Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Sex and Race in Broken Age!

A friend spoke to me last week about just what I meant when I brought up the issue of how video games deal with people who aren't white men.  She was a bit perturbed that I was generalizing such a massive medium in such a sweeping fashion, particularly given its remarkable potential for democratizing expression and distribution methods.  As we discussed the topic further, three distinct considerations began to emerge: first, the manner in which people of color in general and women specifically are portrayed in games (oftentimes relegated to marginal roles or constructed with cartoonish broadness in mainstream games), second, the manner in which the mainstream video game industry in North America seems to be dominated by white men, particularly when one considers leadership positions (Kim Swift and Jade Raymond are the only prominent lead female game developers that I can recall off-hand, and Swift's prominence has diminished of late), and, finally, that the development of tools that democratize the production and distribution of games over the last few years, which have made it possible for more diverse voices to enter the artistic conversation represented by games as a medium have never been more accessible or more available to garage designers, regardless of race or sex.

I'm not well equipped to assess the efficacy of that last point.  Honestly, I'm not sure anyone is.  The super-indie design structure that structures like Steam's Greenlight provide micro-studios with is powerful, no doubt, but it's difficult to pull patterns out of it, or to cement it in a cultural discussion that touches on North American constructions of social identities - Greenlight draws from a global market and allows designers to localize as they like, which is fantastic, but that also makes it difficult to discuss, given the relative invisibility of author figures within the Greenlight framework.  That decoupling is a good thing, but it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to garner useful information about just how people represented by Greenlight self-identify, or what kind of experiences they've had in society; there's no face time with developers, for the most part, and the products that players eventually see are mostly left to speak for themselves.  This isn't a bad thing, but it does make that last point difficult to effectively discuss.  My friend was optimistic about the notion of how marginalized voices might find hospitable ground through these new guerilla distribution methods  I felt less enthusiastic about the prospect, but I'd very much like to be wrong.  The broader the cultural spectrum sharing art with the world, the better.

What we could agree on was that the first two points represented significant issues, issues that mainstream video games seemed to be moving in the direction of addressing.  A while back an African American co-worker told me in passing that a big part of Assassin's Creed 3's appeal for him had been the presence of Ulysses, and his role in the story: for him seeing a fully developed, fully fleshed out black character in a game was such a watershed moment that the problematic elements of the game didn't even manifest for him.  "It's rare to have characters I can identify with on that level who I can really engage with," he explained.  To hear him talk about it, the game was, at its core, about a relationship between Connor and Ulysses (a thoroughly reasonable reading which, frankly, likely allowed my co-worker to play a considerably more interesting game than the one I played).

This isn't an isolated occurrence in the world of Assassin's Creed.  Assassin's Creed 4 just released Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry, a stand-alone expansion wherein players take the role of a Trinidadian slave turned pirate during the era of the Spanish Main, effectively asking players to develop the narrative of a thrice-marginalized person during a watershed moment in human history.  It's great to see the series feature not only a Black man, but a Black man with personal experiences as a slave.  The social and psychic scars of slavery are still thick on the psyche of many people in North America, and our capacity to have a productive discussion about the subject is often occluded by a seemingly intractable division between cultural experiences. Of course, it's worth mentioning that this isn't even the first time an Assassin's Creed game centered on a black character.  Assassin's Creed: Liberation centered around Aveline, a French-African woman living in Pre-Purchase Louisiana.  It makes me wish I was up to date on my Assassin's Creed titles: Adewale's story in Freedom Cry taps into a rich literary tradition of slave narratives, and Aveline is doubly qualified for the purposes of the discussion I'm haphazardly trying to have here.  Ubisoft's progressive inclusion of different voices and characters from conventionally marginalized backgrounds seems to be a key element of the Assassin's Creed universe as it continues to expand, but I'm three games behind at this point; I'd be way out of my depth trying to discuss the development of these protagonists.  So instead of watching me continue to flounder, let's talk about the game that initiated this conversation: Broken Age.

Broken Age is noteworthy for a number of reasons, but the one I'd like to pick apart today is its relationship with race and sex: one of Broken Age's two central characters is, drum roll please, a woman and a person of color.  This is a bit of a big deal in and of itself in video games: I can count on one hand the number of times I've played as a person of color in a game that didn't allow me to customize my own appearance.  In fact, I think there are more games that let me play as an alien or a ghost than games that let me engage with the world through the lens of a person of color.  Women are better represented, to be fair, but their representations are often a bit lackluster, and female main characters are overshadowed in much of gaming mythos by female supporting characters, who themselves often reflect male fantasies, or girlfriend archetypes as I like to call them. This is often true even when they're empowered characters with agency: consider Half-Life 2's Alyx Vance and Portal's Chell side by side.  Chell is a footnote in the Portal series, Alyx a key figure in the Half-Life mythology who resonated so profoundly with players that she became the focus of a series of gameplay "Episodes."  In these episodes she acts as a player's guide and companion, moving the player through environments, supporting the player, and motivating the player to give a shit about the world.  That is to say, broad stroke girlfriend stuff.  She's also archetypically constructed and artistically cast as a sort of punk-rock tomboy, a more relatable, somewhat defeminized construction of womanhood (in comparison to Western conventions of femininity - I'm not making a statement about the authority of her existence as a woman).

Vella, the female lead in Broken Age is all the more noteworthy then.  Vella is initially cast in a supportive role, that of sacrifice, of literal eye candy, an actual piece of human icing atop a cake.  She chafes, not at the trappings of social convention that adorn her, the dress, her status as girl-becoming-woman, but at the expectation that she cannot be a main character.  Vella's cleave with society doesn't come from a desire not to serve and better her people, it comes from a place where she wants deliberate agency separated from the social constructs that contain her.  Vella engages with her femininity wholeheartedly: the trappings of feminine convention, that is to say clothes and shoes, are critical weapons in Vella's arsenal, and by utilizing these objects effectively Vella manages to defy expectations, navigate the world, and undermine authority structures that marginalize her.  Unlike strong female supporting characters I've written about before, like the aforementioned Alyx Vance and Fallout 3's Sarah Lyons, Vella embraces her position in society as a woman in order to navigate the world and overcome obstacles.  Whether she's collecting shoes in the clouds or navigating the cattiness of tween "frenemies" on a beach, Vella is engaging with the tropes of being a woman in modern society and, through that engagement, acquires agency and moves narrative towards catharsis.

Before we dig even deeper into Vella's position in the game vis a vis Feminist theory, let's rattle through some Feminist-Marxist theoretical conventions coming out of Western social norms and literary theory, particularly regarding the female body.  Feminist and Marxist theorists, long story short, have long argued that societies (many societies, but Western society in particular) commodify the female body in daily practices and cultural portrayals, treating it less as an aspect of a person and more as a fungible asset to be traded, employed, consumed, and eventually depleted.  There have been a number of approaches to eschewing these themes in 20th and 21st century literature, dope approaches that have, more often than not, focused on moving women out of feminine spaces and into previously male dominated spaces, where they then mask their sex and/or gender in order to exercise agency.  I'm thinking of noir stories with female detectives, such as Linda Barnes eye-rolling Hardware or Thulani Davis' heavy handed Maker of Saints.  On the other end of the spectrum, writers and artists work to redefine femininity in a way that eschews these traditional structures, as in the avant-garde poetry of Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge and Anne Waldeman's Fast Speaking Woman, work that that deconstructs and recontextualizes modern conventions of womanhood.  As we (slowly, painfully) transition towards a society where manhood is no longer equated with power, however, a new trend has begun to emerge, wherein women assert their authority in conventionally feminine spaces and ways and, in doing so, exert agency in a larger context.  William Gibson's Pattern Recognition is an especially adroit construction of this trope: Gibson's novel centers around a Cayce, a "cool hunter" who uses her ability to navigate the world of fashion and culture to navigate a series of obstacles, both existential and physical.  By engaging with the social forces that commodify her body and exerting mastery over them, Cayce is able to navigate and textually subjugate a hostile world.  Broken Age fits into this emerging tradition: the female bodied Vella doesn't eschew the trappings of femininity, even when they chafe.  Instead, she turns them to her advantage, weaponizing the commodification of her body as she's offered to Mog Chathra, who, spoiler alert, is essentially a many-dicked altar to the male-gaze and the consumption of the female body controlled by a thirteen year old boy.  Rather than fleeing the offering process, Vella uses each offerings as an opportunities to attack Mog Chathra and, in doing so, prove the dominance of developing female authority over established masculine authority.  She embraces her womanhood, and uses the artifacts of her womanhood to overcome threats to both herself, and to the social institutions she holds dear (specifically family).

I jumped off the rails a bit there, but I wanted to be sure to give you a sense of how popular culture and avant-garde art are both engaging with a conversation that Broken Age is participating in.  Broken Age's construction of womanhood goes beyond just including a female-bodied character in the game: it presents a reading of how a young woman can navigate hostile social structures and, in doing so, exert her authority as an individual over the world.  This is no mere eschewing of social morays, this is full out confrontation with what it means to be a woman.  Mainstream video games are straight up terrible at presenting strong female characters without stripping them of their femininity.  Much as I love Sarah Lyons and Alyx Vance, and as important as I think they are, they are, on some level, unsexed (though one could aptly make the case that Alyx Vance's body is frequently presented as potential subject for the male gaze throughout Half-Life 2).  Vella isn't strong despite her womanhood, she's strong because of her womanhood.

There's more to be said about how gender and sex and authority fit together in Broken Age, certainly, and I want to talk about that later.  The politics of yarn alone could keep me occupied for weeks, but if I keep going down this rabbit hole of how Vella's specific construction as a female character resonates in an important critical, artistic and social context, I'll never get to the second half of her exceptional status in the context of video games: her race.  See, Vella is a person of color, which is nervous white person speak for "she has dark skin."

Normally people of color are, like women, relegated to broad supporting roles in video games: even key characters of color, like Sergeant Johnson of the Halo series, are drawn from broadly constructed archetypes.  The hard-nosed black sergeant, the fast talking latino soldier, the jittery Asian combat tech, these are the faces of Benetton that greet us in our video game casts.  Fortunately this is being eschewed of late in a variety of spaces.  The majority of the first Assassin's Creed's characters are Arabs, drawn not from broad stereotypes but with an eye to detail and character that makes them people, rather than objects placed in a context to represent a particular social expectation or anxiety expressed by Western audiences.  This is great, but it remains the exception to the rule in a genre wherein once a massively anticipated release called Daikatana that had a half-decade of marketing lead-up prominently featured a black man named Superfly Johnson.

I'm happy to say that Broken Age falls on the side of Assassin's Creed.  The setting, at least Vella's setting, is a world rife with people of varying hue.  Human hue, not weird alien hue, a key distinction when you're talking about video games.  And far from being broadly drawn as stereotypes, Broken Age's people of color are just that: people.  Individuals, characters, people with feelings and jobs and thoughts who are just trying to get by.  Vella is no stereotype, and her presence as a person of color presents a strong, well drawn character, affording players with a character they can identify with in a way that the monochromatic casts of most video games often don't permit.  Of course, there's a problem in this conversation: because of the decontextualization of race and racial politics in Vella's world, the experiences that Vella has as a character and her existence are largely removed from relevant socio-political and cultural experiences that people of color are forced to confront in the world we live in today.

Games that engage with those experiences more directly exist, to be sure.  The aforementioned recent entries into the Assassin's Creed series are all valid examples, though I'm not well positioned to investigate just how most of them turn on that particular axis.  The Walking Dead video game is a marvelous example, allowing characters to experience the end of the world as a highly educated Black man in the South, whose status as an educator, an academic and a caretaker is framed as secondary to his criminal history.  These experiences are important, and fill a role that Broken Age, by nature of its world's position as a totally-fictitious construct, simply cannot.  That is not to say that Broken Age's deconstruction of race isn't important, simply that it presents a narrative opportunity distinct from that of titles dedicated to the construction of a realist world, titles that ask players to reflect on how they might survive when pressed into a particular set of experiences or challenges.  Broken Age instead presents a conceptualization of the world where existent cultural constructions of race are no more, and in doing so, illustrates a fundamental truth that our society and its institutions often disregards: there's nothing fundamentally different about people with different colors of skin, spare that they have different colors of skin.  Broken Age's construction of race outside of typical contexts comments on that notion, generating what might be called a "post-racial" construction by generating a world where racism, or the notions of "race" constructed by Western culture, are not only absent, but irrelevant to personal and political structures.

A productive bit of dialogue, sure, though it's one echoed in other games: Mass Effect exists in an apparently post-racial society, though some Terra Firma sound bites and story nods echo political movements like the Know-Nothings, and Fallout is as post-racial as you can get, though the inclusion of Ghouls as an oppressed "other" group presents an opportunity for an investigation of intolerance.  What makes Broken Age distinct, then, is that it is largely unconcerned with investigating these problems, instead treating them as what they are: unreasonable constructions of a society with no logical basis underpinning them.  Their absence is not conspicuous, and in this, a dichotomy is generated that makes their presence in our daily lives seem that much stranger and less acceptable.

That's just my take, though.  And, in a sense, my take is pretty unimportant: what's important, or rather what I'm trying to get at here, is that Broken Age, simply by making Vella a woman and a person of color, affords an opportunity to its players and commentators to engage in a dialogue about these subjects, about notions of identity construction and portrayal, of how we see ourselves and how we believe we are seen by the world.  Broken Age is not an isolated artifact: games have been moving in this direction for a while, and even if they weren't, there's no reason we can't engage with a broad spectrum of cultural material to construct "readings" of games as art objects.  What's important about Broken Age is that its position presents such a particularly rich and nuanced construction of each character that we are afforded a multitude of opportunities to construct "readings" of Broken Age as a text.  That's something I plan to do again and again the weeks, and perhaps months to come, and the inclusion of traditionally marginalized groups, along with their thoughtful construction, makes the development of these "readings" so much richer.