Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Concept Forming Exercise on the Subject of Women in Games!

So, sometimes I write cop-out essays for this and it’s quite apparent. Things like sandwich discussions and the like really don’t fit well into this blog’s focus, nor do they really explore the things I set out to focus when I started writing Sexy Results. And sometimes I write cop-out essays because I’m feeling sort of dry. That’s not the case right now at all. I’ve got a lot of games I’d love to write about, including Rage and Space Marine, to say nothing of ongoing essays about The Old Republic, Modern Warfare 3 and Skyrim, all of which have kept me captivated for quite some time now.

But I’m working on a paper this semester, a paper where I’ll finally be able to discuss video games as a literary form at length. I’m going to be posting some of the preliminary work here as it develops, and what follows is going to more or less be a hybrid abstract and proposal: a tentative statement of scope as well as a sample of what the content of the paper will consist of. This will likely be more in line with the older posts that used to make up Super Nerd Sunday, and if you’d like to see more of this sort of thing, please let me know. It’s a lot more labor intensive, but I find it to be interesting most of the time, and if you agree then I’d love to hear it.

Gender has long been a problematic subject in video games. The manner in which archetypes of masculinity and feminity are portrayed, the roles that male and female characters play and the way they’re developed as protagonists, antagonists and supporting characters is in equal turn fascinating and problematic. Ever since the obscure Custer’s Revenge, an Atari based sex-game allowed a floating ghost general to literally drop cum-bombs on horrified Native American women below, began sexualizing and destroying the agency of women within games decades ago, an uphill battle has slowly been taking shape. Occasionally marketing forces have combated the slow progress of the industry, eviscerating strong portrayals of women and transforming them into ditzes, sex objects and pubescent fantasies made manifest. Lara Croft, who began her life as a proposed “female Indiana Jones,” famously became an implausibly physique, nude code adjacent target for criticism within and without the industry. And it becomes difficult not to see this sort of self-destructive path as a necessity of continuing to exist within the industry when games with strong female protagonists from the Playstation 2 generation, such as Beyond Good and Evil, bomb so thoroughly despite critical accolade.

But of late a renaissance has been underway in the games industry. Female protagonists and even female supporting characters have been emerging as complicated, interesting figures who outstrip their male counterparts in complexity and form the cornerstone of carefully constructed, socially aware stories in high-grossing, critically acclaimed games. Brutal Legend’s seemingly male-dominated story turns almost entirely upon feminine power, and female supporting characters are, in the end, both the enablers of the plot and the sole survivors of a harrowing military campaign. Half-Life 2 relies heavily on Alyx Vance, a strong, competent woman who both defies many social morays of feminine behavior and forms the cornerstone of a revolutionary movement, taking on qualities of both mother, sister and lover for the protagonist while embodying a sort of ultra-competent woman warrior, a valkyrie for a digital generation.

Perhaps no game series better illustrates the progress that has been made towards more complex and intellectually engaging portrayals of female characters in video games than Portal, wherein Chell, a voiceless protagonist whom we rarely see, comes to embody and invert many of the tropes that we, as gamers, have become comfortable with over the years. Chell simultaneously upholds and violates many of the rules of first person shooters, creating a revolutionary new kind of genre, a new kind of storytelling and a new kind of energy in gaming. Through the progress of Portal we can see both a complex concept of female sexuality and power emerging in contemporary games and a broader deconstruction of concepts of authority, invention and power in games. We can also look to Portal to find a new methodology and mentality for telling stories in games, representative of a movement towards more complicated, more interesting storytelling that seems to both accompany and rely on this feminine growth within games.

And alongside titles such as Portal indie titles have been expanding both what it means to be a game and what it means to portray women within them. Developers such as Tale of Tales, makers of such revolutionary titles as Fatale and The Endless Forest, have been exploring both our historical perception of women as well as the manner in which we perceive sexuality, gender and sexual development as a part of life and death. In The Path, they retell the story of Little Red Riding Hood as only a video game could, recasting it in a post-modern light to provide gamers with a new means by which to approach the topic of sexuality and explore their own relationship with just what it means to be a young woman growing into a teenager, coming to terms with desires both redemptive and self destructive. Through the revolutionary play of The Path, we’re forced to assess ideas of success and failure in games, ideas of life and death and the concept of achievement as an ethereal or unattainable subject, all the while interacting with a female cast of characters who express more without speaking a syllable than most can manage in an entire novel.

I’ll be bringing these titles into conversation with a number of articles about concepts of sex, sexuality, women in games and the nature of power in both narrative and games in order to explore just how it has both changed and is changing in the days to come. Bringing together figures such as Shodan and Victoria (from System Shock and Thief respectively) and looking at them along with the masculine and/or paternal counterparts (The Many, The Jackal/Father Karaas) illustrates more than just dynamics of feminine power in games. It also illustrates how the introduction of these complicated literary characters forms part of a larger tapestry wherein themes of resurrection, life, death and authority are both constructed and simultaneously undermined through the unique structure and storytelling requirements that games are uniquely possessed of as a medium.

From Custer to Chell, it’s been quite a long journey, and it is far from over. Masculinity continues to be a pervasive and often limiting trope in the construction of stories within games, and patterns of overt masculine exclusion, those evident in works such as Gears of War and Modern Warfare, operate to both undermine their own stories and convey simplified fictions of what it means to be a man in today’s society. By placing these examples next to more complicated stories and revealing the manner in which the perception of gaming as a “boy’s club” has undermined its growth, we can learn about the destructive power of exclusion. We can also witness the importance of inclusiveness within examples of potent female characters who propel complicated stories with key themes and literary methodology behind them. Stupid games will always exist, but it is difficult not to look to the growth of women within the games industry as well as in the stories told by that industry and see a correlation between the quality of stories told, the increasing maturity of the industry and the growth of games not just as a business but as a literary medium for telling singular and structurally unique stories.