Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Who Is Sarah Lyons?

Who is Sarah Lyons?

It’s an important question to ask when you’re playing Fallout 3. She’s a major character, easily the equal of Three Dog, Allistair Tenpenny, or James. She’s distinguished from these characters, however, along with Dr. Madison Lee, by her womanhood. She is, in every way, a strong, capable, complex human being. She has her own views on the people of the Wasteland, the way they should be handled and the role the Brotherhood should be taking in the world at large.

In all of this her womanhood is incidental to her character. It influences her actions and the way we interpret them, it lends extra gravitas to her frequent trips into downtown DC and it adds an additional layer of depth to the social workings of the Brotherhood, in that no one ever discusses the fact that their most elite commando unit is headed by a woman, and the daughter of their leader to boot. But her sex never takes center stage. And in this Sarah Lyons is everything a video game character should be.

Let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture of women in games here. Recently Leigh Alexander and Daniel Floyd did a great piece that focused on the topic of the female gaming audience and touched tangentially on the portrayal of women in games, and they made some great points. Even strong, capable female game characters are all too often stripped of their power and placed in pandering positions or depicted in an over the top, overly sexualized fashion for the purpose of marketing or fan service. Lara Croft, who as Floyd points out was devised as a female Indiana Jones, was reduced to little more than crypt-candy through a combination of marketing slips and retarded designer decisions (A nude code? Seriously? Oh, and you’re having her play through the final mission in her nightie. Brilliant.). Blood Rayne, who could’ve been a perfect anti-authority figure if she’d been properly utilized, was instead used for an abysmal Playboy spread and progressively more lewd portrayals from game to game. Hell, even Tifa is guilty of this sort treatment: again, a strong, capable woman whose breasts remain one of her most memorable qualities – not her heartbreaking willingness to remain with the man she loves despite coming in “second place” or her endurance of humiliations in order to become a force of positive change for her world.

This has become a sort of industry standard, and it really needs to stop. While portraying, discussing and developing attractive characters sexually is fine, even healthy, it needs to be given the proper context and needs to be an aspect of the character instead of the clumsy realization of a fantasy. Katie Sackhoff’s portrayal of Starbuck in the Battlestar Gallactica reboot is a perfect example of the balance games seem to strive for: she’s a strong, sexy woman who has a sex drive and very occasionally wears a dress, but never puts herself in a submissive position or breaks from being who she is (an overt, aggressive badass) for the sake of pandering.

All too often, though, attractive women in games are denied this sort of treatment. They’re shown to be just strong enough to warrant our respect and then they’re reduced to objects of desire. Elika from the Prince of Persia reboot is guilty of this offense. Elika is critical in realizing all of the Prince’s actions, saves his life time and time again and breaks down the defenses of the Corrupted when he cannot, but when she is removed from his side she collapses, shifting from badass to McGuffin in seconds. All of her powers, necessary for saving the world, cannot be used for her own benefit and can only be focused through a male authority figure: the Prince.

This is a pattern we’re all too familiar with: the badass chick who suddenly needs a knight in shining armor, usually a weaker male character who is inexplicably stronger than her on this occasion. And it’s one we need to break free from. That’s where characters like Sarah Lyons come in to play.

Sarah isn’t the focus of the game. While she is a major character she isn’t THE character. She’s never the object of desire, or eventhat of a search or quest in a game obsessed with such missives (Fallout 3’s obsession with searching for absentee authority figures is a whole different essay, however). Your interactions with her are limited to a handful of bouts of cooperation and the occasional service under her command. She’s accessible, capable and totally in charge. She’s a strong, interesting character who happens to be a woman, not the other way around.

She never needs saving, never doubts herself or needs to be held. She’s stable, smart and calm regardless of circumstances. She’ll even walk to her death if you’re too big of a pussy to man up and activate Project Purity yourself. She’s a badass through and through, easily the equal of Halo’s Sergeant Johnson (Scratch that – she’s tougher than Johnson. She doesn’t wig out when people around her start dying – an odd reaction for any military veteran) or Barney from Half-Life 2. She keeps her people together and keeps on fighting, no matter the odds.

And she happens to be an attractive young woman. She doesn’t feel like a construct. Instead she feels like a character. As a result I had a healthy respect for her before the game’s end. I didn’t feel like I was being pandered to (that armor is never coming off, after all), I didn’t feel like I was being sold an implausible character inserted solely to give boys a reason to swoon. As such the feelings I developed for the character were mine, and mine alone. Maybe the developers wanted player to develop this sort of camaraderie and attraction to Lyons, maybe not. But by creating a smart, independent woman they effortlessly managed to develop one of my video game crushes without making me feel like I was supposed to like her or even think of her as sexy. She was just a really cool character who happened to be a girl.

This is something games need to start doing more often. They’ve already begun to do it with characters like Alyx Vance and Jade of Beyond Good and Evil fame, but for every Jade it seems that we find two of X-Blades Ayumi, a caricature of a “strong woman” clad in dental floss. So I’m going to outline a few concepts which Sarah, Alyx, Jade and their sisters in maturely portraying women embody and try to lay down some things that I, in my infinite lack of qualification, believe need to be done with female characters if games ever want to move out of their boy’s club roots and start being seen by people in general as a place where both genders receive fair treatment:

1 – Dress your characters like fucking human beings.

This one applies to both sides of the gender divide, really. Cheesecake Conans are just as bad, for all intents and purposes, as Lara Crofts and Ivys. It’s alright to let loose sometimes, but when the industry standard becomes exposed, rippling chests and suits of chain mail with cleavage slits and bare midriffs we’ve got a problem. Note that two of the three characters I’ve presented as examples just wear every-day street clothes, and the third wears a suit of armor. All of them are contextually appropriate, and two of them let the ladies show off what they’ve got without presenting an overly sexualized character or an implausible code of dress for a reporter/thief/leader of a global resistance movement. This speaks to a larger problem in games writing of generating consistent worlds with functioning internal logic, but these errors seem especially egregious given the context and the history of exploitative portrayals of women in games. That brings us to number two:

2 – Portray your characters consistently throughout your games.

It’s one thing if our guileless female McGuffin is just that throughout. We can apply the same standard to men and it’s just dandy. Princess Peach, after all, isn’t an overtly sexualized or offensive portrayal of a female video game character, though she’s plainly an object of desire throughout the entire game. She’s never built up then undermined or dangled in front of you like a carrot. She’s just the reason you’re hunting down Bowser in the first place. But when you strip your strong, independent characters of power and make them into objectives you’re entering troubled waters. Again, you can apply this to both ends of the gender spectrum, but it seems to present itself far more often with regards to women. Gamers are all too accustomed to seeing their previously powerful female allies stripped of power (and on occasion clothing) and placed upon a pedestal with a glowing arrow above their head. This isn’t a diatribe against change and development, it’s a cry for consistency and a shift away from the boyhood fantasies of swooping in to save the badass woman of your dreams so that she’ll be eternally grateful. If we want to be seen as grownups we’re going to have to start acting like it.

3 – Try to develop your characters without an eye to their sex.

Obviously this one is kind of impossible to manage. Metroid came as close as any game ever has, though, and we can take a few lessons from the nearly story-less NES and SNES entries into the series. Samus Aran is totally gender neutral until that helmet comes off (for the purpose of discussion I’m ignoring the lengthy period of time when developers decided it would be a good idea to put her in a skin tight body suit) and she’s a pretty big badass regardless of what kind of plumbing you think she has. Sure, once the helmet comes off we see her as a woman and that influences both our feelings for the character and the way we relate to her. But her being a woman never seems to generate information about her character. Instead it’s simply an aspect of who she is. She is a tough, capable bounty hunter who happens to have a vagina. This is something we need more of in games in general as well – developing characters with an eye towards identity rather than archetype. This is just another specific area where there’s been particularly slow progress. There’s nothing wrong with considering sex and sexuality as a part of who your character is, but when you’re utilizing that as the generative trait for your character that’s when we tend to run into Tomb Raider situations where otherwise tough, intelligent female characters shift from being capable human beings to being damsels in distress with barely a gun holster to cover themselves with.

4 – Stop forcing us into relationships.

This is one of my favorite parts of how Fallout 3 portrays Sarah Lyons. She’s never a “relationship option.” And why would she be? You see her a handful of times over the course of a few weeks. You barely know her. She’s way out of your league, and she’s part of one of the most selective, isolationist organizations in the game. Even more impressive is that she’s never written into a forced relationship – she’s a young, focused adventurer who doesn’t need a partner – same as the Kid from Vault 101. We don’t always need to be shoehorned into a relationship in video games. In fact, it’s often healthier to leave relationships out of the equation entirely. This is something Bioware desperately needs to learn to do. The relationships in Baldur’s Gate II (mostly) stemmed from long standing interpersonal relationships and developed in a believable, if not realistic, fashion. The relationships in every subsequent game they’ve made have been shoehorned clichés of romance crammed down player’s throats. Sure, we can ignore them, but it actually takes an effort to do so. And you have to be a bit of a dick to boot. Can you tell Ashley off while remaining the high minded, regulation focused Shepard with maxed out paragon points? Or is the only means by which you can avoid boffing your co-worker being a bit of a dick? These aren’t usually problems for developed media with a message, and games have got to learn to stop doing this to us. It’s fine to put us in a game where we can pursue a relationship, but as long as we keep getting forced into them we’re always going to be portraying one of the parties in an exploitative light. And, sadly, it’s normally going to be the female party.

5 – Hire better writers.

This is my last point, and, again, it’s one of the ones that needs to be taken to heart by gaming at large with regards not just to women but characters in general. A lot of these problems emerge from putting people in the writer’s room who have absolutely no business being there. Characters like Jade, Lyons, Chell, Alyx, Tennenbaum and a milieu of others emerge because actual honest to god writers sat down and made them. Characters like Zelda, Liara, Elika and every other hackneyed female love interest come into being because people who have no business putting pen to page are forced to make stories to fit their game play models. This is starting to turn around, but it’s slow going and it’s incredibly frustrating. In a world where plenty of capable writers are chomping at the bit with new and interesting game ideas the high cost and closed-door nature of the industry seems to be keeping them out and ensuring that the people writing the games are not people who could work as professional authors in their own right but instead people who already work in “the biz” who happen to be able to write in complete sentences. I’m sure it’s more complex than that, but this is how it all appears to an outsider and, frankly, it’s obvious when real talent emerges to write games. Portal proved that employing capable writers, people who would be crafting stories even if video games had never come to be, can generate some amazing writing in games. And once we have more people following Valve’s example and getting some real writers to sit down and breathe life into their properties we’ll stop seeing the same tired damsel in distress archetypes and start seeing some original, thought provoking stories emerge in games.

Just follow these five, not so simple points and I’m sure your industry will start to be perceived as mature in two to three years instead of two to three decades. If those five points are too complicated, however (we all know how short executive attention spans are, after all), I’ve come up with a one sentence summary to help you decide if you’re making your female character properly: More like Sarah Lyons.