Women in games

[Super important update: This piece no longer reflects my thinking on the matter. I'm leaving it up as an example of some of the traps a naive white male can fall into when trying to deal with this topic. If you want to stop being naive, I recommend actually listening to some women. I mean, really listening. --AW, 2014-10-09]

There have been a couple of posts in the blogowebs over the past couple of weeks about allegations that publisher Activision has been telling its developers not to create games with female protagonists. Whether or not the allegations (which Activision denies) are true, I'd like to put my perspective on it.

A female video game protagonist (Kit Ballard from Blade Kitten).

Identification with the protagonist of a game is a complicated enough issue as it is without bringing in gender politics. For example, Dragon Age: Origins presented the player with pretty much a blank slate on which to create their character. Some people loved that, while others (like me) felt that it made my character's emotional response to certain situations somewhat arbitrary and meaningless. This is in contrast to (the somewhat similar) Mass Effect, where, although Commander Shepard's personality was subject to the choices of the player, those choices felt more like an interpretation of Shepard's character than a creation of that character by the player. (Both Dragon Age and Mass Effect, in keeping with BioWare tradition, allowed the player to choose whether to play as a male or a female character.)

Vanya at split/screen co-op argues that "There are many cool games that mainly appeal to boys. The lead characters in most of those games are strong males that the players can identify with. If the players are male that is," implying that such a decision, if true, is driven by an outdated attitude that the gaming market is mostly made up of males. I respectfully disagree. I don't necessarily identify with those strong male characters. The phenomenon isn't male-centric, but adolescent-centric. It's not about identification, but about power fantasy. That is, of course, motivated by the outdated attitude that the gaming market is principally adolescent.

There are also plenty of games out there where the protagonist isn't even human. One of my favourite games is Ōkami, in which I play the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu incarnated in the form of a wolf. The title of this blog notwithstanding, it's a bit harder to identify with a wolf than it is to identify with a woman, but that doesn't make the game any less appealing to a boy like me. Also of historical note here is in some ways Ōkami's spiritual antecedent, Ecco the Dolphin, in which the player played as a totally un-anthropomorphic dolphin. To say that boys couldn't identify with a female character is like saying a pale Scottish lad like me couldn't identify with GTA: San Andreas' CJ because he's a black American. Similarly, then, why couldn't a girl identify with a male protagonist in a game?

I don't think identification with a game's protagonist is necessarily a gender issue, and knowing what would attract females to gaming if not a female protagonist is somewhat outside my ken (I've asked a few women, gamers and non-gamers alike, about this: not nearly enough to be a statistically valid sample, but 100% of them said the gender of the games' protagonists wasn't an issue), but what about the other issues concerning female characters? Let's take quick stock of the female protagonists in games. We have, obviously, Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider series, Samus Aran from the Metroid series, Jade from Beyond Good & Evil, April Ryan and Zoe Castillo from The Longest Journey series, Cate Archer from the No One Lives Forever series, Ruby from Wet, Kit Ballard from the forthcoming Blade Kitten, and so on. Not all of these are startlingly wonderful representations of women, but maybe the problem is that we expect them to be. Not all male protagonists are great representations of men, either: I find the testosterone-fuelled machismo of Command & Conquer: Renegade's Nick "Havoc" Parker to be absolutely cringe-worthy, but I don't find it insulting to men because it's not supposed to reflect all men. We don't expect the moral flaws of the Grand Theft Auto series' (exclusively male) protagonists to reflect on all men, either. (Many of the female characters listed are engaged in violent activity, and there is an argument that that's a male domain. I'm not sure what to think about that.) How can a female protagonist represent women without essentialising women, which is inherently patronising? The answer, I think, is not to politicise female protagonists, but to depoliticise them. The thrust of feminism being, essentially, that women are people too, why can't a female video game character stand - like male video game characters do - for that one fictive woman, rather than for all women?

I think there are three possible reasons to make a video game character female: one is commercial, one is political, and the other is creative. The problem with making a video game character female for commercial reasons is that the female protagonist is likely to be hyper-sexualised, to objectify women (as was arguably the case with Lara Croft originally, and is still the case with some female protagonists today). The problem with making a video game character female for political reasons is that the female protagonist is likely to be essentialising and patronising. This was the case with Purple Moon, which made games targeted at pre-teen girls in the 90s. There is a caveat that I don't want to disparage Purple Moon for that at all: as Purple Moon's Brenda Laurel says (quoted in Tristan Donovan's Replay: The History of Video Games), it was politically necessary at the time, but we're sort of past that, now:-

I get a lot of crap from both women and men who don't understand the social context in which Purple Moon and its sister companies came to be. They don't remember the time that girls were afraid of computers, boys dominated computer labs in elementary schools and girls thought tech was not gender-appropriate for them. The conditions that we were trying to address when we started Purple Moon no longer exist.

I think, then, that the best chance for creating a positive female character is to take a creative perspective on it. That's probably the most thoughtful approach to what it means for the character to be female. But what do we mean by a 'positive' female character? Literature is full of anti-heroes whom we really shouldn't like, but with whom we nevertheless sympathise: Orwell's Winston Smith, Dostoyevsky's Rodion Raskolnikov, Burgess' Alex, Fowles' Frederick Clegg, and so on. If we want to accept gaming as a mature medium, shouldn't it be free to deal with those less savoury aspects of human life? And is there any real reason those anti-heroes should be exclusively male?

I want to leave this post with a somewhat controversial thought about the sexual objectification of women in games. Gamers are, by and large, very quick to defend that shooting a fictional game character in the face is nothing like doing the same to a real person. Far fewer, it seems, are willing to say that sexually objectifying a fictional female video game character is not the same as sexually objectifying real women. While in my gut I sympathise with that viewpoint, I'd be hard pressed to articulate why that issue's any different.