The Surprising Moral Clarity of Mass Effect 3

I've been working on a commissioned feature about film noir lighting in video games.  Without going into what I'm writing in that essay, my very first thought was: "Oh, that's easy. I've played Mass Effect 2."

It's Blade Runner! It's Double Indemnity! No, wait: it's Thane!

ME2 casts Shepard in an ambiguous moral position.  Not only does the paragon/renegade problem carry over from the first game, but its effects are amplified dramatically.  With interrupts added to the game--sudden, one-click decision points that add to Shepard's paragon or renegade scores--as well as charm and intimidate keying to reputation, rather than to skill points, the question of Shepard's soul begins to matter more.

As well, she is in a more tenuous position with regards to, well, everything.  Now employed by the shadowy Illusive Man, she is working for Cerberus, known from the first game only as a terrorist organization.  The crew she assembles around her is full of misfits, exiles, and murders who, if we're lucky, mostly turn out to have hearts of gold, or at least good intentions.

Of course, we all know where the road paved with good intentions leads.

The essay in question will be running in early 2013, and I have been asked to make it current, to tie it to one or more big 2012 releases.  Knowing how strongly Mass Effect 2 relies on the conventions of film noir and neo-noir, I thought that my sprawling, ludicrous collection (1800+) of Mass Effect 3 screenshots would lend me the perfect inspiration.

I was wrong.

 

With only a handful of exceptions (as in the shuttle, above), Shepard's lighting in Mass Effect 3 is surprisingly clear and unambiguous.  Even when she is in a visually dark location, the lighting spares her.  Shadows fall around her, but not on her; even her companions are largely of the light.

As the game itself gets darker, in every possible sense of the word, the ambiguity becomes stripped away from the Normandy and its passengers just as it becomes stripped away from the plot.  Yes, every decision has consequences, and the strings of three games' worth of choices bear out in many meaningful ways.  But even while that matters, the time for ambiguity is, simply, behind Shepard and behind us.

By ME3, the reapers are here. They are destroying worlds, cultures, civilizations, life... everything.  There is no question of "sides," of "morality."  Respect her (paragon) or fear her (renegade), Shepard is our hero and the hero's time is now.

In fact, the more I browse my enormous gallery of images, the more I feel like Mass Effect 3 is lit with a series of spotlights.  Where Mass Effect 2 threw diagonal shadows around the place to create effect, ME3 is doing everything it can with framing, light, and color to highlight our heroes, fighting to the end in a darkened world.

Sometimes that world is darkened a little too literally.

Indeed, even in an area and on a mission where moral ambiguity and character confusion could easily have been added, the game avoids that construction.  I am speaking of a point somewhere near the end of Act 2 (relatively speaking) where the asari Council representative has summoned Shepard, to impart a secret and necessary piece of information.

The asari's motives and goals are unclear.  She could be honest; she could be dishonest.  Shepard's reaction is unclear: the player can be angry or resigned.  The conversation takes place in an office, where light and posing could easily have conveyed ambiguity and confusion.  Instead, the conversation is brightly lit, with all the whites the Citadel presidium has to offer.  The greatest distance the scene ever creates comes through framing one shot on the other side of a window, hinting at a sense of voyeurism and eavesdropping.

You know, if you had mentioned this BEFORE your planet was invaded, that would have been helpful.

By the time the Shepard's saga reaches its third and final game, that which is... well, is.  Most of the questions and mysteries are removed from the story, and the moral ambiguity of our players along with.  This is not a game for introducing new characters, or questioning their motives; this is a time to revisit the consequences of the stories we already told, and resolving the fates of characters we already know.

Even knowing that, though, I was surprised at how strongly the visuals bear that out.  Subconsciously, they of course reinforced that message the entire time I was playing.  That's what visual language does.

There is also, of course, an exception.  Or in fact, a pair of exceptions.  The Leviathan and Omega DLC add-ons each provide dozens of examples of moral ambiguity and character confusion conveyed through noir-like use of light and shadow.  And it makes sense: these are the segments of game that introduce new characters and new concepts that stand slightly to the side of the hero's straightforward quest for war resources.  Aria, Nyreen, and even the Leviathan itself are all moral wildcards when they are introduced, standing aside from Shepard's binary perspective, and so the lighting lets us stand in Shepard's shoes for a little while, uncertain about who we have just met.

The Gamer's Gaze, part 3

In part 1 and part 2, we discussed the historical origin of the term "male gaze" and went over the actual literal ways in which the camera "looks" in gaming.  There are some great commenter insights in the comments of those posts, too.

The inspiration for this whole mini-series originally sprang from a comment Enstarstarstar left on the Tomb Raider post, where he asked:

"my question is this: isn't this true about games in general? that is, the format of a game--you, the player, have control over much of the perspective and action--makes it in many respects about you. horror games in particular do this prolifically: they take you (and the character you control) through situations that make you feel helpless, or threatened, or out of control. at the very least, narrative games put your character into situations that are designed to play your emotions (think, for instance, bioshock, which even explicitly takes control away from you at the climactic moment).

i guess i'm wondering--aside from the looming threat of sexual violence, the echoey shrieks of the main character, and the different tone of the story and setting--how that intro is different from the intro to uncharted 2. drake wakes up, shot, on a train hanging off from a cliff, and the whole place is falling to pieces around him. there is no question about it: the threat to drake is meant to be something that you feel, something that tosses you into the middle of the action in order to pull you in to the story.

lara's situation strikes me as meant to do exactly the same thing. where they differ, i would argue, is in the way they go about doing it."

My initial response to his insight?  "Exactly."

Modern narrative games are designed to put you into a character's metaphorical shoes.  First-person and third-person games go about it in two different ways, but either way, at least some element of the narrative is in your hands.  That's what makes it a game.  Which elements you can control, and how deeply you the player can affect any of them, vary widely.

Enstar is right to observe that in one sense, Naughty Dog and Crystal Dynamics are indeed aiming to accomplish the exact same goals.  But he also highlights a crucial problem: in this instance, the difference between a male character and a female character is in the looming threat of sexual violence, the echoey shrieks, and the tone of the story.  And he's exactly right: the difference is not even so much in the story that is told, but in the way the story is told.

All of it, across three posts, adds up to this: the stories we play contain visual (and sometimes auditory) cues that tell us, in unquestionable terms, that the player meant to be viewing these stories and sharing these perspectives is an archetypal sort of heterosexual male.

Most of the time it's so ingrained and built-in that we don't really notice it until we're presented with an exception.  None of us were surprised to be in the role of a mystery man in Bioshock, but discovering Chell in Portal made many of us utter a surprise squeal of delight.   Madison's treatment in Heavy Rain isn't shocking, just disappointing.  And because lady Commander Shepard is so great, Miranda's ...assets... particularly stand out.  

When the player character is male, we don't have as many opportunities to notice this design bias.  We're seeing what we expect to see, what we've been trained to see.  It's easy, however, to come by moments of cognitive dissonance when the male perspective is being filtered through a female player character -- and it's especially easy to catch when the player gets to pick the sex of the protagonist, as in Fallout 3.  In "When 'You' Is A Girl," Jenn Frank observes:

I admitted I wasn’t very far into Fallout 3, so my impression was, and remains, cursory. But it would have been one thing, I reasoned aloud, if I genuinely felt bonded to my Fallout 3 character, or if I had felt like the Character’s story were my story, too. But I didn’t feel that way at all.

Like, in the story, when another little girl comforted me during my botched birthday party, I suspiciously felt as if she were coyly putting the moves on my (ten-year old?) “self.” And I think I was supposed to like her, at least in the context of the game, and instead I just felt sort of weird, a dissonance, an artificial and completely fabricated gender dysphoria. And it would have worked if she had talked to me, well, I guess maybe like a lesbian, but instead the dialogue was vaguely heteronormative, like when eight-year old girls play House together and one girl says, “Now you be Dad” (we did! We did do this!), and then she talks to you in this put-upon, artificial way like she thinks Mom talks to Dad, instead of using the vocabulary and lexicon eight-year old girls use to talk to one another, which on an especially well socialized child sounds like “Can you please braid my hair.”

And then, I complained on the patio about how, maybe twenty minutes further into Fallout 3, some teenaged bully is following me around, shouting, threatening—and trying, I think, to punch me in the teeth—and I just cannot shake the feeling that he thinks he is shouting at a guy. It’s as if his every pronoun has been shifted from “he” to “she,” carefully rerecorded for my personal edification, and yet it is glaringly obvious that the game’s “You!” was never intended for me.

She later writes a fantastic line about how Fallout 3 lets you change the player character sex, but not actually the character gender -- all of the behaviors of NPCs and narrative still default the Lone Wanderer to male.  As with so many other games, it reads as a reskinning of the default male player character with long hair and breasts and a find / replace on some pronouns.

There's this argument one hears all the time from male gamers (I have lost track of how many hundred times I've seen it): that they create female avatars in third-person-perspective games so that they have someone attractive to look at.  Which is funny, because when I create female avatars in third-person games, it's so that I have someone attractive to be.

That difference in approach is, right there, the player's personification of the male gaze.  There's certainly no crime in appreciating your protagonist's physique.  (For example, I'll grant that I, a straight woman, definitely appreciate Nathan Drake's character design.)  But a game isn't designed for a male player to appreciate a male lead character's ass.  It's designed for a male player to project some aspect of himself into that male character, and to take back some of that male character's general badassery unto himself.  When a female player character arrives, she is pretty much always still the personification of that male ideal, just now also dressed up in a slim and curvy body for the male player to appreciate.

When we play Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, there is absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that the player sees the game through Monkey.  Trip is, well, a problem character.  As designed, she's a force for compelling Monkey to reveal his heart of gold, and a prize to be endangered, thus requiring rescue.**  As the game is presented to us, Monkey is absolutely justifiable in his early rage toward her and, other than an ability to become completely useless over time, Trip has very few defining characteristics overall.  In fact, Trip's character could have been written a hundred different ways (and has been, as in the original myth her role was filled by a Buddhist monk).  And of those hundred different ways, which is chosen for gaming?  The attractive, somewhat under-dressed, doe-eyed girl, who needs the player character.

Right.

This is what made Commander Shepard's female incarnation such a landmark character: Shepard's behavior, motivations, animation, and so on really do apply equally well to either the Mark Meer or Jennifer Hale iterations of the Commander.  As Line pointed out, Shepard can veer neither into overly "masculine" or "feminine" behaviors, as both versions are given full respect by the development team.  So while the world Shep inhabits still has some definite issues with male gaze, the player character generally does not.

In terms of success in a first-person game, I actually felt that Fallout: New Vegas had the neutrality that was absent from Fallout 3.  Generally the newer Fallout games are played in first-person and the Courier is unvoiced, so the third-person nuance from the Mass Effect titles isn't present.  But in general, every NPC to whom the PC talks is presented front and center, in a neutral straight shot.  The S&M styled hookers in New Vegas come in both male and female varieties and none are presented as particularly alluring.  Villains, companions, and denizens of the Wasteland are indeed a relatively organic mix of male and female, and the removal of limitations on sex-based perks removes a significant chunk of the privilege from the default.  

This is not unique to gaming by any stretch; film and television are just as guilty as they have ever been.  The difference is that while film and TV have also created genres (still problematic) that do inhabit "female gaze" territory, gaming has been slow to catch up on that front.  As we see over and over in every other aspect of gaming -- writing, art, and especially marketing -- the common target is still the mythical basement-dwelling adolescent (but with adult income) socially inept male.  Many games are designed, up front, to appeal to that small handful of modders who, first thing, are going to apply nude textures to every woman in the game, as if the internet didn't have enough boobs on it already.

If we were to look for a female gaze in gaming, my hunch is that we would find it in a handful of jRPGs.  My memories of Final Fantasy XIII are hazy because all I ever did was make fun of it, but as I recall parts of it at least had what I would consider a "girly" take.  (Though it may just be that I'm remembering the use of soft focus, which would be read as feminizing to the characters on screen but not necessarily a female point of view.)

Regardless, my preference is for attempts at gender neutrality in the construction of games.  Some male characters are going to be chauvinists and some female characters are going to be seductresses; those are (still) the stories we tell.  But when the use of camera and framing in a game make those characters more "okay" than others, we run into a system that keeps making games about men and for men, even when the player character and the player are both women.  And that's just not going to do.

**I'll mention here that we're still in chapter 8 or 9 of this game, and have not yet finished it.  It is possible that in the last act Trip and the design studio will redeem themselves, but I am decidedly not optimistic.

The Gamer's Gaze, part 2

We're going to take a brief step back from diving deeper into the idea of the male gaze and spend a moment talking about straight up looking: how do we see what we see in games?  We began by working through what the gaze means when we're discussing the cinematic camera.

But in gaming, the camera goes beyond cinematic.  Games contain a level of spectator participation and interactivity above and beyond that of film.  In addition to the director's choice of camera placement, the player has choice in camera placement.  Whether through direct control or through controlling our avatars, in most modern gaming we participate in the camera's positioning.  However, even when we define the literal point of view taken on the scene, the actual angle, we don't necessarily control the gaze.  It's a delicate balance, but the player does contribute to the gaze in games through active choice, in a way not present in most other media.  The game's authors, by creating the content and the camera, and the game's players, by choosing character perspective both literal and figurative, work in tandem to create the final gaze that the spectator takes.

Our ability to take on a changing and well-defined (or ambiguous) gaze has changed over time, as the technology of game design has improved.  The literal points of view available to us have shifted through the years.  Most players, for example, can admire the landscape and imagery present in an isometric game, but few of us will actively control the camera in such a layout for any reason other than better to understand tactics or strategy.  The gaze is akin to the way a player would look at a chessboard, rather than the way an audience member would look at a play or film.

Diablo II was the grand-daddy of a generation of clone RPGs.

In film, the camera represents and guides our view.  It leads; we follow.  Indeed, we have no other choice.  The director has pre-determined our viewpoint and the boundaries of frame and of on-screen space for us.  Film works because of limitations on the spectator gaze.  In order to create illusory spaces with real people and objects, a director needs to play with the camera and with space in all kinds of ways.

Forced perspective can make hobbits of us all.

Older generations of games were subject to nearly identical limitations.  For example, Myst -- now so very dated, but at the time so groundbreaking -- billed itself as "photorealistic" and meant just that: you moved through a world that was, essentially, a long series of complex and interactive photos.  The landscape was lovely but in terms of how we saw it, Myst was as much a flat pixel-hunt as Maniac Mansion or any shareware adventure game before it.

But in the 1990s, we gained a rather dramatic change with the arrival of explorable 3D game space.  Although it would take some time before our game worlds could be "true" 3D (and even in 2011, we're still fairly limited on that front), the difference was stark.  Given the chance to wander through a three dimensional space, the player suddenly gained some measure of autonomous control -- and notoriously, that measure was aim.  

The Doom games were beyond influential on the perennially bestselling FPS genre.

The most basic mechanic of the first-person shooter hasn't changed all that much in twenty years.  The game's camera and the player's point of view are meant to be one, intertwined.  Through fine mouse control (or later, and now more popularly, the analog stick), the player is expected fully to immerse himself (notably, not herself) in the role of the avatar.  The player explores the world, takes aim, and fires while fully inhabiting the persona of the character.  As a result, the player character may or may not be a well-defined individual.  Indeed, the player character can be nothing but an empty vessel, reduced to nothing but the gun -- but the world through which the avatar, and therefore the camera, moves is of utmost importance.

And those worlds have gotten pretty impressive, as Modern Warfare 2 shows us.

What's most interesting about the spectator's gaze in the FPS, though, is that game designers didn't invent it.  Alfred Hitchcock did, over 60 years ago.

Spellbound, 1945.

It's with Hitchcock (and the eternally fantastic Ingrid Bergman) that we vividly see that the first-person perspective is no accident and is not merely utilitarian.  The transgressive or voyeuristic potential of the gaze suddenly becomes apparent when we, the passive spectator of a film, are unavoidably thrust into the position of aiming a revolver at the film's star.  (The full clip is here, but it's from the end of the film so I'd recommend watching the whole movie instead.)  Whether or not we want to, we are following the aggressor's gaze -- and so we, in a sense, become the aggressor.

In a game that uses the first person perspective, we the player are put into a certain point of view on the narrative world; we are asked to inhabit the space in which the game takes place.  We take on the character's perspective in looking, in all the things that means.  The camera is in someone's head, and we literally see through those "eyes."  But unlike in Spellbound, or any other film, we choose where to look.  There's a level of player control available.

In a game like Bioshock, that control is the absolute key to the telling of the story.  The core narrative is framed around choice, while the story visibly runs on rails.  Progression through Rapture is intentionally linear, and yet the dialogue in the game speaks to freedom.  And of course at the key moment in the narrative, player control is completely removed, up to and including the ability to look around during cut scenes.  In fact, Bioshock is using Hitchcock's trick: the player is no more able to stop targeting Andrew Ryan than the viewer is able to stop targeting Ingrid Bergman.

The third person perspective, on the other hand, is both simpler and more complex.  We the player do not literally inhabit a character's point of view.  Rather than the role of protagonist, we are cast in the role of director, and we move our actors through their stage. We can see the player character, and how she or he is framed in the world.  In a sense, it's the difference between puppet and puppeteer, although that analogy makes the distinction sound sinister, which it's not.  Rather, it's a matter of artistic choice and mechanical necessity.

In a third-person game, the player does have the anchor of being tied to a player character, but also has the freedom to move the camera independent of the PC's perspective.  The trade-off for a broader perspective, though, is more limited range.  The game's designers control what positions are available to the player, and while in some settings the player can put the camera anywhere that doesn't require pathing through a collision plane, in other cases the view is as tightly scripted as Hollywood.  EverQuest II is a good example of the former, in that the player can put the camera anywhere around the character except underground, can zoom in or out as much as she likes, or can choose a first person perspective.

The latter option, however, seems to be the current trend in most console game design.  If the player is guiding Kratos, Ezio, or Drake through a story, then the camera will be a fixed tool that provides directional guidance and a set perspective.  Camera motion shows the lay of the land, potential climbing or escape routes, and likely avenues for weapon retrieval or enemy breakthrough.

In terms of gaze, this fixed third-person camera operates effectively as a cinematic camera.  Because the player does not contribute to its placement, the player is effectively freed from the implications of its gaze.  We may be watching all manner of unfortunate scenes, but our role is considered passive, at least in the sense that it is unintentional.  The damsel may be in distress or in disarray, but if we happen to watch her a certain way, it's because the game put it there for us.

Although I'll actually give credit; the Assassin's Creed games don't present this view all that often.

So when we take a deep examination into the presence of the male gaze in gaming, this is what we mean: when does the player have a choice over where to look?  How does the player look?  What is the physical presentation of women (and of men) when the player has control of the camera?  What is the physical presentation of women (and of men) when the player doesn't have control of the camera?  How is character agency reframed when the player controls the perspective?

The very literal gaze of the camera is what we've just digressed to here: what angle does it view from?  How far afield can we see, or how close up?  But our real concern is this: what viewpoint and bias do those cameras reveal through their placement and methods?  How is player perspective from inside, say, Duke Nukem's (ick) head different from perspective six feet behind Lara Croft, and what do those literal perspectives tell us about the value and archetypes assigned to the worlds they inhabit?

In short: how does literal on-screen framing tell us more about the figurative framework of the society that made the game?

We'll loop back around to that question, and unite parts 1 and 2 of this little series, in the third and final (I promise) installment.

[Edit: Part 3 is here.]

The Gamer's Gaze, part 1

The gaze is a term you hear thrown around quite a bit in critical media studies.  It is, at once, both simple and complex.

"Gaze."  It's as easy as looking, right?  And at its most basic level, that's exactly what the phenomenon describes: who is looking, what is being looked at, and why? All visual arts have, in one way or another, a built-in gaze that can be examined and analyzed.

In the 1970s, film theorist Laura Mulvey brought the term "male gaze" permanently into the lexicon of film criticism.  Her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" [PDF] relies heavily on Freudian theories (even while in a film studies graduate program, Your Critic found this essay a particularly thorny read) but also basically defined feminist film theory.  It's a difficult piece from which to pull a key quote or single definition, but I'll run with this one:

"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active / male and passive / female.  The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.  In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness."

In its most basic, shortest form, the idea is this: on screen, the primary purpose of a woman is as a sexualized (deliberately or not) object, and the viewer for which film is designed is a straight male.

The essay that defines this idea is now closing in on 40 years old, and came out of a different era.  I don't think that, here in 2011, I'd ever be inclined to apply straight-up Freudian theory to media analysis.  (If I ever do display the urge to do so, please take away my computer.)  But the idea of the gaze does indeed hold up, as does the idea of the default viewer.

Here's the thing: it works at a mostly subconscious level.  With very few exceptions, a film director or a game designer doesn't set out actively thinking, "I am going to make this to appeal directly to straight white men and everyone else can get bent."  Rather, the likelihood is high that the creator himself is a straight white male, and so comes to production with unconscious biases in place, that then are reflected through things like the framing of shots or the motion of the camera.  And even if the creator in question is not all three (straight, white, male), the media landscape has been dominated by those elements for such a long time that this perspective is the default, and its point of view may not be challenged.

Thus: the male gaze.

So as we talk about the gaze and the male gaze in gaming, what do we really mean?  What are we talking about?

Wikipedia has a nice little run-down of the areas of gaze -- the "who" in "who's looking."  The three that are most important to us are:

• Characters' gaze at other characters
• The camera's gaze
• The spectator's gaze

The spectator, in our case, is the person playing the game.  Whoever is holding the controller, or gesticulating at the Kinect, or sitting at the keyboard: that person is the spectator.  The spectator's gaze is unbelievably crucial to both first-person and third-person narrative games.  So important, in fact, that it will be standing alone as a Part 2 to this discussion.

The camera's gaze is the easiest to talk about, and the way characters gaze at other characters is tied into it.  We the viewers see how characters see each other by how the camera behaves.  This is every bit as true in gaming as it is in cinema, although in modern 3D narrative gaming, character placement and framing also play a large role.  (Non-interactive cut-scenes essentially are film, and can be analyzed in the same ways.)

As a general, broad rule of thumb, the way the camera moves around or is positioned on a character tells us something about how we are meant to view that character, both literally and figuratively.  Media saturation is now so high in our culture that we're very nearly all born speaking this language of visual cues and ideas.

We know what heroes pose like, and how they're framed.  You can actually tell a lot about each character from how he's standing.  Ezio's design conveys his positioning in the grey areas of life (he's a good guy by being an Assassin), Supes is, well, Supes, and Snake over there looks straight at you.  But note how they all stand: strong, confident.

You work those shoulders, gentlemen!

We know what villains pose like, and how they're framed.  They are men of action, in motion, presenting their challenge.  And their weapons.  And their black costumes and / or hidden eyes.

No comment on Sephiroth's sword vs. how happy he is to see you.  Such as.  *ahem*

For us, the issues arise with women, and how they're framed.  And so it comes to pass that a super-spy, a world-renowned adventurer, and the galaxy's best thief mainly display their... assets.  When they have weapons, they're held pointed toward the floor.  They don't stand straight; rather, they pose their hips.

And then of course there's wardrobe design. Lookin' at you, Eva.

Of course, gaze is constantly in motion (think of the classic head-to-toe scoping out of the hottie across the room), not static.  These are all just promotional images, right?  So let's go to the video.

There's always Miranda offering her loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2 (00:01 - 01:08):

Or of course there's our introduction to Madison in Heavy Rain (probably NSFW):

With Madison, the issues of what we see and how we see it are both in play.  The camera is... not shy.  (The censored bits between 03:00 and 05:00 are to make it YouTube-safe; nothing's covered up in the game.)  For extra credit, watch Ethan Mars's morning shower from the same game.  The camera is much less fond of his curvature than it is of hers.

In gaming, the camera's gaze and the characters' get tangled together, because we aren't just viewers, but players.  We take on the role of someone in the story, and the camera serves as our eyes.  Male characters tend to be the point-of-view characters, even in a third-person game.  We watch what interests them.  Miranda's deliberately putting herself on display for Shepard.  This makes the moment of male gaze particularly jump out if you're playing a female Shepard, as then the on-screen dynamics feel misplaced, rather than feeling like a default.

So when characters gaze at other characters, the camera follows their lead. Hundreds of games do it.  The running comment I had while playing through the Metal Gear Solid series (spouse held the controller 90% of the time; I provided the running MST3K-style commentary 100% of the time) was that clearly, working buttons and zippers for women were too expensive for these high-tech organizations.

Seriously, Naomi? You're going to leave your boobs hanging out with a kid like that flinging hot food around?

The other issue of gaze in gaming, however, is made more complex by the interactivity and choice factors in the medium.  Heavy Rain is a deliberately cinematic game and so the camera, framing, and direction behave in a deliberately cinematic way.  Madison may not have an awareness of the viewer but she will behave for his eyes all the same.  But what about another genre of game?  How does the gaze behave in an action platformer, an adventure game, a first-person shooter, or an RPG?  How does the male gaze function when the lead character is a woman, or when the player has full control of the camera?

In the interest of not presenting a 10-page paper for your Monday morning, the player's gaze is Part 2, coming in the next post.

[Edit: Part 2 is here.]

Beyond the Girl Gamer 2.1: The System of the Worlds

Beyond the Girl Gamer: Introduction | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4
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So far, we've talked a lot about characters: our protagonists, antagonists, and supporting casts.  Character design drives our gaming, to a huge extent, but it's just one part of the overall element of game writing, which is what we're going to examine in chapter 2 of this series.  And we're going to delve into some actual critical theory in order to do that.

Our transition, though, begins still with character to some degree, and the concept of the "coin flip" character in gaming.  The concept is this: you need to determine something binary (a male or female character), so you flip the coin to see if it comes up heads or tails and run with it.

I think of Chell, in Portal and Portal 2, as a coin flip character.  The game is completely, 100% unaffected by the PC gender.  In this case, the coin came up female.  In Half-Life (2) there doesn't need to be a particular reason that Gordon Freeman is male.  Valve probably didn't flip the coin, but when you do -- sometimes it still comes up heads.  There doesn't need to be a particular reason that Shepard of Mass Effect (2) is male; in the future, space marines come in all types.  And so BioWare has given us this most basic choice: to flip that coin ourselves.

This doesn't usually happen.  Not only does the coin not land on non-male, it also doesn't land on non-white or non-straight.  The straight white male is still an absolute default, and in the context of most games (and movies, and books, and...) any deviation has a distinct narrative presence.  There's a reason that THIS character has to be black, or female, but there's never a reason that a player character has to be a straight white dude.  He just is.  It's the unquestioned default.  (This is why the default Shepard is so boring to me.  He's generic, and there are thousands like him.)

Contrary to what some alarmists believe of all feminist thinkers, I agree that there's no good reason to make a specific man's story about a woman.  Sometimes you're telling the story of a man's life and that is totally cool.  If you are writing a historically accurate game about a knight in 12th century France well then by god, I expect him to dude up the joint in the manliest possible way, and I expect most of the powerful figures in his story also to be men, especially among the warrior and clergy classes. 

But when are our games ever historically accurate*?

Games take place in worlds of our own creation.  Law and Order can purport to represent New York City as it is.  We cannot claim to be representing Ferelden as it is, because there never was such a place outside of a writer's imagination.

But in fact, even when claiming to represent a place, like modern Manhattan, as it actually exists, all fictional media fail to some degree or other.  The story being told is always one that was written by a human, and one that is being filmed and edited by a human.   In any TV show, movie, or game the world, as we see it, is entirely constructed.  Someone came up with it, and made it, and everything in it is intentional.  Even the "reality" that bumps in (as in traffic on the street in Law and Order) is a deliberate choice -- someone chose not to use a soundstage, not to close that street, and not to use a different, traffic-free, take.

This basic idea -- that we are not ever watching reality, but are looking at a construct -- is at the core of all film studies and so it is in one of my old introductory film textbooks that I looked for the best description:

 "What film reviews almost always evade is one of the few realities of film itself, that it is an artificial construct, something made in a particular way for specific purposes, and that plot or story of a film is a function of this construction, not its first principle." 

Robert Kolker, Film, Form, and Culture, 2nd ed (2002). (p. xvii)

Rephrased, the most important concept to understand in early Film Studies is this: the characters are never the creators of the story's events.  Han and Leia don't flirt with each other due to mutual attraction; they flirt with each other because a script-writer called for it and a director put it on camera.  The story that you see unfolding is an element of the film you are watching.  The same is true of gaming.

Further, the sum total of everything put into the image you're looking at, in film, is called mise en scène (because the French had the first crack at written film theory).  It's basically the idea that lighting, set design, and every other visual in a scene help tell your story.  The textbook example (literally, it's in every introductory film theory and film history book out there) is the 1920 German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  One look at a famous shot and it becomes obvious why:

91 years and thousands of films later, it's still creepy.

For us, and for our purposes going forward, the really important, unbelievably crucial point is this: Game worlds are 100% digital and therefore, 100% constructed.  Nothing is simply "found" and nothing is incidental or accidental.  Every pixel is deliberate and intentional -- even though those pixels can also be utterly thoughtless.  "Created" is not the same as "carefully created."

Let's take ourselves back to mise-en-scène for a moment.  Can anyone argue that this environment, shown below, is not absolutely as carefully crafted, and as essential to the story, as in any film?  It has, in fact, been argued that the real main character of Bioshock is the underwater city of Rapture, and there's something to be said for that.

It's like a murderous and awkward Renaissance painting in here.

But the fun part is, it's not just the modern, cinematic games that use this concept so crucially.  I think the first game where I became really aware of the environment beyond my character as essential was Super Mario Brothers 3.

Yes, this game.

In SMB3, the sun itself pulls right out of the background art and becomes an enemy.  All of the brick types work differently (two are shown here).  Enemies, fatal to the player character, come popping out of the environment regularly (the plant in the image above being just one example).  And in levels comprised of large, scenic blocks (World 1, Level 1 for starters), the player can actually drop behind the white ones.  Literally, the player can take herself behind the scenes of the video game's environment -- but only at certain times.

So when we're looking at a game, and analyzing it in any way, the crucial thing is for us to remember that everything is created.  We need to remember to step outside of the narrative and to repeatedly ask how and why the designers of the game chose to frame it or to make it progress in the way they did.  If we're asking, "Why does Naomi Hunter wear her shirt unbuttoned so far down in the lab?" it's the wrong question.  We should be asking, "Why is this world designed in such a way that our scientist is an attractive female who keeps her shirt unbuttoned so low while working?"  If Nathan Drake bumps his head going into a tunnel, the question is not, "Why is he so clumsy?" but instead, "Why did the game's creators decide this tunnel was two inches shorter than their protagonist?" or, "What are we meant to learn about this character through seeing this collision?"

Sometimes, when we're asking these questions from outside of the narrative, the answers will be mundane.  "Budget restrictions" or "tight deadline" are probably the most common answers, across all games and studios.  If we're asking why the Courier in Fallout: New Vegas is silent, that's probably the answer we'll get (not enough time and money in the world to make recording every possible line a worthwhile design choice).

But sometimes, we'll find, on asking, that no-one thought carefully about a design choice one way or the other, and instead just made an assumption based on his or her own cultural defaults.  Those are the most interesting answers.  From these moments, we learn more about the culture producing the game -- we learn more about ourselves, and about what will need to change in the future if we want different games.  From the same text I cited earlier:

"The idea of culture as text means, first, that culture is not nature; it is made by people in history for conscious or even unconscious reasons, the product of all they think and do.  Even the unconscious or semiconscious acts of our daily lives can, when observed and analyzed, be understood as sets of coherent acts and be seen to interact with each other.  These acts, beliefs, and practices, along with the artifacts they produce ... have meaning.  They can be read and understood.

Robert Kolker, Film, Form, and Culture, 2nd ed (2002). (p. 116)

Here in the real world where we live, everyone is allowed to be incidental.  People come and go, because they're people.  The main character of my life is a straight white woman (and I am she).  When I am at work, if I am taking the elevator from the ground floor to the 10th, and the doors open on 6, the odds are about 50/50 whether a man or a woman will board.  Similarly, in my workplace in particular, the odds are about 50/50 that the person boarding would be white or a racial minority, and about 1 in 6 that the person boarding would identify as non-straight.  I would expect and understand any of these, because I move in a world full of people.  If I am taking the Metro home, and the doors open at Union Station, I would expect an even bigger range of diversity in boarding passengers.

If Solid Snake were in an elevator going up ten stories, and the doors opened on 6, there would have to be a story-driven reason for a woman to board.  (In fact, there would need to be a narrative reason for the doors to open at all.)  Snake moves in a world of ideas, concepts, and tropes, not in a world full of people.  We say "truth is stranger than fiction," because we expect fiction to make sense.  But what kind of sense?  Does fiction deserve as much random diversity as reality has?

And so, in the next chapter: what spaces do our characters live in and why do our characters live in these spaces, when they could be anywhere?

*Your Critic will not have a chance to play L.A. Noire until later this summer, so if this one is the exception that proves the rhetorical question, well, try not to leave spoilers.