Beyond the Girl Gamer 3.1: Box it Up

Beyond the Girl Gamer: Introduction | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 2.1 | 2.2
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[This post is very image-heavy and so much of it is behind a jump.]

The discussion so far, over the last six months or so, has focused on what we see inside games: how the characters, both player and non-player, are designed; how the characters comport themselves; how the scenery of the narrative world is arranged for the male gaze; that the scenery of the world is, in fact, arranged; and how so many of the game worlds we visit use the same tropes to tell the same stories with the same kind of gender problems built into them.

The umbrella of "games, gaming, and gamer culture," though, goes well beyond the in-game, narrative, digital worlds.  Arguably, the biggest and most persistent problems we face aren't in the text, but rather, are wrapped around it.  And so we reach the third bucket of this series: marketing.

We've looked at the existence of the Chainmail Bikini trope before (1.2), but the problems of female characters in game marketing are bigger than, well, boobs.  Broken down, we're presented with two major areas of concern: the invisibility of non-sexualized female characters in marketing art, and the over-visibility of minor female characters just for the sex appeal.

A huge number of games do this.  After thinking of some on my own, I put the question to Twitter and received another few dozen suggestions in the first hour.  Sadly, there's no shortage of examples.

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 1.4: Best Supporting Actress

Beyond the Girl Gamer: Introduction | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3

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In this series, so far the character discussion has focused on protagonists and player characters -- our heroes, as it were. But the worlds in which we game are teeming with sidekicks, companions, antagonists, villains, and other NPCs.

And when I say teeming, I mean it.  First I sat down to list off "just a few," but even limiting myself only to games I personally have played in the last two years, I immediately came up with: GLaDOS, The Boss, Naomi Hunter, Liara T'Soni, Jack, Miranda Lawson, Dr. Chakwas, Rose of Sharon Cassidy, Veronica Santangelo, Christine Royce, Chloe Frazer, Elena Fisher, Lucy Stillman, and Madison Paige.  That batch was just my immediate first thought -- clearly, there are hundreds or thousands more we could discuss.

Cass, Dr. Chakwas, Chloe, Elena, GLaDOS, Jack, Liara, Lucy, Madison, Miranda, Naomi, and Veronica.

There's more than a bit of variety in types there, to be sure.  Some of those characters are presented in a deliberately sexualized way; many, interestingly, are not.  Some of these characters defy stereotypes; some reinforce them.  (And despite the variety in their names, there's not much racial diversity in this collage, nor in the characters I named but didn't grab images of.)  But what they have in common is that most of them do actually get to be characters.  We don't know as much about them as we hope to know about our player characters, but many of them are at least given histories as plausible and deep as those of the main characters.

What I want to see in a female member of the supporting cast is a woman who helps to serve the story by what she does, rather than by what is done to her.  And let's face it: fiction (not just gaming, but also literature, television, and film) is chock-full of women whose purpose as a plot device is to be victimized.  This is where we get the Women in Refrigerators trope.

As with many of the issues of representation in media, the issue is more an aggregate one than an individual one.  One story of a man avenging his raped and murdered wife would be one thing, but hundreds of stories about a man avenging a raped and murdered woman add up to another thing entirely.  The same applies across all problematic, over-used tropes: the incompetent father, the black criminal, the Spanish-speaking housemaid...  By itself, any of these stories could stand as a story of one incompetent man, or one victimized woman -- but together, they add up to an ugly and problematic cultural picture.

One of the best things about Portal (the first) is that GLaDOS serves the plot entirely, 100% by what she does.  Nothing has been done to her and she is not in any way a victim: she is the guide and antagonist, full stop.  On the other hand, by Portal 2 this has changed.  Her motivation is now based on something that was done to her in the first game: she's pretty damn pissed off about you having dismantled her in the boss fight.  But her "murder" at the end of Portal isn't exactly what I would call "victimization" and even through being transformed into a potato she maintains her vindictive core.  Whichever way you look at it, circumstances force her into a passive role, rather than an active one, and that is indeed where so many female characters find themselves.

For the most frustrating example of passivity (in the "what is done to her" sense) in modern gaming, I nominate Madison Paige of Heavy Rain.

Oh, Madison.

You first meet her while she is asleep in her apartment, in her underwear.  She putters around with insomnia for a while (where the player can look at her digs and even have her take a shower).  Then she's suddenly attacked by a team of shadowy men assaulting her, a (surprise, dream!) sequence that always ends in her capture and death.

This is your first impression of Madison Paige.  Not with her family (like Ethan Mars) or at work (like Norman Jayden or Scott Shelby), but inexplicably the victim of a violent physical attack.

Further scenes with Madison have her escaping a horrific serial killer with some pretty damn creepy rapist overtones, removing half her clothes to get access to a slumlord, removing the other half of her clothes at the slumlord's violent insistence, playing nursemaid to the male lead at least twice, spontaneous sex with the male lead, and being trapped in a burning apartment (although there "woman in refrigerator" is actually the non-death answer).

And that's if you do the "good" Madison who survives the whole game as a character in play with all the "right" choices: boobs, nursing, boobs, nursing, ass, sex, boobs, and repeated victim or near-victim of graphic, horrible, sexualized violence and attempted rape.  Even my extremely mild-mannered, no-strong-words, no-drinking, no-swearing, even-tempered father-in-law remarked aloud that the best (and only memorable) thing about her was her rear end, and that the only understanding he got from her scenes was that she was fun to watch.  And I think that's about all Quantic Dream intended.

I recently wrote about the role and presentation of some female companion characters in Mass Effect 2.  I had wanted to write that first so I wouldn't repeat myself here -- so if you're curious what I think about Miranda's rear or Jack's outfit, look there.  In terms of writing, though, I do give BioWare full credit: all members of your party seem to be roughly equally developed.  They each have a loyalty mission (most of which seem to involve some serious daddy issues) and they each have roughly the same amount to say when you're just kicking around the Normandy.  Although some of their physical assets may be overdeveloped (and isn't that always the way), their stories at least aren't underdeveloped, at least as compared to the male characters.

Not all female sidekicks get that level of development.  Elena Fisher of the Uncharted games is a journalist who's fairly kick-ass (and certainly competent) in her own right.  But she and other similar characters (Lucy in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood leaps to mind) blend together by being underdeveloped.  I really would have loved a few more lines in Uncharted or especially Uncharted 2 just letting us know why Elena was around, and what she ever would have seen in Drake.  Her character was so close to being awesome that I really wish they'd taken a few extra steps and brought her farther to the front. (On the other hand, Uncharted 3 seems to be setting itself up with a prominent female villain, so I do look forward to writing more about this franchise at the end of the year.)

There's always so much going on in the supporting cast of a video game that sometimes it's hard to unpack all the steps that are involved.  Are there even any women?  If so, must their gender serve a specific narrative purpose or is it the "coin toss?"  If there are women, are they granted the same character status as men?  And how do they dress, walk, speak, and present themselves?  I've only mentioned the tiniest handful of games here, because I'm just one gamer and this is just one post.  There are thousands more we could discuss, some of which I would agree "do it right," and others... not so much.  (And I'm sure they'll come up in the comments.)

Next chapter: we transition to section 2, writing, by tackling the "coin toss," the default avatar, authorial presence, action, and intent, and examining the worlds in which our characters move.

Heavy Rage

It's all over the net now, but a day or two ago Joystiq brought us this:

David Cage, director of the soggy serial killer interactive drama Heavy Rain, has already said there won't be a sequel to that game, telling the PlayStation Blog, "We're going to be exploring a different direction, which will still be very dark and still for adults, but completely different to Heavy Rain" for Quantic Dreams' next project. That game's specifics may be a secret, but it may have a title: "Fiv5" ... yes, in the style of David Fincher's film Se7en.

I would indeed like to see them branch out of the Serial Killer genre, but I have a feeling that's not going to happen.  Here's what I think will happen:

• It will be billed as the next iteration of cinematic gaming / interactive film
• And it will look great
• And it will look exciting
• And everyone will get it, and play it
• And it will feature: more dumb choices by characters
• More plot holes
• More exploitation and victimization of reason for no reason whatsoever
• More horrible violence
• More serial killing
• And I will want to punch David Cage in the face.

 I mean, I'm sure we'll end up playing and owning it anyway.  But that's what I think will happen.

Can violence in gaming be educational?

This weekend's tragic event in Tucson has triggered a number of national conversations for the past few days: one around mental illness, one around violent rhetoric in the modern political scene... and one, that's always going on somewhere in the background, about American gun culture, including the presence of gun violence in our media.

Over here, a number of us discussed all these factors at length.  In that discussion and in another thread, the commenter sara_l_r raised the following:

My boyfriend's theory in more depth, and I think there's a lot to this, is that lots of people learn about guns from movies and TV rather than from gun instructors or people who actually know what they're doing.  ... TV and movies have absolutely horrendous gun safety and don't accurately depict what happens to your body when you get shot. ... He thinks that if films and television did a better job of showing how guns work and what happens when you actually get shot, people would be aware of what they can actually do and would therefore be much more careful, both of their own bodies and of others.

 I was intrigued by this line of thought, particularly as a counterpoint to the more common (and, I believe, false), "violent movies and video games cause kids to become violent people" trope.

And on thinking about the "reality" of guns in media, I immediately went to Heavy Rain.

Heavy Rain features four player characters.  Among their stories, the player sort of tag-teams the narrative, coming at the fundamental story -- a serial killer has kidnapped a young boy and there are only a few days left to rescue him -- from a number of angles.  Occasionally their stories intersect (players A and B or B and C will appear in the same chapter).

One of the four player characters is FBI profiler Norman Jayden:

Jayden's role is a fairly archetypal one.  He investigates the crime scenes and works with a database of evidence to put together a profile and likely locations of the killer.  His partner is Asshole Cop Variation A, Lieutenant Carter Blake.

Jayden and Blake seek out and eliminate multiple possible suspects on the road to solving the case.  One of the first they visit is Nathaniel Williams.  As you can see (click to embiggen -- the split shot is original to the game), Nathaniel is... not quite right.

The situation develops into a tense and intense triangular standoff with Blake, Nathaniel, and Jayden.  Jayden pulls out his gun; Nathaniel may or may not himself have one.  Neither Jayden nor the player knows for sure.

All of the commands here are optional -- R1 is the gun's trigger, and X, O, triangle, and square provide options by which Jayden can attempt to defuse the situation:

But here's where the game, I feel, is unusual, and where the educational component comes in: to shoot is completely optional.  The game does not require or demand it at any time, just as the game frequently gives you the choice to act or not to act (and makes this explicit in the tutorial Prologue).  R1 is an option, not a command.  Most players tend to have a finger hovering over or near R1 when holding a Playstation controller, and in particular during this scene.

The really important part?  Without fail, every player I have seen with his or her finger near R1 flinches and shoots Nathaniel when he makes a sudden movement.  And almost every single time, the player immediately shoots, "Wait!  Damn it!  I didn't mean to do that!"

For all that we spend a load of time in gaming with the virtual gun in our hands, for all that we learn to speak caliber and reload speed, for all that we collectively play first person shooters and third-person bloodbaths: one game puts us in the position that real law enforcement officers face all the damn time, creates a situation where we can shoot almost against our will, without meaning to, and then immediately makes us sorry for it.  

Heavy Rain manages to create an emotional moment where the lives of the player character and his partner both depend on a split-second, hair-trigger, almost gut-level decision being made -- and it's a moment that reflects a reality that gets people killed with alarming regularity.

I don't know if this kind of game could ever reach the audience that would most need to think about what it shows.  But if a scene like that lingers, and makes any of us think about the reality behind the story... can that ever be a bad thing?

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Bearing in mind that the writers of video walkthroughs can make a number of different choices along the way, if you'd like to watch the scene here's one where you shoot Nathaniel and one where you don't.

Bioshock

I finally finished Bioshock.  Only, what, three years late?  I've got some thoughts about it, but if you, like me, are a slowpoke, do yourself a favor and do not look below the jump.  There are spoilers galore and I find the game is very much enhanced on the first play by not knowing the twist(s).  I managed to stay unspoiled for those three years (I don't know how), and I recommend you do the same.

So seriously, if you haven't finished it, walk away now.

Otherwise...