If people perceive games as a place where men and women in a
state of protracted adolescence congregate, what can we do to really change
that? Is it our duty, as enthusiasts, as
members of a community (vast and varied and thoroughly differentiated) to influence
the opinions of people outside our community in a way that reshapes the
accuracy of their perceptions and presents us in our best possible light? Should we be ashamed of the snickeringly
childish glimmers of fun we greedily slurp down in the hours we have free? Or should we contextualize these experiences
within the frames of popular culture, of art in general, so that people outside
the medium can understand the depth and variety of the art created within its
confines?
These are the thoughts, however strange, that have occurred
to me as I play through Metro: Last Light. I don't want to discuss Last Light as a game today, though I'd like to at some point. What I'd like to discuss is the manner in
which Last Light portrays what are, for lack of a better term, adult themes:
issues of sex, sexuality and, sexual identity.
In a largely lawless world reforged by revolution, Last Light permits itself to reinvent
society in some pretty keen ways. It
examines the wounds, cultural and historical, left on the Russian people by
World War II, as well as their cultural acquisition of the sort of militant
intolerance that the Nazi party globalized.
It looks at notions of adulthood, childhood and sonhood (to coin a term)
as intersecting and conflicting vectors of personal development which
necessitate encounters with, and movement past, violence and violent acts. But when it comes to sex and, moreover,
notions of gender fluidity or human sexuality, Last Light is downright childish.
Let me explain.
Metro: Last Light,
sequel to the seminal Metro 2033,
expands on the almost exclusively male world of Metro 2033. Whereas Metro 2033 had by and large only men (or
male conceptualizations of hollowed out female bodies re-established as
prostitutes within the game framework), Metro:
Last Light introduces you to a female character with a face and a name and
a personality within the first five minutes of play. On its face, this seems like a great idea:
the world of Metro is growing up and
learning how to deal with girls.
Your initial interactions with this female character, the
only female character so far who doesn't fall into the category of damsel, mother,
or whore (to rewrite the rules a little
of Frank Miller's list of acceptable female archetypes) is essentially that of
a third grade girl flirting with a third grade boy: this capable, attractive
young woman makes fun of you, and you dumbly accept her social punishment. The elaborately punctuated cursive lettering
is written on the wall: this girl is going to kiss you at some point. That's what girls who are mean do to the little
boys they're mean to. They kiss them, or
they ask them to make with the kisses already, dummyhead. The mentality behind this setup, behind this
series of interactions (wherein the strong, independent young woman is
eventually damselized, of course) is so transparent, so nakedly dedicated to
inventing a particular conceptualization of adult sexuality, that it seems
almost absurd to comment on it, but I'll do so anyways. I mean, that's why I'm here.
The character of Anna, her arc from tease to peer to damsel
to partner to ex, represents the relationship one might have with a young fling
or a schoolyard crush. It's childlike
sexuality, but it's portrayed with bullets and tits: Anna, when she finally
kisses you, exposes one of her breasts, because if she didn't you might not get
it, get that this is sex, sexuality, sexytimes.
It's a kind of adolescent wish fulfillment, framed in a manner a boy
might understand, even wish for: he gets to be a hero, he gets to kiss the
girl, and best of all, he gets to be special.
In and of itself, I don't know if I'd perceive this as exceptional,
but I've been spending a great deal of time thinking about gender and sexuality
in contemporary culture: the way we construct it, the way we twist it, and the
way it twists us. Last Light, as a game, illustrates something problematic about the
manner in which games manage issues of sexuality in general: they're terrible
at dealing with gray areas and, as such, simplify things to the level that a
tween might understand. Want to bone a
guy? Well, that makes you a gay, or
maybe even a homo. Pucker up
buttercup. Want to bone a lady? Well, she totes wants it, but she won't say
so, because girls are weird and foreign pixie beings. Something in between? Don't quite identify with your character? Just kind of there disinterested in this
shadow play? We can't really deal with
that right now - come back later.
Consider the Mass
Effect series: this laudable series about character customization permitted
players to select a bevy of qualities shaping who they wanted to be in this
brave new world, but for the first two games they only permitted homosexual
relationships between two women, and even then softened the blow by explaining
the sexuality of an alien species away with a quick "Well, they're all
blue lady aliens, so they gotta go with whatever, y'know!" When the third game finally did roll around,
it did quite a few things poorly, but one thing it did spectacularly well was
introduce and engage with homosexual relationships. Suddenly, we were no longer treated to, at
best, a pair of gay dolls simpering at each other. Shepard could be a big, manly hero and be a
gay man. Shepard could be a straight man
with gay friends and it wouldn't be a big deal.
Ditto if Shepard was a lady. And
the romantic options provided weren't all "well, we already put this in
for the other half, so we might as well..." options - they were fully
fleshed out characters (arguably two of the most interesting ones in the game -
Traynor is just great, and Cortez is the most grown-up character in the Mass Effect world). But this change, this apparently simple
change, took half a decade to come, and there was even some backpedaling along
the way (no blue alien loving in Mass
Effect 2).
When Metro: Last Light
engages with homosexuality, it does so by introducing male on male rape as the
single most humiliating thing imaginable, a thing so horrid that, even as the
game floridly portrays bandits preparing to gang rape women, it stops at the
mere mention of a man sleeping with another man. Coming off of Far Cry 3, with its cartoonish portrayal of human sexuality in
general and homosexuality in particular, this struck a note for me: this is the
god damn 2030s, long after the second sexual revolution. I know they're coming out of Russia, but come
on. Of the fifty thousand people left in
the tunnels, of these people pushed to their limits, there have to be more than
just a handful of the one-in-five who are cool enough with themselves to go for
it. The world's over, society has been
completed reforged. Why does this one
aspect of it still stand?
It's a boyish construction of sexuality, the notion of how
love could and should work that I had when I was ten. It's not terribly accurate, it's not well
informed, and it engages with normalized narratives about what we're supposed
to want. It's part of executing a power
fantasy, and it plays into the way that we, as a culture, are seen by the
slowly shrinking minority that want to marginalize us. We're not capable of discussing grown up
stuff, let alone acknowledging it. The
idea of a trans person would never even enter into the head of someone in the
world of Metro. The idea of a gay person? Simply absurd! In a world where society has been completely
dismantled, the notions about human sexuality that dominated the playgrounds of
the suburbs I grew up in persist: no homos allowed.
I'd like to say that this is the exception to the rule, but
the reality is that AAA releases by and large have a bad track record on this
front. If you rifle through the games
that have received the bulk of mainstream media attention, you'll find
relatively few positive portrayals of queer people and women. The large scale releases that have them at
all often make them into cartoonish caricatures of behavior. It's head shakingly unfortunate, as the
dialogue on queer identity expands on so many other fronts, even within the
fabric of indie games, to see this immature, at best formative dialogue
persist. But what can we do about it,
what can I do about it, spare point out places where it can change and lament
the moment where a game I otherwise enjoy quite thoroughly invents a world
where "faggot" might be screamed in derision at a young boy, and he
might cringe?
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