Bad news for me means good news for you! My paper did not get accepted into the Film conferences I submitted it to, so I have decided to put it up, in its entirety, on my blog. The writing has been modified to be less academic. At some point I plan to add pictures, so if words aren't your thing, just wait.
Without further adieu, here it is:
Now the Controller has Cooties:
Identifying Across Gendered Videogame Avatars
Avatar
and Diversity: Politicizing or Empowering?
These
days, at the dusk of 2014, there's hardly a hotter topic that's causing more
controversy in the gaming industry than women in games. More people of more
races, ethnicities, sexualities and genders are craving a wider amount of
representation. While some enjoy the prospect of playing characters of many
kinds, many underrepresented groups, including women, are more interested in
being widely represented as interesting characters. For this, women need to be
able to see themselves on screen with abilities just as impressive as those of
men. At the same time, however, women want to see more variety in the type of
women shown - sexy women, powerful women, sure, but perhaps also complex women
who cannot be defined by a single word. That said, one of the chief complaints
about this diversifying in gaming is that adding members of different races,
genders and sexualities will politicize games and take away from their inherent
freedom. Players who want more representation disagree, and it can be assumed
that the ability to have a wider array of avatars to choose from will add to the
freedom and choice in gameplay for mass market. In all instances, the topic of
gendered gameplay is complex, but I believe it is possible to break it down in
a way that explains why more diversity in gaming will be good for all. To do
this, first we have to establish what an avatar is and what it means to create
avatars with identity -- in this case, gender.
Most importantly, this essay will focus on the relationship between
avatar and player, unraveling the confusion between gendered play space and
gendered avatars, and on how players can identify with female avatars, and how
playing as a woman can add even more freedom to gaming.
Context: Why Doesn’t Lara Croft Have to Stay in
the Kitchen?
At the moment of this article’s creation, the videogame community,
IRL, is undergoing the most turbulent schism in regards to gender and minority
representation that it has ever experienced. The movement, coined in August
2014 #gamergate by actor Adam Baldwin, may have begun as an attempt to
delve into the ethics of journalistic techniques, but was commandeered by many
on the Internet to attack not journalists, per se, but women within the
industry. These women are seen as threats to ‘pure gaming’ – a gaming where ‘political
dogma’ like diversity and feminism does not take time away from escapist
fantasies. Reading between the lines of this increasingly vicious ‘debate’, it
has become clear that many of those who feel threatened by adding diversity are
afraid that their play space, that has stubbornly been one of the last
remaining ‘boys clubs’, will be destroyed by the addition of real world issues
minorities face. To simplify, take into consideration the concept concerning
gender: Many men, who mistakenly believe they dominate the consumer market
(women make up roughly 50% of the videogame market as of Oct. 26th
according to the Washington Post) feel as if they would be inherently
unable or unwilling to identify with the feminized gameplay that must be linked
to a feminine avatar. However, their fear lies not with the avatar but the
misguided linking of avatar gender and a particular gendered play space.
For many, the relationship between play-spaces and gender have
little to do with one another. However, Henry Jenkins, author of the article Complete
Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces explains how
socially linked space and gender have become—through some devices dating back
as far as Victorian novels. He argues that these tropes persist today,
especially in early video games. He defines the parameter of two types of game
spaces: The ‘Adventure Island’ (male) and the ‘Secret Garden’ (female).
Essentially, his argument suggests that modern day play space in videogames can
be linked back to their precursors in literature. Male play space he defines as
an “Adventure Island”, where there is “’no place to seek cover’ and thus [the
male play space] encourages fight-or-flight responses... the narratives
offered... larger-than-life enactment of those values, staged in exotic rather
than backyard spaces, involving broader movements through space and amplifying
horseplay and risk taking into scenarios of actual combat and conquest.” He
likens it to “manifest destiny” and explains how male games “often took the
form of quests, journeys, or adventures into untamed and uncharted regions of
the world” thus aligning with the stereotypical male dominated video game
(Jenkins 346). Meanwhile, female play space competes with a differing
definition: He describes traditional female game space as “girls’ books” with
“open fantasies of being alone and then [requiring] the female protagonist to
sacrifice their private space in order to make room for others’ needs... [the
spaces] describe naturalistic environments, similar to ... daily experience”.
Unlike their male counterparts, much of the exploration involved rediscovery of
an interior setting, where “the exploration of space leads to the uncovering of
secrets, clues and symptoms that shed light on character’s motivations”
(Jenkins 448-349). To clarify, just because a character is a woman does not
mean the character will only explore a typically female game space. The kitchen
and all its utensils, the cleaning supplies, the pregnancy and baby raising are
not attached to the character as sexist baggage, and the female avatar,
regardless of personality, can penetrate into a male play space and perform
active ‘manly’ tasks. Men can sit, wander around the home and collect clues in
a feminine game space; women can run amok and gun NPCs down in a masculine
warzone. Such assignments of gender, men as active and women as passive, while
traditional, are arbitrary. Nowhere in Jenkins’s work does he laud the
segregation of genders into their appropriate biospheres. In fact, his entire
goal in writing his essay is to promote the concept of a gender-neutral game
space where both masculine and feminine spaces are provided for play.
These two play spaces would seemingly create a binary between how
games can be played, however such systems are illusory; like most binaries,
this one really exists to create the extremes of a spectrum: From these it is
possible to define different shades of videogame play space, with varying
levels of masculine islands and feminine gardens.
Setting up the Spectrum:
Masculinity and Mario
With all this talk of masculine and feminine game space, one must
be wondering what it means to play a Masculine game verses what it means to
play a traditionally feminine game. To understand the available spectrum in
gaming styles, we must first establish the binary to be broken down. To do so,
the quintessential Masculine and Feminine examples must be established.
The easiest example of a masculine game is Mario, the famous Italian plumber with a mustache, a penchant for
pipes, a princess girlfriend and one extremely jealous turtle-rival. Mario
began as “Jumpman”, a monkey-mistreating plumber in the 1981 game, Donkey
Kong. In the game, and many of its following incarnations of side scrollers,
the player guides Mario on a linear journey to rescue a kidnapped damsel. The
game works towards an objective, saving Princess Peach (or, in early
incarnations, “Pauline”), while traveling across foreign landscapes—from the
familiar, hometown grass and mountains to Egyptian influenced deserts,
mysterious caverns, and painful underwater levels. The linear format, combined
with the simple objective and lack of character development creates the
quintessential masculine game space. Putting a female avatar in place of Mario
would do nothing to change the type of gendered play space the avatar inhabits:
Treasure Island is Treasure Island, whether Jim or Jill Hawkins finds the map.
Girls and Gone Home
On the opposing side of the spectrum is the female game space. The
creation of this seemed like a theoretical task, but thanks to indy developer,
The Fullbright Company, a game exists that oozes with textbook feminine game
space. Gone Home caused quite a controversy amongst gamers who felt they
were cheated out of their money. Cited often was the misleading promo, which
they believe sold them on a creepy, puzzle-horror game complete with hauntings
and undead enemies. The game opens as the protagonist, Kaitlin, arrives at her
family’s new house after a year abroad in Europe. The night is thunderous and
the house, being both unexplored and antique is spooky. But this is a society
piece: as the player explores the game-world, it eventually becomes clear that
this will not be an action, run-and-gunner, but a subtle game that focuses on
building the narrative of Kaitlin’s sister, Samantha, and the exploration into
her sexuality. This Gamefaqs review from Snight01 sums up the opinions of many
indignant gamers:
I happened to pay 20 bucks
for this game off steam. I finished this game in 30 mins. No indication or
warning that the game is a hardcore LGBT title( If i knew this, i wouldn't have
bought it) and every audio log you recover goes in detail of samantha carrying
out her sexual fantasies...The ending leaves you with that familiar feeling of
being ripped off and lied too.. There were no ghosts, no deaths, a surprise
LGBT story and a empty house with one working tv.
There is a lot we can learn
from this angry gamer: The issues they cite include the expense for “thirty
minutes” of playtime, the LGBT content, the lack of Non-player character
avatars to interact with, and the lack of violence. What Snight01 finds
problematic with the game are actually the components that mark it as a
feminine play space: The events of the game take place in a domestic setting,
where the player is unable to explore new worlds. The main action of the game
consists of roaming around the halls of Kaitlin’s new home – a process which,
at its quickest, can take as short as a half an hour, supposing that the only
objective is to “beat” the game.
What players like Snight01 are doing is playing the game like a
linear, masculine, objective based one. Gone Home defies this type of
game-play in order to promote the concept of story building as objective
through the exploration of domestic secrets. At its barest bones, Gone Home
is the interactive story of a girl discovering that she is a lesbian in the
90s. No matter what style of gaming you play with, Samantha’s is a story that
will get told regardless. However, if more time is taken to thoroughly scour
the house, and the player interacts with all available objects then multiple
narratives unfold. It is not just one story but several: the story of a mother
who is considering cheating on her spouse; a man who was sexually abused by his
uncle as a child; a lonely and lost Christmas duck trying to find his nest in
the attic. There are no weapons to pick up or enemies to beat because the game
is about character development and world building, not an ultimate objective.
The game allows the player to pick up and put down objects but not
to use them for anything. In addition, Gone Home is an empty space, with
no non-player avatars – thereby disabling the player’s ability to objectify the
other characters: Despite seeing through Kaitlin’s eyes, Kaitlin does not have
an objectifying gaze. Samantha’s lesbian romance cannot be used as titillation
or what Desire and Deviate Nymphos author—Sydney Matrix—calls the
“trivialization of Lesbian desire” (Matrix 74), a concept that points out the
use of Lesbianism as spectacle to reinforce the false idea that two women are
capable only of a sexual relationship, specifically for male titillation, and
not a loving, romantic one as two human beings. This trivialization exists in
much of mainstream entertainment culture, yet is interestingly absent from many
games, such as Gone Home. The player perceives Samantha and girlfriend,
Lonnie, in an emotional connection based on love and romance instead of a
fetishized state. In fact, when you pick up a journal entry with Samantha’s
personal description of her own virginity loss, the player is unable to pick it
back up after the avatar ignores the wishes of the player and puts it back
down. We, as players, cannot pick it up afterwards: Sam’s relationship is not
for our amusement or arousal. What The Fullbright Company’s designer, Steve
Gaynor, has created is a game about female relationships with the world, from a
female point of view, in a traditionally female play-space.
Deconstructing the Binaries with Bioshock
If Mario and Gone Home represent the two sides of
the masculine/feminine game binary, then most games exist somewhere in-between
these two. In fact, more and more, the games that receive acclaim by both
players and critics alike are the ones that have an almost even amount of
feminine and masculine elements. Take, for example, 2K (Later Irrational
Games)’s game, Bioshock. With a multiplatform release in 2007, Bioshock
revolutionized the process of world building for mainstream games. Instead of
being given obvious objectives to defeat the game’s big-bad-guy, the player is
forced to gather information from the surrounding world – from the very
walls—as well as audio logs. It is possible to play through Bioshock without
collecting every log, however much of the character building and world creation
would go entirely unnoticed, while the shooting and action portions of the game
would remain intact.
A player that plays with a masculine style, ignoring many of the
findable objects, will not have as immersive an experience. The extra content
in the game provides clues and background information about the world – a dead
body lying on the ground can gain significance through context, and often times
a subtle horror is created: For example, the dead body lying on the bed in the
bordello is much more horrifying when you take the time to listen to the audio-log
and realize that she is, in fact, the character’s own mother. What once seemed
like a world inhabited by deformed and violent drug addicts known as ‘splicers,’
becomes complex. Even the conversations that enemies have with one another
before spotting the player can add new elements to the world. Not every
character you meet needs to be killed, though all can be. These logs and other audio-visual
devices function in a manner greatly similar to the audio logs of Gone Home
and help to not only build up the city of Rapture into a living entity of its
own, but also help the game’s plot progress.
To return, for a minute, to Rehak’s gendered playspaces, Bioshock’s
city of Rapture has a duality between the masculine and feminine: While Rapture
sits as a secret underwater Atlantis, its entrance a lonely lighthouse, the
game does not function like a masculine “Treasure Island” but more like a
“Secret Garden.” Structurally the city is built up with an interior similar to
a shopping mall, a place often associated with the feminine. New maps are not
shown on streets but in cavernous hallways where the storefronts of shops,
bars, and vice sit in opposite ends. Even the medical wing contains mall-like
entrances to the dentist’s office and surgical wing. The entire structure is
interior, and because of the games greater focus on exploration within domestic
space, this game, often lauded as one of the best games to be released in recent
years, cannot be regarded as a male play-space: rather it is a game that takes
its complexity from the joint expression of both the traditionally masculine
and feminine. In reality, these gendered gamespaces, that many seem to believe
will ruin gaming with pink and purple backgrounds and sparkly ponies are
actually useful for adding to a game’s depth, not treating the game material
like the players are naive and emasculated. If this is true of the spaces the
avatars roam, then perhaps the physical manifestations of gendered characters
are also unlikely to doom gaming forever.
What About the Avatar?
The concept of ‘avatar’ lies between the sphere of the imagined
world and the sphere of reality. Gaming has the most tangible and personal
relationship with the visual avatar, as the character you are supposed to
identify with is literally under your control. Unsurprisingly, the player and
the avatar have a relationship far more complex than the common Monkey see,
Donkey Kong do apparatus. Bob Rehak’s Playing at Being explains, in
detail, the history of the videogame avatar from its inception with Spacewar! in 1962 all the way up until
its publication in 2003. (Rehak 1). Rehak introduces the idea of avatar as
vehicle, as a form dominated by the ‘inorganic’ spaceships and cars of early
video games, before the avatar was transformed into a representative of the
‘organic’ in Pac-Man (Rehak 6-13). First living, eating form on screen, Pac-Man’s
revolutionary developments in gaming did not end there; Ms. Pac-Man’s
arrival demarcated an important point in the development of the avatar. With Ms.
Pac-Man, and her vivid red lips, gaming had become a coed sport. Women were
available personas for the playing.
Since Ms. PACMAN’s introduction in the 1980s, the variety
of avatars has increased a thousand fold, even far beyond the scope that
Rehak’s Playing at Being delineated. Avatars today have tons of personal
identity markers and players can relate to their avatars on entirely new
levels. Because this topic has become so broad, and because I do not wish to
generalize, the focus in this essay will be limited to discussing the effect
that gender has on playable 1st/3rd person human (or
humanoid) characters with predesigned avatars. This will limit the context in
which I will discuss games and thereby acknowledge the differing relationships
between an avatar you can design, in games such as Skyrim and Mass
Effect, and games where your character has a preset human identity, such as
Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider. Given these limitations, how does a player interact with an
avatar when their coded genders differ? Its easy to say that the gender of the
avatar does not matter, as the player has full control over the action of the
character and should, in theory, play the game as if they themselves were
really in a warzone, or medieval kingdom, or spaceship. Yet this ignores the
fundamental purpose of a videogame: a world where the player can react to the
world and the world can react right back. But the world can only react to what
it sees the player as – and as any player of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time can tell you, there are two very
different reactions to the Hero of Time, Link, depending upon whether he
appears as a child or adult.
With a basic understanding of the avatar established, its best to
go back and look at a similar, older and more well established art form: Film.
If the theories of Laura Mulvey could be applied, with no significant changes,
then the relationship between avatar and player should be obvious. Mulvey
argues:
Women then stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male
other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and
obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of
woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning. (Mulvey
15)
On
the one hand, Mulvey assumes this theory is being applied to primarily the use
of film and this leaves out the undeniable difference between games and film:
the audience of a film is passive while the audience of a video game is active.
But this in itself raises more questions: When female NPC (Non-Player
Characters) exist in a game, especially when they seem to serve no other
function than as healer, someone to escort or love interest, does this
character's role immediately fall into Mulvey's theory that she is a “male
other”? That is to be voyeured at? More
haunting, in my opinion, is what this theory says about characters,
particularly female and minority characters, that you do play: re-read this
quote, replacing the idea of the looked-at woman with a playable female
character, for example, Tomb Raider’s
Lara Croft:
"[Lara Croft] stands in
patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic
order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through
[controller] command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied
to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning."
In spite of every single attempt to make
a powerful female character, what this sentence does is argue that no female
avatar, however sassy or well written, no matter the story line, has still come
no further than to be a version of the “male other” to be controlled with no
will of her own. So now what do we do? As women, we wish to have better
representation in video games with more options to play as a female character,
yet at the same time, that very ability to choose a female avatar immediately
subjects her to a patriarchal standard - to be viewed as both an object of
desire and a method of anxiety in the form of a castration symbol.
So
what do we do? Should we make playable female characters for more games but
only give women access to play them? Of course not. Luckily, the concept of
fantasies and obsessions is applicable to pretty much any video game character
regardless of gender. If you replace Lara Croft with Uncharted’s Nathan Drake the quote still makes sense. It is simply
in the nature of the avatar to be a vessel of control. Her concepts of relationship between men and male characters vs
their relationships with female characters boils down to controversial ideas as
well: she regarded men as “bearers of the look “ while women inherently held
the title of objects. Any attempt at reversing these two constructs is, in this
view, going against the “straight, socially established interpretation of
sexual difference" (Mulvey 14). In effect, this argument suggests that
women naturally transgress gender boundaries when watching film as they must
take on the male persona of the objectifiers to correctly watch a movie.
According to this, the male player, must identify, through Mulvey’s construct
of ego-narcissism, with the active playable male character, and when confronted
with a female avatar, control her through a solely voyeuristic gaze as an
object.
However, such binaries are never able to give full scope to any
system, and Mulvey’s theories, while a concrete basis to build upon, are far
from complete. Mulvey’s thesis directly states that men generally cannot be the
object of an erotic gaze. As a woman interested in men, I can say with
certainty that the male form can be objectified and that Mulvey’s theory ignores
the active gaze produced by both women and gay men. Steve Neale, in his
prologue Masculinity as Spectacle,
argues that the male form, while not directly objectified, can have a male body
as object, so long as it is “motivated in some other way, its erotic component
repressed" and redirected into the appreciation of the physical form
through its ability to achieve a goal (Neale 14). Really, who doesn’t love an
underdog?
Steve Neale is also one of
the first to give voice to the problems of Mulvey’s
identification/objectification binary. He cites John Ellis’s book, Invisible
Fictions, quoting that “identification is never simply a matter of men
identifying with male figures on the screen and women identifying with female
figures. Cinema draws on and involves many desires, many forms of desire. And
desire itself is mobile, fluid, constantly transgressing identities, positions
and roles. Identifications are multiple, fluid, at points even
contradictory." (Neale 10). This is an incredibly important piece to take
away from an analysis of film. When talking about apparent binaries like male
and female, it is so easy to forget that gender is shown now to be a spectrum,
and also only one facet of our identity as human beings. Being a woman is not
the opposite of being a man, it is simply something that differs in one sense
of our identity. To that end, there is not one way a player relates to an
avatar, but a varied spectrum. They can relate as voyeur, as identity maker, as
self and as other. The idea that a male gamer could not relate to a female
avatar, or vice versa, particularly within the construct of a fantasy space is
a fallacy. As Neale reminds us, “identification involves both the recognition
of self in the image on the screen, a narcissistic identification and the
identification of self with the various positions that are involved in the
fictional narration" (Neale 11), not just gender. The players, as
individuals, may relate to differently gendered avatars on different levels and
to different degrees, but they will relate on the level that makes all avatars
– male, female, genderfluid—a representation of the human condition.
Why Cross-Gender Identification
is not as Far Away as You Think
Male Body Tourism
Despite the clear differences between the two, there is an
important relationship between the avatar and the gendered game space. While
the avatar is the representation of both self and other, ultimately it is the world’s
reaction to the avatar that players witness. These encounters with the world
give the player rules upon how they will be treated and how they should react
to the environment. For instance, the backlash received by Gone Home has
more to do with the different world interaction rather than because the playable
character is female—an important distinction to make, as some gamers attempt to
argue that they are unable to relate to Kaitlin. Even in the strictest sense,
it is unlikely any man would be unable to relate to a female avatar on some
level; women are human too, after all.
Despite this, claims of women characters hurting the freedom of
videogames still run rampant because somehow adding diversity disrupts the
nature of gaming and ruins them. But the concept of crossing gender lines isn’t
unheard of: women have had to cross that gap for years, because all of the
interesting games were played with heroes, not heroines. Even now female gender,
when it is used, defines certain game characteristics and playing styles. Women
are used for stealth, while men fight in a Rambo-esque run-and-gun style. When
a member of one sex plays as a member of another, they are able to tour the worldview
of that gender, and have the potential to learn more about the world –
supposing the character is portrayed in a fair manner.
In her article Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and
Passing on the Internet, Lisa Nakamura explores this concept of “Identity
Tourism”—and while her article uses this concept to explain how playacting as
another culture is harming to that culture, properties from her work do argue
that such tourism, the implicit view of another, is helpful. There are certain
gaps she leaves. Nakamura’s
essay specifically addresses the method of identity tourism performed by white
males in online MMORPG style gaming and their tourism into the identity of multi-ethnic
(but particularly Asian) avatars. While she does talk a little bit about
gender, she does not systematically go through every variation of identity
tourism, i.e.: minorities who play as other minorities, minorities who play as
privileged characters, people who exclusively play across the gender gap.
While her focus is upon the
privileged using racist archetypes as a privilege to demean, there is something
to be said for a system that forces a player to put on an avatar and understand
how life is to a marginalized group. It involves the
process of putting on another mask, in this case a racial identity mask, in
order to gain the benefits of a marginalized point of view without the
fallout of having to deal with the repercussions that come with having no way
out of that identity. This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing : in fact,
if used well, identity tourism allows anyone to experience life from another
point of view and forces you to question how you treat others who have a
differing self identity. The problem with identity tourism comes only in that
most representations allow for the spread of harmful stereotypes, which hold with
views from a white male society. Nakamura uses the appropriation of an Asian
identity online as an example:
The choice to enact
oneself as a samurai warrior in LambdaMOO constitutes a form of identity
tourism which allows a player to appropriate an Asian racial identity without
any of the risks associated with being a racial minority in real life. While
this might seem to offer a promising venue for non-Asian characters to see
through the eyes of an Other by performing themselves as Asian through on-line
textual interaction, the fact that personae chosen are overwhelmingly Asian
stereotypes blocks this possibility by reinforcing these stereotypes (3).
While such performative
stereotypes of differing cultures occur often in the MMORPG world, in the realm
of console gaming, the majority of avatars are created with a white, cys,
straight, male as the protagonist: thus, more of this identity tourism takes
place when women and other minorities play as the privileged class of people:
In many ways it is freeing, and it truly lets games become a play-scape for all
types of people. Such games will always exist, and adding ‘politicizing‘
elements is unlikely to ruin the superhuman high gamers experience in the
videogame world, and in fact create more nuanced and interesting settings.
Woman for Women vs. Women for Boys
Over the course of the last fifteen years, games engineers have
incorporated gameplay options that attempt to include the female gamer, while
not making her their target demographic. Male protagonists have still dominated
the field of videogames, but as time progresses, these characters have been
given more complex backstories and often interesting or strong women to support
them.
The next logical step, after the introduction of well-developed
secondary female character, was to widen the market through the creation of the
female action avatar: In 1996, Tomb
Raider introduced Lara Croft, gaming’s first mainstream action hero with
two very perky polygons. From the beginning of her rein as the action queen,
Lara Croft sparked enormous growth in adding gender diversity to games. However,
much of the female characters now available in games are produced with similar
body types and personalities. The female avatar, as described in Helen W
Kennedy’s Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?, has come to mean the
hyper-sexualized woman who enters into the traditionally male space of foreign
worlds. Characters like Lara Croft draw a ‘new’ demographic—women— which now,
according to an October 26th 2014 Washington Post article, make up
roughly 50% of all players world wide. But these characters have another
primary target: to be the object men can look at while they play. Kennedy
refers to such characters as “bimodal” meaning that they function as not just for
men to stare at, or just for women to identify with, but both modes of the
avatar – hence, bimodal. Other examples of these characters can be found
throughout gaming: Chun-Li (Street Fighter), Sonya Blade (Mortal Kombat) and
Tifa Lockhart (Final Fantasy VII), just to name a few. These characters were
created to appeal to the different genders in two completely different ways:
traditional male gamers, Kennedy argues, were intended to view these women as
an objectified other, while women were intended to identify with the feminine
body placed upon the screen.
In many ways, this binary aligns with the one that Mulvey suggests
– that the two sexes inherently cannot cross-identify with one another. Yet, as
already discussed, Mulvey’s theory is flawed and incomplete. It should be ok to
have a sex positive, body positive, powerful female avatar – the only issue is
when these characters are created with only male pleasure in mind. Yet often,
female characters have hyper-sexualized features that mark them as objects:
Croft is infamous for her original design with an enormous chest. Now female
avatars have a new binary that is hard to disentangle: Some avatars have had
their femininity toned down to nonexistence, while others remain hyper-sexualized.
Finding characters that fall between are rare, and when they do occur, they are
still stilted with one demographic in mind over the other.
Implicitly, female avatars are designed with women players in mind, but always
as an addition to the ‘primary’ male gamer. Because of this, even though
bimodal female characters exist, they act as a selfhood of a preteen boy rather
than women they claim to represent. This makes it more difficult to discuss how
men truly relate to a female avatar: in the design of a male protagonist, no
one seems too concerned with creating male avatars that women easily identify
with – the same should be true of female avatars, yet the industry standard
still clings to a misfortunate idea that images of women should be modified for
male comfort. Although this makes cross-gender identity an easier transition
for the male player, it also takes away parts of the ‘woman experience’ that
could be identified with.
Relevant is Carol J Clover’s concepts of what she terms, “the
Final Girl”, in her work, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film. She talks of the “Final Girl” as not just being bimodal, but
as avatars intended for the male viewer. Clover argues that the final woman
protagonist in horror films—the one who survives the horror to triumph—are
relatable to the target audience of preteen boys because they have had their
femininity stripped from them. They lack their own sexuality; the films,
or in this case games, lack a male body to objectify. These women become devoid
of sex or are more likely to be sexually curious about another woman’s body
rather than a man. This seems to imply that it is more acceptable to objectify
a female figure than a male one. The Final Girl wears flannel; she is bookish
and quiet and has not yet come into her own body. In this sense, they are the
perfect avatar for the young male viewer and must earn their metaphorical
‘penis’ through an intense trial. Clover describes it best:
“The Final Girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer [in horror] is not
fully masculine, she is not fully feminine—not, in any case, feminine in the
ways of her friends. Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other
practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from other girls and
ally her, ironically, with the very boys she fears or rejects…” (Clover 40)
It is very apparent that
many game heroines are similarly neutered through the use of phallic weaponry,
and an undefined sexuality.
Many female game characters are given a traditional place as the
‘mannish’ woman. Some such as Lara Croft (Tomb Raider) and Lightening (Final
Fantasy XIII) are made asexual, and any potential attraction is never
discussed. The action of the game is more important than the humanizing characteristics
of sex or romance. Others such as Vanille and Fang (also Final Fantasy XIII)
or Ellie and Riley (The Last of Us) are coded (or explicitly) lesbian.
Unlike most film, however, game-lesbian relationships are sewn with sincerity.
This is great – showing a loving relationship between two women is a step in
the right direction to diversify characters; it does, however, highlight the
severe lack of explicitly straight women to play.
Of the straight female protagonists that do exist, many are
neutered by circumstance: in Final Fantasy XIII-2, Serah Ferron, the
straight female protagonist, has her fiancé, Snow, a protagonist from the first
game,
removed from view at the outset, so as not to be the object of Serah’s (and by
proxy the player’s) gaze. Yet the game implicitly claims, after two years of
absence, that Serah is still so loyal to her fiancé, Snow, that she cannot be
attracted to the game’s male protagonist, Noel, despite an obvious closeness
the two share. Similar treatment is given in the game Lollipop Chainsaw,
where Juliet, a sugar-driven, chainsaw-wielding,
cheerleader-valley-girl-feminist, is not allowed to voyeur at her boyfriend, Nick,
as she literally chops him off at the neck minutes after his introduction.
He is not dead, mind you, but becomes a talking head companion instead. His
lack of a body objectifies him, not sexually, but as a tool used for various
tasks. Nick’s body as a sexual object is so absent in the game that he often is
placed on other bodies for humor – a cheerleader zombie, an obese zombie. In
the end he is given a shorter, older, and ostensibly less attractive body, and
the kicker is, that this less commoditized body does not matter to Juliet in
the slightest. His body is not for us to objectify but to accept, something
that, if the role had been reversed, would be an unlikely outcome in Hollywood
style entertainment; Cheerleaders will date the chubby guy, but hot Jocks steer
clear of Fatties. All of this is done to
make straight female characters more relatable to the men who play games,
rather than the women who wish to see their own bodies, however sexually
stunted, on screen. All of these characters, boyish and beautiful, are made for
men to identify with, not women. Things are beginning to get better.
Stylistic Gameplay: Booker DeWitt Kills,
Elizabeth Knocks Out
A compromise of sorts has crept into the gaming industry: many
games are being created that utilize the diversity afforded by male and female
avatars to create multiple types of gameplay within a single game. Such games
will often create avatars that are given different advantages based upon body
type, demeanor, and most recently, gender. Games such as Borderlands 2
use such techniques to offer specific advantages through different characters –
Zer0 has the ability to create a ghostly image of himself; ‘Gaige, the
Mechromancer’ enlists the help of a robot companion to assist her with the take-down
of minion enemies for timed periods; the hulking mass that is ‘Salvador the
Gunzerker’ uses his ability of duel wielding (which really means he is able to
use more than two weapons at any given time) to ravage the enemies. Often
characters are assigned different tasks based on their size, yet female
characters are developed for stealth, while male characters are deemed the
action run-and-gun type. An interesting example of this occurs in Irrational
Games’s Bioshock Infinite and its downloadable-content, Burial at Sea
Part II.
Unlike the original Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite
takes place in a game space that is inherently more masculine. The corrupt
society of Columbia exists in clouds, aloft on floating islands, and the
initial object of the game is to free a girl, Elizabeth, from her place in a
tower. This masculine, linear, plot is intentional and inverted, as Elizabeth
becomes, not a damsel in distress, but a guide and partner with astonishing
power.
However these gender differences do create for interesting
contrast in gameplay, once the player is given the opportunity to don the
Elizabeth-avatar in Burial at Sea DLC. In the main game, the
protagonist, Booker, plays similarly to the first game’s Jack: he collects
various weapons and special powers known as ‘Salts’. Although he gains some
defensive powers, the majority of his arsenal helps him better kill the
enemies. When introduced to the playing style of Elizabeth, however, one
difference is major: instead of beginning the game with a violent melee weapon,
Elizabeth finds a blunt object, but is immediately told that she will only be
able to knock enemies out with it, and only when they have not seen her coming.
Through a voiced monologue, she says that she does not have to be her father:
in other words, you should not use Elizabeth to kill because more often than
not, you physically can’t. This inability to kill continues as the next weapon
you receive is a crossbow filled with tranquilizer darts.
Although Elizabeth does eventually pack some actual heat, the game
first establishes that Elizabeth wants to be a pacifist and will play like a
pacifist. Such a playing style could be interesting and exciting, had it not
seemed influenced by the gender of the character. Even though it is established
in the game, the choice seems gendered regardless. In a world permeated by
violence, Elizabeth often stands horrified and shocked as Booker kills to
protect her. It is a startling and poignant moment in the game when Elizabeth
herself is forced to kill someone to save a child. However the DLC takes place years
later, and this Elizabeth is one who, it has been established, has killed her
own father, in multiple dimensions many, many times. In the main game Booker is
not given a way to disarm – he can only kill – odd considering his desire to
redeem himself from his violent history as a soldier. Had Booker been afforded
the same option of non-violence and Elizabeth’s initial innocence not
undermined by her characterization after the ending of the main game, then the
added bonus of a non-lethal stealth gaming style would be less subject to
criticism. In many ways, it does make sense that Elizabeth would have to play
more in stealth than Booker, who is a well-trained war veteran. The story that
she moves through, as the avatar is interesting – however it could have been
more interesting to do it before she had become jaded and before her character
design had so clearly been changed to remind us of the masculinized Hollywood
Femme Fatale. The game, while brilliant, is still not perfect, and Bioshock’s
attempt at a female character was still clearly created to be more identifiable
for young men.
Why it’s Hard to Confirm Cross-Gender Avatar
Identification
Identification for the young male consumer is important to explain
why cross-gendered identification is difficult to confirm or deny; if the
characters are intentionally created to be more identifiable with the male
player, then there are not many outlets to see how men identify with female
characters created for women. Complicating this further, renderings of female
bodies for women are often created by well-intentioned men, yet the Barbie
results only further the societal caricature of women. It is between these two
binaries, that of society’s caricature woman and the loosely disguised bimodal
boy-girl that avatars have yet to satisfactorily combine. Perhaps it is
something that new altogether that needs to be created.
I don’t want to reprimand the games listed in this piece for wanting
wider market appeal; these games contain many progressive elements that show how
games can and should be developed for a wider demographic. The avatar is a
representation of both self and other; the more that avatar is placed in a
world that gives equal distribution to male and female game-space, while not
ignoring the realities of how the world reacts to these identity distinctions,
the more likely it will be that the game will resonate with the highest number of
players. Even if the player can’t relate to the gender, they can relate to the
other qualities that make up a sense of humanness, which is not just gender
neutral, but both feminine and masculine in quality.
So there you have it. I’ve touched the controller, I’ve touched
the theories, and I have touched upon the positive outcomes that will result in
diversifying gaming. I am a girl, and I play games. Hopefully, I’ve given you
the cooties that will make you want even more representation so that games can
be even freer.
©2015 Lex Vex
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