Category Archives: Gender

TLF: PAX Bostonia

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At the end of March, I got lucky enough to have a presentation at the New England Modern Language Association annual conference in Boston at the exact same time as PAX East 2013. PAX – Penny Arcade eXpo – was started years ago by the guys that run Penny Arcade, and has since expanded to include PAX East (Boston instead of Seattle), PAX Dev (for developers), and PAX Aus (Australia). In other words, it’s enormously popular. The passes sell out every year.

So when I noticed that I was going to be in Boston anyway, you can bet your britches that I was going to go. And this was my experience. It was, in a word, awesome. Sure, there were a couple of minor downs, but overall, PAX was full of ups, and gives me hope that with the right leaders in terms of attitude, the gaming community will join the rest of the Western civilized world in recognizing equality as something open to everyone, not just straight white men.

Can I Play?

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So I was already annoyed today by the various reports (the linked one is from Gameranx) that Adam Lanza is a “deranged gamer” who was clearly attempting to rack up a “high score” because he used an excel spreadsheet to document “kills” for school shootings, but this is just so utterly silly that I can’t help but feel compelled to bash my head against something.

Apparently, the news tells us, that girls now play videogames. Yes, kids, girls play video games. Kotaku fortunately finds it as ridiculous as I do, and put together a mash-up of February 2013 news stories that tell us just this… and clearly also all borrowed from the same script. Yes, girls play games. In fact, about 42% of gamers these days come fully equipped with a female-oriented gender identity!

I guess I’m extra annoyed about the frivolousness of these reports because of the clear detachment that news agencies seem to have from the reality in which many of us live. And while I understand that as a female, a gamer, and an academic, my world is probably a good deal different from that of the average American, but I’d like to think that the people reporting the news to me aren’t really that… naive. And, frankly, I find it a bit upsetting when confronted with the fact that reporters, editors, and journalists take on stories they know absolutely nothing about.

I’m not asking them to become experts. I’m asking them to take five minutes to look something up on Google. Or even Bing. Just go ask the internet, because as unreliable as the internet can be, it at least provides more information than most people seem to have these days. I’ve written quite a bit about female gamers and games and violence in the past couple of months, and I’ve gotten questions from professionals like “But don’t you think young men don’t need more violence?” and “All the shooters have been young men… that’s who plays games.”

But with 42% of gamers being female, you’d think we’d then see 42% of violent shooters being female, right? Because I will guarantee you that most of those 42% of gamers are not just playing Cooking Mama (and yes, that is really a game). In fact, all the female gamers I know play Call of Duty, Gears of War, Dead Island, Resident Evil, Halo, Mass Effect, and so on. None of them play Cooking Mama (although clearly somebody does). Furthermore, the average age of gamers is 37. That  is also not the average age demographic of school shooters. It’s the age of young parents and professionals, people who play games to work out stress and relax after a long day at work or graduate school or being a stay-at-home-parent.

It’s also the age at which people are reaching complex conclusions about their personal ideologies, about their morals, and about where their lives have taken them. Gamers are sophisticated adults, mature people with mature conceptions of the world, and games are following suit.Sure, there are still kids who play games (plenty of them), and young men who enjoy shooters. But “gamers” can’t be pigeon-holed anymore, and seeing a news story that’s so far behind where the ball has come to rest that it’s just now announcing that “girls play games!” is disappointing and depressing. Because I want us to be at that stage of social acceptance where we no longer address activities as “male” or “female” oriented. I want to see us not only evaluating games as cultural artifacts responding to their social milieu, but as capable of moving beyond the basement-dwelling-young-male stereotype to recognize that “gamers” are really “people,” with as diverse backgrounds, interests, genders, sexualities, preferences, and politics as society at large.

And I want the industry to see this, too, and begin to reflect – outside of the indie market – the complexity of their consumer base. Just like films and books, games need to diversify their protagonists, their ideologies, and their mechanics to reflect what it is that all their players want, not just what the old stereotype is believed to want. And this is going to take more than just making women protagonists (although I’m in favor of that), because Lara Croft is still problematic, but it’s a first step that the industry desperately needs to take… or we’re going to have to keep hearing the shock in a newscaster’s voice when she says “GIRLS have now joined the gamer ranks!”

Damsel in Distress

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I’m talking about me, not Peach, and my distress is the kind that will end with me punching my way through the prison wall and navigating my way out through a maze of guards all by myself, thanks. But seriously, this is about Anita Sarkeesian’s project, Tropes Vs. Women in Videogames. Given how much space I’ve devoted to it here, the fact that I’ve blogged about how I’m getting kind of sick of the project, and the (finally!) release of the first video in the series just a few days ago, I don’t think any of my readers are going to be surprised that I’m going to post about it. The first video – Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games: Damsel in Distress: Part I – looks at the history of the trope in games from the 1970s forward, with Part II promising to deal with contemporary games. Like VGW’s Jen Bosier, I have “some mixed reactions about it.”

As the video opens, Sarkeesian does remind us that we can be both critical and enjoyably engaged – something that a lot of detractors of criticism tend to forget. And this is very important to remember. I can like playing a game (or watching a movie or reading a book) even though I recognize the things about it that bother me from an ideological and/or a methodological standpoint. Criticism does not equal (at least not always) inherent dislike.

Okay, so the purple female fox was switched to Starfox, but while it may be true that Crystal’s outfit change was completely unnecessary, I think there was probably more to the change than just wanting to eliminate her as a hero. For instance, using a known and popular hero (Starfox) probably made the game more marketable, as it already had an audience. While I do agree with Sarkeesian that Crystal’s transformation into a literally “foxy” damsel in distress was both problematic and unnecessary, I don’t think that the choice to turn the game into a Starfox sequel was not necessarily the worst choice they could have made.

It is totally valid to point out that Nintendo seems to have, as Bosier notes, a trend of passing over or changing female-hero games in favor of male-hero ones, and she says that “the cause/effect of this would make for a great discussion. Unfortunately, this is abandoned to instead discuss the history of kidnapped females and how they worked their way into video games.” And here I have to agree with Bosier.

Perhaps it’s just me, but if we’re watching to hear about games, do we really need to hear the entire history of the phrase “damsel in distress”? Also, if we do, why did we skip the entire genre of chivalric romance, which, oh, invented the trope in its present form? But that’s just my academic side having completely unnecessary fits for the sake of largely irrelevant historical accuracy. But seriously, the whole “damsel in distress” segment should probably be its own video, rather than a part of a videogame critique.

Overall, though, I think this series – which is hard to judge from Part I of a segment alone – might ultimately prove to be a good thing, even though I think that it’s overly simplistic in its approach. There were a lot of things I liked about it, and I think that she’s trying to take on a subject that’s enormously complex and reduce it to something she can put into small, 30-minute-or-less segments. And that’s no easy task.

I liked her point that Peach (from Super Mario Brothers) was once briefly playable, but that she hasn’t been since (outside of some of the multiplayer versions). This is a valid point – as is her remark that female characters tend to occupy the object-position to the male subject-position within a lot of games. Yes, this is true, but everybody – up to and including my proverbial uncle – knows these games exploit this trope to the level of the ridiculous: as Bosier says, “I don’t know a single gamer who would point to Peach or Zelda as accurate or compelling video game portrayals of women.”

But – again – I want to hear about what we can do now, how games are creating a problematic ideology now, rather than what happened in 1970s and 1980s arcade games (like Donkey Kong’s cutscenes of DK carrying the blonde up the ladders). While Peach is the proverbial “damsel-ball” between Mario and Bowser, and many games have picked up on and perpetuated the formula through the 1990s, I want to see how this trope has been changed – or, more frighteningly – if it hasn’t. And, as Bosier says, Sarkeesian doesn’t mention the positives: “Also, as an aside, for as much time as she spends discussing the damsels of the 80s, I noticed she didn’t mention that it was the same time period that also birthed Samus Aran.”

When we get down to it, what I really want to hear about is not a catalogue of games that use a trope that predates their creation by several thousand years. Yes, the damsel-in-distress trope is enormously problematic and rests on a cultural tradition of misogyny. But videogames are not to blame for its existence. They are also not the only medium to employ and perpetuate it – films, television, books, and so on are also horrible culprits. Yes, she acknowledges this, and I agree with Sarkeesian that appeal to tradition is no reason to perpetuate the trope, but I’m not sure I find as much value in the historical analysis that she’s doing here as I would be in seeing her critique current games that are still exploiting the damsel-in-distress trope (what she’s doing in Part II).

Now don’t get me wrong – I think there’s a lot of inherent value to doing a historical reading of this trope in games from the 1970s-1990s. In fact, the academic in me thinks that it would be a great way to examine the way in which our social practices with relation to the job-market and career-choices in the real world are being reflected by the frequency and type of damsel-trope exploitation in videogames. In other words, do these games accurately reflect the ideological conceptions of gender of their decades, or do they attempt to cling to outdated tropes… and why?

Sarkeesian does begin to approach the question of contemporary games, as when she discusses Nintendo’s 2007 Ocarina of Time – which, I have to say, has one of the more sexist commercials I’ve seen in a while… I mean, really? “Wilst thou get the girl? Or wilst thou play like one?” Not exactly a shining example of gender equality. Sarkeesian says that the use of the trope actively disempowers women in the games in which they are damsels in distress… and that it creates a dichotomy in which male characters can only be empowered when women are disempowered. She also says that male characters are allowed to escape their imprisonment – while women are expected to passively wait for rescue (usually by a male). And she’s absolutely right that this strips them, in the world of these games, of agency and even personality in most cases.

(Can I just say, in a side note, that Dragon’s Lair is awful? And Princess Daphne… I… I’m just not going to say anything, but did you see her [lack of] outfit?!)

Sarkeesian’s closing becomes a little too political, I think, for the kind of project she’s working on. Yes, she’s absolutely right that games are a reflection of our social practices, and that they can perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Absolutely. And she’s also right that developers can choose to have female heroes in their games. But I think that just making women protagonists isn’t the answer to the “problem” of the damsel-in-distress trope. The “problem” is in large part that it isn’t as simple as just making the hero female. For instance, Tomb Raider as a series doesn’t do a lot to remove the labels of either misogyny or objectification from videogames, and it has a female protagonist.

Like Bosier, I was left with “the burning question in my mind was simply, ‘What’s the point?’” Okay, yes, this trope exists, it’s a problem, but what do you want me to do with that? It’s the same question I ask my students when they present me with a catalogue of “look at this thing in this novel!” So what? What’s the actionable part of your thesis? Why is this relevant? Why should I care? As Bosier says, “My concern is that I really, really wanted this video to start a serious conversation. Not only start a conversation, but advance the conversation. This video merely states facts that are already known and with her constant referencing Peach and Zelda, it feels like we’re spinning our wheels.”

I want to make it clear that I’m supportive – despite my being rather tired of the constant invoking of Sarkeesian like some sort of martyr to the feminist-online-cause (and I am still sick of it) – of her work. I didn’t support the Kickstarter financially, but I do support her project spiritually, even if I’m not 100% on board with her methods or conclusions. As she says in the opening of her video, we can criticize things and still like them. But because it’s Sarkeesian, there are any number of people who have crawled back out of the woodwork to once again raise a trollish-level stink, as Gameranx notes in its piece from yesterday, “Comments Aren’t Disabled.” Because clearly that was so effective last time.

Ultimately, I think that this series will do more good than harm. In fact, I don’t think that beyond prodding the proverbial hornet’s nest of internet trolls, it will do much harm at all. While I would like it to be more critical, more engaged with the nuances of the industry, and more reflective of its purpose behind a vehicle for complaint, I think it’s far better existing than it would have been never to have been made. And I applaud Sarkeesian for her desire to make it. I’d like to see someone more familiar with the industry, more academic (or at least, more trained in formal critical practices), add to the conversation, but I’m glad Sarkeesian is making them. I also hope that other people – men, women, cisgendered folks – will join in the conversation, because as much as I support Sarkeesian’s project, I don’t want her to speak for all feminist, female, or non-standard-white-male gamers. I want her voice to be heard, yes, but I don’t want it to be my voice. So while I’m going to work on my small chirping from this corner of the academic feminist-gamer side of the world, I hope other people aren’t deterred either by the content of Sarkeesian’s work or the backlash that she’s receiving. I hope she inspires others to speak up and make videos and posts of their own, or to hunt down places (like The Border House or Stay Classy) where others are already doing so.

Ins and Outs

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So about the last thing I expected in my in-box this morning was a response to yesterday’s post from Zoya at The Border House, and I have the feeling that Todd (who had inspired the original post from me) probably had a similar reaction. Now I think that Zoya’s point is actually a good one – How do we know for sure that Taric is gay? Isn’t it just as problematic to assume someone’s sexuality from markers and clues that may or may not have anything to do with sexuality? Absolutely, agree 100%. And this is an important conversation that needs to be had.

The only real issue I have with it is that Taric is not a real person, he’s an iconographic representation of something, and the motivations that we’re looking at should not be ascribed to him, but to the developers who designed and implemented him. We aren’t trying to “out” Taric (if he even happens to be in the closet), we’re trying to convince Riot to come out of the doorway in between “maybe he is… maybe he isn’t… we’re not telling,” because, as Todd argued on his twitter account, “In this wink-and-a-nod mode where everything is illicit and rumored and strange. That rhetoric is the same rhetoric that forced me and many…others into the closet in our lifetime, just as much as the expectation that we conform to stereotypes would. I don’t want that.”

At The Border House, Zoya says that “I’m not against coming out, but I am against the assumption that everybody will or should manage their social lives and personal identities in the same way. And even though I don’t play LoL, this call for an apparently feminine male character to come out as gay is deeply troubling to me as a genderqueer person.” She makes the very valid point that assuming that Taric is gay based solely on gender cues is fallacious, and it is, but when we’re dealing with media and (especially, unfortunately) games, those cues are important. Now I think it would be a really interesting move for Riot to have intentionally created Taric with his pink legwarmers and love for sparkles as a straight man, or an asexual man, or an identified-female.

So, first of all, maybe Taric is not gay. Maybe he loves women almost as much as he loves gems. Maybe he doesn’t identify as a guy. Maybe he just doesn’t know yet. Maybe he doesn’t need to explain his gender expression in terms that fit your worldview.

Or maybe he is gay, and he doesn’t feel the need to navigate the complex network of social connections between the League and the LGBT community through the rather culturally-specific rite of passage of coming out. Maybe Taric belongs to a culture where coming out isn’t the best option for him or for his family. Perhaps his privacy is very important to maintaining his connection with the community he grew up in. It doesn’t necessarily mean he isn’t doing his bit to break down homophobia in that community, but the challenges might not be navigable by the same means that they are in your culture.

Maybe Zoya’s right. Maybe Riot is really much more complex and thoughtful about gender and sexuality than we’re giving them credit for. Maybe they just didn’t think about it and have a designer who likes sparkles and pink legwarmers. Maybe they want to make the point that we shouldn’t ask questions about sexuality because it is fundamentally unimportant to Taric’s role in the game. Honestly, though, I don’t think Riot thought about any of that, and I’m pretty sure that that’s the point Todd was getting at.

For the sake of full disclosure, I don’t play League of Legends, and I don’t really have a founded opinion on whether Taric is gay, straight, bi, asexual, questioning, or not even human at all (hence my use of “so if he is” in the original post, because I really don’t know). That said, I’m inclined to think that Todd is probably right, and that Riot created a character they “decided” was gay, but left his sexuality ambiguous (his description reads, “Taric is tight-lipped about his life outside the League and prefers his privacy”) to avoid fan backlash. And if that is the pattern we’re seeing here, then it is a problem, and should be talked about.

For instance, Todd’s response makes the equally valid point that while there’s no particular need for Taric, as a fictional individual, to be gay, it is important for media producers like Riot to include characters who – if they are, in fact, gay – are not reticent to own their sexuality. Not because people should feel obligated to do the same, but because of another point that Zoya made: “If there was someone like me on British TV, I would have a much easier time explaining my identity to my mother.” It’s important for people of all types to appear in our media as open, accepted, and equally competent as everyone else.

The assumption that Taric is gay – which, as I understand it, is held by much of the LoL community – may be problematic because of what it says about the way we read gender and sexuality codes, but that’s exactly why Riot should be open about Taric’s sexuality, whatever it is.The problem isn’t that Taric isn’t openly gay, nor that he likes sparkles, but because they’re pointedly refusing to talk about it while nevertheless including elements that our society automatically codes as homosexual:

Valoran’s media, for some reason, has taken a great interest in his personal life. While open about his life as a champion and gracious in all things, Taric is tight-lipped about his life outside the League and prefers his privacy.

The inclusion of a sly comment that hints at something nefarious, illicit, or otherwise “hush-hush” is dangerous because it allows for certain assumptions to be made based on the established pattern of closteting and bigotry that exists in our society. If that’s not what’s happening, Riot has the responsibility to make that clear so that no one – gay, straight, asexual, genderqueer – feels as though they need to remain silent. Can they? Sure. But they don’t need to because their sexuality or gender identity isn’t condemnable. If Taric is okay being whatever he is – and liking gems and pink legwarmers – then they can feel okay about being whatever they are.

No Girls Allowed (on the box)!

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So a recent issue – and one which I intend to spend more time on at a future date when I have time – has come up since the release of the cover art for Bioshock Infinite (which you can see here at the announcement). If you know nothing about the game, you might look at the cover image and say, “so what?”

Here’s the kicker. Most of the game is spent protecting and being helped by an NPC (non-player character) named Elizabeth. You never see yourself (the player-character whose shotgun-wielding self is depicted – presumably – on the box), but you will spend most of the game staring at her. And she doesn’t even show up in the background on the cover.

Why not? Apparently, because, Matt Hawkins at Gameranx notes, “Mostly the reasoning behing [sic] it, which according to creator Ken Levine, is a means to target the ‘frat boys’ demographic.” If that is the truth, then the cover art is offensive not only because of the rather glaring lack of the female protagonist, but because it has just suggested that players are stereotypical “frat boys.” I, for one, do not consider myself a “frat boy” in any sense of the term, derogatory or no. But Hawkins’ article isn’t actually about Infinite’s cover, which apparently garnered so much disgust that Irrational is holding a cover art contest to make the cover “reversible.”

Hawkins points out that while Irrational may be catering to the proverbial “common denominator,” Naughty Dog (to which, I might point out, Nate Wells went when he left Irrational) is refusing to allow its publisher to make the same misogynist error and is insisting that the protagonist – Ellie – of their new title be left on the cover art. In fact, Naughty Dog’s director, Neil Druckmann, is quoted in the piece as saying, “I believe there’s a misconception that if you put a girl or a woman on the cover, the game will sell less. I know I’ve been in discussions where we’ve been asked to push Ellie to the back and everyone at Naughty Dog just flat-out refused.”

As Hawkins suggests, “Naughty Dog should be applauded for sticking to their guns,” but, he continues, “one fears the possibility of sales being hurt by such a noble stance. Unfortunately, numbers do not lie, and there are stats that does [sic] show that many gamers will not touch a game if there is a female on the cover. Yes, even in the year 2012.” While Hawkins may be right (his grammatical and spelling errors aside), it strikes me as though part of the reason gamers won’t pick up such games is that the games they want to play have never traditionally featured women… and so they have come to associate women on the cover with games that they don’t want to play.

But I bet they’d still buy Modern Warfare if the next version features a female soldier because they trust it. And I think that Bioshock Infinite probably has enough of a fan base at this point that it can afford to do what many smaller franchises cannot – to do what’s right for its fans and the game, rather than capitulating to the stereotypes pushed on its fans by the marketing industry. (After all, the fans were upset enough to call for a new cover to begin with…)

Redcoats and Petticoats

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With the recent release of both the new Bioshock Infinite and Assassin’s Creed 3 trailers, coupled with the presidential campaign and debates, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about American exceptionalism (by which I mean the notion that Americans are somehow unique from and superior to other nations’ citizens). I expect that I will have more to say about this (and, indeed, I did, over at The Learned Fangirl) with relation to Bioshock Infinite‘s new trailer (and the game itself, come February), but for now I want to stick to Assassin’s Creed 3.

In part, this is spurred by Border House’s blog post yesterday. Jillian Scharr says that “my coworker and I both agreed that there was something ‘off’ about the trailer.” Which made me want to go watch it for myself.

The trailer is surprisingly… multicultural. There are Native Americans, colonists, several men who appear to be pirates (maybe Minutemen in tricorns?), in percentages that are radically unrealistic to the actual demographics of colonial America. Except for African Americans. They aren’t present (despite the fact that AC3 has already announced that the protagonist of the DLC Liberation will be both African American and female) at all, in fact, a point that Scharr notes:

while we’re on historical accuracy, maybe you thought you were dodging a bullet by apparently not including African Americans in AC3. I suppose it remains to be seen what you do with American slavery. But if the trailer’s line about playable multiplayer maps including “the blood-soaked cotton found on the Virginian plantation” is any indication, you’re going to milk that for every drop of exploitative “coolness-factor” as well.

In short, if you’re going to mention those “blood-soaked cotton” fields, you might as well make it clear whose blood soaked that cotton long before you decided to turn them into killing fields for assassins. (This, of course, doesn’t mean that the game itself won’t have African Americans in its Virginia setting… but it doesn’t show them here.)

But the absence of the obvious is only one of the trailer’s problems. The voice-over is less a “narration” and more a sales-pitch, which breaks the fourth wall nature of most contemporary trailers. It’s selling a game instead of telling a story – focusing on mechanics rather than ludo-narrative (the story told by the gameplay) or narrative (just story). While that make seem to make sense on the surface, it doesn’t mesh with what we’ve come to think a “trailer” is supposed to do. It ignores the potential narrative power of the setting – revolution, national identity, etc. – in favor of describing multiplayer maps. While players are interested in those maps and the multiplayer experience they signify, the list of information does not make for a very good trailer.

Finally, there is the point that really concerns Scharr: that the proportion of violence inflicted on men is much lower than the proportion of it inflicted on women:

The trailer shows a lot of men killing men, and quite a bit of men killing women. Only twice was a female assassin shown killing a male: once, at 0:38, where the Native American female assassin shares the screen with a white male assassin; and at 2:49, the last assassination of the trailer, when a white woman nails a white man in the head with the butt of her rifle, then shoots him as he lies on the ground. The other women in the trailer are either shown non-lethally striking a man, being non-lethally struck or thrown by a man, or being killed by a man. The worst is at 1:16, when a man in an overcoat and top hat grabs a woman in a low-cut green dress who is backing away from him, and plunges a dagger in her stomach. Then, for some reason, we get an instant replay.

This is not really what bothers me the most about the trailer, but I can understand why Scharr noticed it. The ratio is really quite poor. And – especially once you’ve had it pointed out – very obvious. Certainly, there are female assassins in the game, a point in its favor. However, there is no reason why the trailer needed to emphasize violence against women over violence against men (particularly given the fact that most players are like to be men, and therefore male-on-male violence would be a more accurate representation of the actual demographics of the gameplay).

While – in this trailer specifically – I find the voice-over more off-putting than the disproportionate violence against women over men, I take Scharr’s point that it is a problem. However, it isn’t just a problem with AC3. Violence against women – specifically, sensationalized violence against women – is a symptom of the larger issues that I’ve addressed here before (and which appear to be central to Anita Sarkeesian’s interest in producing “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games). I think Scharr is probably right to criticize the trailer for its imbalance, but that isn’t what struck me as “off” about the trailer.

What struck me as “off” is that it was less of a trailer about the game as art and more a focus on the game as product. And this bothers me, in part, because of Scharr’s point about violence – not because the game is violent (I happily play shooters on a fairly regular basis), but because the game commodifies that violence as the sole point of the game, which ultimately diminishes it to nothing more than a sequence of mechanics about mortality.

And a title like AC3 is about more than just its mechanics. Multiplayer is a bonus for games with deep and rich singleplayer campaigns, not the point of the game. It provides incentive to keep playing even when the campaign is over. It serves, to put it bluntly, to keep players playing long enough that they don’t immediately sell their copy back to GameStop. And I don’t really have a problem with this, when it comes down to it. But the explicit commodification of violence (especially with an emphasis on violence against women) as the ultimate raison d’etre of the game does it and its potential audience a profound disservice. Games are more than that, and gamers (most of them, at least, I would hope) are looking for more.

In short, the trailer assumes that its audience is not as sophisticated as I believe they are, in by focusing on the game as specifically commodified violence, it panders to those who disparage games as juvenile and unethical, and it reinforces its own reputation as inartistic and misogynist. I very much hope that the trailer is not a promise of a similarly shallow game that has little consideration for gender and racial politics. I hope – as I did when I first saw the announcement of Liberation – that AC3 lives up to its promise of gender and racial balance.

What Does a Heroine Look Like?

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So in the furor over Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women in Videogames, the content of what she’s producing has been largely overlooked. But The Mary Sue‘s Becky Chambers has a suggestion:

I want a character who makes me feel emboldened on sight. If I’m a soldier, I want to look like the rest of my squad. If I’m escaping a zombie apocalypse, I want shoes I can run in and clothes that minimize the likelihood of getting bitten. If I’m a warrior of song and legend, I want a set of plate mail that will silence a room when I walk in. None of these things require a trade-off of my sexuality or femininity. I want my character to be beautiful, but I also want her to wear what I would want to wear in her circumstances. And if I’m given a pre-designed character, I’m fine with makeup or flowing hair or a lower-cut top, so long as it feels in character. It’s a costume, after all. Creative liberties are to be expected.

I have to say, I agree. I have said before that Shepard is my favorite female protagonist. Her costume is armor (I put her in the ridiculous black dress only for the mission where I have no choice) or a uniform that is appropriate to her context (as Chambers says), and she behaves and speaks like a soldier, which she is. She looks like the others in her position, male and female (this is also true of the women in Gears of War 3 and Halo Reach, for which both games should receive credit).

But what is more important is that she doesn’t “act like a girl.” Like Chambers, I am less concerned about what a female protagonist is wearing (within reason… she does need to be wearing actual clothing that is more or less what someone in her position would be wearing) and more with what she does and says. Shepard is a great protagonist because she was written to be a male protagonist (with a few adjustments for the female version).

Chambers presents a list of things that can “break” an otherwise-positive female protagonist:

    • Women in combat roles who lament their loss of femininity or express a desire to be a “normal girl.”
    • Women who cannot act without a man to instruct and/or save them (cough, Metroid: Other M, cough).
    • The sense that the protagonist is the only woman in the game world who has ever become a hero.

That last point is perhaps the most important. If I’m playing a female protagonist, I’m keenly aware of how the other characters treat her and who the other female characters are. If my character is the only woman on the battlefield, or the only one deemed worthy of full armor, that’s a problem. The warm fuzzy feeling I get from playing a strong female protagonist dies quickly if the only other women I see are damsels or love interests (I say that as someone wholeheartedly in favor of getting laid in-game).

Shepard fits all these criteria, too. While she may be the only woman who somehow manages to do all the things she can do, the same would be true if she were a male Shepard… and those who accompany her (both companions and non-companion NPCs) are both men and women who are capable of doing the jobs that the story requires of them… not to mention the fact that the villains of the Mass Effect universe are both male and female.

But Chambers makes a final point that even Shepard can’t answer. She says that while gender-variable protagonists (like Shepard) are great and work in games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Fallout, or Fable, it is also important to have games with female-only protagonists (and male-only protagonists). It’s important for developers to be able to construct a story that requires (or limits, if you prefer) the gender of their player-character. And when it’s important for a protagonist to be female, it’s also important for her to be a female who is realistic (as much as she can be) and practical, and not only for the women who might play her, but for the men who will come to associate her with positive femininity.

I’m So Over This

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So things have been swimming along fairly nicely in the gaming community these last couple of weeks, and then Games Radar decides to make a post about Booth Babes. And my reaction is not blind rage, but, rather, the desire to drop my head onto my desk with a very loud thud.

(Booth babes, for those of you unfamiliar with the genre, are women hired by companies to dress in scantily clad outfits from their games or comics or what have you in order to attract the drooling masses to their tables. They are virtual staples of the gaming and nerd community conventions, according to some, and have been the subject of enraged feminist lambasting and stereotypical straight male geek fantasies pretty much since they were invented.)

One would think that at this juncture, with PAX and PAXEast having banned booth babes, with GDC and E3 taking fire for allowing them, and recent flame wars concerning online misogyny in the gaming community, that Games Radar would have more tact, taste, and maturity than to post an article with 106 words saying “Here are our favorite babes” and several cleavage-heavy photographs.

Perhaps worse is the fact that no one has told them that they’re being adolescent and crude. There are admittedly only three comments so far (and no, I didn’t comment as I have no desire to have my Facebook inundated with trollish comments, no matter how constructive trolls might be on their good days), so the trend might break, but the attraction to posting pictures of scantily clad breasts on gaming sites that purport to be serious about games is disappointing.

It’s also shown  me just how inured we’ve become to this sort of thing. Now booth babes are not women who have chosen to cosplay (fans who dress up in the costumes of their favorite characters, who are also often scantily clad because that’s how women’s costumes are designed, which is a whole different kettle of fish), they’re paid to fulfill a fantasy image. I don’t really have a problem with character-models being paid to emulate a videogame character (one of the coolest parts of PAXEast 2010 were the Gears of War 3 guys roaming about and taking pictures with Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite), whether scantily clad or no. What I have issue with is that articles like Games Radar’s are acceptable and expected, and that half the point of having people dressed like a character are so that they can be scantily clad. No one hires a model to dress up as Samus Aran.

What I’d like to see happen is that game companies hire all sorts of models – male, female, scantily clad, fully armored – and see game journalism sites post pictures of all of them. I’d like to see sites like Games Radar behave a bit more maturely than to cater to juvenile impulses like 106-word articles that say, in effect, “we took pictures of boobs.” If the gaming industry wants to be taken seriously, then it needs to stop acting like it just graduated from junior high.

Boyhood, Manhood, and Why I’d Like to Hit Something

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This was sent to me by a colleague’s husband, who I’m sure realizes that it’s going to end up on this blog: “A Call to Arms for Decent Men” by Ernest W. Adams. At the top of the article on its original page is this line: “Gamasutra declined to run this column, but I still consider it to be part of the Designer’s Notebook series. Contains strong language.”

My guess is that strong language is not why Gamasutra declined to run it. Despite purportedly encouraging politeness and fair play, Adams’ article is actually a prime example of misogyny at its nefarious best.

To be fair to Adams, his intentions are good. However, what he is doing falls within the same umbrella of misogyny as the behaviors he’s criticizing. For example, while he says that “boys” who engage in online harassment are immature and need to grow up, the way in which he phrases their responsibility to act as decent human beings leaves a bit to be desired on the egalitarian front:

Men have more power than women: financially, politically, and physically. What distinguishes a real man from a boy is that a man takes responsibility for his actions and does not abuse this power. If you don’t treat women with courtesy and respect –- if you’re still stuck in that “I hate girls” phase –- then no matter what age you are, you are a boy and not entitled to the privileges of adulthood.

While biology may generally dictate that women are in fact physically weaker than their male counterparts most of the time, the presumption that physical strength is tantamount to financial and political power is insulting. The entirety of the feminist movement has been spent to disabuse people of the idea that men are inherently superior and more deserving of money and power, and Adams has simply accepted that the old Victorian mores are in fact truisms.

In essence, Adams’s article panders directly to the attitude that women are inferior beings and that “real men” don’t need to abuse women just because they can. In fact, by Adams’s logic, “real men” should protect and stand up for women because they are inferior and, by extension, apparently incapable of standing up for themselves. That’s not what he’s saying, exactly, but that is the attitude he’s created here.

The statement “A grown-up man has no problem being in the company of women. He knows he’s a man” presumes the same ideological framework as the “boys” to whom Adams is writing. He defends this position, stating that he has to assume this attitude in order to reach his audience:

Some of you might think it’s sexist that I’m dumping this problem on us men. It isn’t; it’s just pragmatic. Women can not solve this problem. A boy who hates girls and women simply isn’t going to pay attention to a woman’s opinion. The only people who can ensure that boys are taught, or if necessary forced, to grow up into men are other men.

It is sexist. It’s absolutely sexist to assume that only men can teach boys to behave like responsible adults. It’s sexist to suggest that responsible adults of either gender have a specific set of behaviors coded to that gender that aren’t universal to all human beings. Men and women alike have the responsibility as human beings to treat all other people with the respect accorded them simply by virtue of being alive, regardless of gender (or age, wealth, creed, etc.). So long as we accept that “men” have different responsibilities or sets of behavior than “women,” we are perpetuating a sexist attitude in which one gender (or the other) is dominant.

Suggesting that “men” need to teach “boys” to grow up and behave treats the symptoms, not the disease. Both chivalry (in the modern and medieval sense) and sexist harassment are symptoms of the same social disease, and by attempting to eliminate only the symptoms, Adams does not recognize that his prescription is contributing to the problem. We – both men and women – have to eradicate the attitude that presumes a fiction of superiority, and the elimination of symptoms will follow.

Finally, Adams offers a list of things “real men” should do to curtail the behavior of the “boys,” and then a list of ostensible counter-arguments from those “boys,” including this sparkling gem of classist sexism:

 “Women are always getting special privileges.” Freedom from bullying is a right, not a privilege, and anyway, that’s bullshit. Males are the dominant sex in almost every single activity on the planet. The only areas that we do not rule are dirty, underpaid jobs like nursing and teaching. Do you want to swap? I didn’t think so.

This paragraph makes me want to run out of my dirty, underpaid office – in a row of offices that belong to men who are (by Adams’s logic) also apparently dirty and underpaid – and use my feminine fists to demonstrate just how “inferior” my physical strength actually is. I’m not going to, but that’s the level of frustration I’ve reached with this article, which engages in the worst sort of chivalric fantasy in which Adams, the white-clad paladin, rides in on his shining stallion to defend the honor of delicate flowers offended by the malodorous hordes of the trollish unwashed. Women don’t need men to defend their honor. Women need to be accepted as human beings, the same as all other human beings, regardless of race, gender, sex, creed, or orientation.

To be fair, Adams does close with perhaps the only truly egalitarian sentence of the piece: “Let’s stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the women we love, and work with, and game with, and say, ‘We’re with you. And we’re going to win.’” With this statement, I agree wholeheartedly, but that’s not what the article has spent most of its time saying.

Which brings me to another, more difficult point. I live in the South, but I’m from the upper Midwest and arrived here by way of Boston. I’m used to opening my own doors, to holding the door for whomever I’m with, male or female. Here, that gets me funny looks and even causes consternation among men who don’t know what to do with a woman who holds the door. My point is that women need to be willing to do the work, to get dirty, to accept that in order to achieve equality, we have to put in the same effort as men and not expect chivalry if we aren’t going to give it. And men have to let us do it.