Representing as Self and Other

Toby Gard, the creator of Lara Croft, suggested a distinction between two different types of playable character in video games: the avatar and the actor. The avatar, in his model, is a character that the player 'inhabits', projecting either their own personality or an invented personality onto the character. Silent protagonists, such as Gordon Freeman or Link, fall into this category. The actor, meanwhile, is a character with personality pre-created by the game's writer, a character of whom the player takes control. Examples include Gard's own Lara Croft, or Solid Snake. Gard also suggested that avatars should be tied to a first-person view, while actors should be tied to a third-person view, though I think the relationship between camera view and type of playable character can be overstated: Link is an avatar with a third-person view, while J.C. Denton is an actor with a first-person view, and both of them work just fine.

I'm also not convinced that the distinction is as binary as Gard first suggested. Is Mass Effect's Commander Shepard an avatar or an actor? The answer is that she's a bit of both. (Or he is, if you're playing it wrong.) The character is customisable, and the choices presented in the game are, as I've argued before, not 'true' choices that the player is expected to decide on, but questions about how the player interprets the character. Shepard has neither the flexibility of an avatar, nor the rigidity of an actor, but lies somewhere in between.

But what I want to delve into today is the parallel between Gard's concept of avatar and actor, and the psychological concept of 'self' and 'other'. Some playable characters are proxies for the player's 'self', acting as the vessel for the player to be transported into the game world. Other playable characters are, well, 'other'. The player relates to the character, but doesn't necessarily identify with them.

Take Mario and Sonic. After 30 years, we still don't really know who Mario is. He is a (white male) human with whatever personality the player invests him with. He is the 'self'. Sonic, on the other hand, has a personality (unfortunately). But even before he had a personality, in his heyday, he was still a blue hedgehog. Assuming that nobody playing the game is actually a blue hedgehog, he is the 'other'.

This all has a knock-on effect for diverse representation in games. We are comfortable with playing white dudes as the 'self', and we are comfortable with playing all manner of outlandish creatures as the 'other'. The joke has often been made that the industry is content to let you play as a dragon, but balks at letting you play as a woman. When we introduce a character who is a woman, a person of colour, gay, trans, gamedom gets confused. Is this supposed to be a 'self' or an 'other'? It shouldn't be that way: after all, we're content to cast white guys as the 'other' as well as the 'self' - we're content to play as white guys who have their own personalities rather than being a surrogate for ourselves. That's a function of white male defaultism.

Anita Sarkeesian made a video about why the Scythian from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is a positive female character. And Sarkeesian's right: the Scythian is a positive female character. But she's a positive female character in a very specific way. It may be an oversimplification, but I would say the two goals of feminism are to normalise women (which is to say, get away from thinking of male as the 'default' and female as the 'exception'), and to humanise women (which is to say, getting people to treat women as actual human beings). These goals are very closely aligned (to the point where I have had trouble explaining the distinction), but I think they are served in games quite differently. Normalising women is better served by allowing a female character to be the 'self' - as the Scythian is. Humanising women is better served by portraying a woman as an 'other' - after all, how do you demonstrate the humanity of someone who has no personality beyond what the player brings with them?

Neither of these things is 'better' or 'worse' (although casting a woman as 'other' does need to take care not to undermine the normalising effect of casting a woman as 'self' in other games). Both are necessary. But I can't help but wonder if it's possible to achieve both at once. On one hand, Mass Effect seems to manage it. On the other hand, ludonarrative dissonance is often caused by a playable character switching unpredictably between 'self' and 'other', as in Grand Theft Auto, where the cutscenes and missions present the character as an 'other', but the between-mission gameplay presents the character as a 'self'.

I've focused a bit on women here, but the same can be said for other non-'default' groups. We need positive examples we can identify with ('self') to normalise them, and positive examples we can relate to ('other') to humanise them.

There is a caveat that, as a white guy, I might be talking nonsense. But I do think that discussions of more diverse representation in games do necessarily need to talk about what particular kind of representation we're talking about, and what that means.

The Dialectics of Videogames

This is something I've been meaning to post for a while. I've talked briefly about dialectics in video games before, but that was in a sort of different context.

Socrates (Image credit: Eric Gaba)

So, I understand that for most people, the word 'dialectics' is probably big and scary. Let me break this down with a short and oversimplified history of dialectics. Dialectics was allegedly invented by Zeno of Elea (he of the infamous Archer's Paradox), but was really made famous by Plato and Socrates. They gave us what we call (for rather obvious reasons) Socratic Dialogue. In Socratic Dialogue, one party adopts a position, which we call the thesis, while the other adopts the opposite position, which we call the antithesis. There are formal rules for how the dialogue proceeds, but suffice to say it is the goal of the antithesis to find a flaw in the thesis, and the goal of the thesis to defend itself. Socratic Dialogue is, therefore, a means of evaluating the strength of a thesis. If a thesis is strong, the antithesis will fail to find fault with it. If the thesis is weak, the antithesis will defeat it, and you should go and think up another thesis.

We're going to skip over 2000 years of history now and go straight to the 19th century, and the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Georgie gave us another form of dialectics, which we (again, for obvious reasons) call Hegelian Dialectics. Like Socratic Dialogue, Hegelian Dialectics begins with a thesis and an antithesis, but it's perhaps fair to say that Hegel saw dialectics as more generative than evaluative. Rather than using the tension to test the strength of the thesis, Hegel rather saw the tension between thesis and antithesis as culminating in a process we normally call sublation (although we're talking about Hegelian Dialectics, we actually use a lot of terms where Hegel himself actually used different terms, but they basically mean the same thing). Sublation does not represent the triumph of thesis over antithesis or vice versa, but the creation of a new, third position, called the synthesis.

G.W.F. Hegel

We could also talk about Karl Marx and dialectical materialism, but the difference between dialectical materialism and Hegelian Dialectics isn't really relevant to our purposes.

So what does this have to do with videogames, and why am I writing it on a videogame blog that is especially concerned with stories?

Well, I propose that games qua games are Socratic, and stories are (often) Hegelian, and because of that, they require different methods of resolution.

If we consider a game, where the point is to win, in dialectical terms, it seems obvious to say that the player represents the role of the thesis, and that the opponent or other challenges represents the antithesis. A player wins a game by not allowing the challenges to find flaw with their playing: by not allowing the antithesis to find flaw with the thesis. (This is slightly different from Socratic Dialogue, because the antithesis is often waits for the player to come to it, but whatever. The player can only win the game by facing the antithesis' challenges.) The strength of the thesis is directly correlated to the player's playing ability.

In a story, the story tension is indeed set up by the tension between thesis and antithesis, but is resolved not by the virtues of either side, but by some change to a new position: the synthesis. If one side was inevitably going to win anyway, there is no tension. Now, yes, the protagonist often beats the antagonist in a story, but usually because of some change in the protagonist such that the protagonist is no longer playing by the thesis they presented to begin with. In this case, the protagonist doesn't so much represent the thesis as resolves the story by switching from the thesis to the synthesis. This is pretty much what we mean when we talk about a character arc: the character changes over the course of the story. Here I would say that I think the Socratic-style dialectic of the protagonist merely overcoming the antagonist's challenges without any real change is a perfectly valid story - it is, at the very least, something I would be content to call a story - but I'm not convinced it's often, if ever, a good one.

I don't want to put words in Ernest Adams' mouth, but I get the feeling that, when he talked about the disanalogies between gameplay tension and dramatic tension, this is what he was driving at, particularly when he talks about dramatic novelty and the need for change.

Likewise, with reference to when Jesper Juul talked about the distinction between immediate desires and aesthetic desires, I would propose that our immediate desires are by and large Socratic (in the sense that we want the thesis to win) while our aesthetic desires are more Hegelian (in the sense that we want an interesting resolution).

Inevitably, we're going to have to talk about Mass Effect 3's (pre-extended-cut) ending here. I don't want to get too hung up on what I think about the ending, or why people liked or hated it. The story of the trilogy is, essentially, about cycles, and specifically Hegelian cycles, so it's rather appropriate the the three ending options were the thesis (destroy the Reapers like you set out to do), the antithesis (siding with the Reapers in the hope of controlling them) and the synthesis (which was, helpfully, even called the synthesis ending). To my mind, the thesis and antithesis endings are your typical 'good' and 'bad' game endings. Like in Streets of Rage (or was it Streets of Rage 2?), where, upon meeting Mr. X, you can choose to either beat him up to get the 'good' ending, or join him to get the 'bad' ending. This is complicated a little bit by the fact that the 'good' ending in Mass Effect 3 was portrayed as a Renegade choice, while the 'bad' ending was portrayed as a Paragon choice, but let's discuss that later. Then you have the synthesis ending, where the story is resolved by some change, as stories, as we've established, usually are.

In summary, a win in a game often means the triumph of the thesis, while a resolution in a story often means replacement of the thesis with the synthesis. One of the great challenges for narrative-heavy games is reconciling the two. A good place to start might be Raph Koster's idea that Narrative is not a Game Mechanic.

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.

Eyes on the game

I will not be buying Nintendo's forthcoming 3DS console.

It uses a technique called autostereoscopy to present a 3D image without the need for special glasses, which sounds brilliant for most of the population, but not for me, and the perhaps 5% of the population who suffer from amblyopia. Apparently even mild amblyopia (commonly known as "lazy eye"), can negate the effects of autostereoscopy. So I might as well be playing a regular 2D-display game anyway.

It's not the first time my eyesight has caused me trouble. I played Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 for a little while, but I had to give up on the otherwise great WW2 shooter because my colour-blindness (~7% of the male population) made it difficult for me to tell the difference between Russian green and Nazi grey uniforms, leading to situations where I frequently killed my teammates. My long-sightedness (~30% of the population, but correctable with glasses) exacerbated Mass Effect 2's tiny text problem.

Mass Effect 2's text was difficult to read on standard definition screens, and more difficult for those of us with hyperopia.

When we talk of accessibility in games, we often think of making games available to the disabled. And that is certainly a laudable goal into which game developers really should put more effort. But I am not disabled, and even I struggle with some games. It appears we still have a long way to go.