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19day

2006-02-27

Which class will you pick, Fighter, Elf, Wizard, or Woman

Filed under: General — 19day @ 19:38:55

I’ve been thinking about this entry for a while, so I’ve sat down and I’m going to try to type the thing. Basically, it’s about the role of women in videogames (in the videogames themselves) while having done absolutely no research, heh, but it’s an opinion piece, so you can leave taking away that I’m just crazy and forget it.

So what we seem to have these days, is an increase in female characters in strong, leading positions, but it seems the people making the characters almost always get it wrong (assuming what they are trying to get right is making female characters feministically acceptable, which I’ll probably have to define later, but it’s more of a feeling than a defined state, plus I just made it up).

Let’s start at the beginning, women didn’t play games, they didn’t care (apparently), well, girls I guess, since at the time, video games were for a younger audience, things like PacMan. So they come up with Ms. PacMan, which was actually a surprisingly good step when you think about it. They added a Bow, okay, stereotypical, she’s adorning herself, but when the original character was a pizza with a slice missing, it certainly seems acceptable. And hey, it’s not like they added two really big yellow circles just ahead of her intersecting with the body, and bobbing along as she moved.

Well, actually, if you read the history of Pacman itself from the original creator, it seems that the point of the original Pacman was to appeal to women, and that the Ms. Pacman bit was just a gimmick later on. But when I read his inspiration, I think it’s a little chilling, don’t you?

“So there I was, wondering what sort of things women would look for in a video game. I sat in cafés and listened to what they were talking about: mostly it was fashion and boyfriends. Neither of those was really the stuff of a good video game. Then they started talking about food – about cakes and sweets and fruit – and it hit me: that food and eating would be the thing to concentrate on to get the girls interested.”

- Toru Iwatani http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1718312,00.html

I don’t know, something about that makes me feel depressed. I wonder if Pacman were created now, that after eating all the dots you needed to get to the middle section and vomit all the dots up before moving on the next level, oh, and the bonus items would now be worth negative points, and would spawn immediately in your way.

Ms Pac Man purging

What the last step of each level would be if it had been made today

Okay, so his reasons weren’t great, in my humble opinion, but still, something for the girls. Well, also, a way to market to girls to get their lovely money, if I were to be cynical about it, but when have I ever been cynical… really.

But as a yellow dot goes, it’s not like it was revolutionary anyway, more like lip service. It seems that the big jump to a positive female gaming role model would be in the form of Samus Aran. I was never part of the group that played it at the time, in fact, I started with Metroid II, and never played the original until quite recently. From what I heard, it was a bit of a stir when it was revealed that under that suit was a woman, especially since the instruction manual referred to the character as a He, so either they were trying to throw players off, or they were just as surprised as everyone else. The nifty thing about the character, all the way through to the 3D Metroid Prime (the last Metroid game I played) was that there was no inherent sexuality involved. The character was a woman, in a suit, so it dodged any Lara-Croft’ian problems, which might be a cop-out, but at least it’s neutral…

Except of course, whenever they get the basic idea right, they ruin it utterly and miss the point. For it’s been a sort of tradition now, in Metroid games, that you get ‘rewards’ for completing the game fast enough, and with enough of the items, so that in the credit sequence, various things happen. In Super Metroid, if you finish the game in less than three hours, you get to see Samus in what I can only describe as a bathing suit, no doubt required for her suit to function. So hurrah, strong female character, itty bitty bathing suit. Alas.

Samus stripping

Obviously they wanted to remove any lingering doubt as to her gender

Okay, so lets move away from the strong female leads, into the damsels in distress. These are easy to pick on, but I will anyway. So we’ve got a mustachioed Italian plumber rescuing princesses left, right and center. At least the princess got out and started fighting a bit herself in Super Mario Bros II, the Doki Doki Panic hijacked game. Sure, she was in a dress, but somehow that allowed her to float, which was a characteristic I liked since I’m terrible at the tricky jumping crap. Mario seems to be ceaselessly rescuing this woman, well, Princess Toadstool in most of the games, but Princess Daisy in the gameboy game, perhaps others, I wasn’t paying enough attention.

Link is just as bad in this regard, always rescuing Zelda, for the same reasons (damsel in distress archetype), but a Link to the Past made this worse, she was captured a number of times, as well as several other girls, and they are supposed to be all magical, but of course are defenseless. Zelda herself doesn’t appear to be overtly sexualized yet, so her being a playable character in a Zelda game (perhaps, where she rescues Link, hmm?) would be compelling enough. In Wind Waker, the last Zelda game I played, she at least was a decent character, but not playable and not very active herself, until the very end, where she helpfully shot light arrows at you. Thanks. Maybe the new one will do something more with her, Twilight Princess I think it’s called, might be promising.

Zelda fighting for her man

Scene from Link: A Zelda to the Past
Link is about to be imprisoned in crystal

I’m on a never ending quest to save my boyfriend

I should perhaps now talk about a game that did things pretty well. American McGee’s Alice is one that stands out for me. It’s just you, a slightly grown up Alice, against a deranged wonderland. You are neither attractive nor not, somehow striking a good balance that is more easily seen in male characters in other games, where they are neither chiseled nor lanky. She is herself, running around wonderland, with a knife. Though she does sob a lot through the story, it all makes sense and is perfectly orchestrated, it makes you wish you could fight your own demons as literally. I enjoyed playing the character, and I wasn’t outraged once. The nifty story and environment helped too.

Alice pulling a Duke Nukem

At this point, the narrator was running out of ideas

In terms of sexism on all sides, there can hardly be a better example than Duke Nukem. Both 3D and the Manhattan Project 3D-sidescroller thingy that came later (under license). Now, I liked Duke Nukem 3D, I thought it was a great game, but there were also the naughty bits. It had really great environments, not just dank dungeons like Doom and Quake, but places that looks like what they were, if, unfortunately, theaters of and dance halls of ill repute. The story hopped along well enough, challenge was decent, enemies were, well, lacking somewhat, but had interesting characteristics. It’s also the only game I took my hand at creating maps for, making a semi-completely and mostly terrible Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy run of maps, with the story of Duke following on the heels of Arthur and Ford across the various locations, Vogon Ship, Magrathea, Heart of Gold, Milliways, Frogstar C, Krikkit, and others, while killing ‘Vogons’ who looked suspiciously like the aliens having been killed up to this point. Ah, memories.

But it was sometimes difficult populating those maps, since, and I think this is a telling point, that the only non-hostile animated and interactive ‘people’ in the game were either strippers, prostitutes, or women held or killed by alien intervention. I swear that in Lameduke, a really fantastically crappy alpha of the game released for fun by 3D Realms, that there was a male, normal, NPC… but I could be wrong, hard to recall. In any case, basically the prostitute was the only useful one since out of the context you normally found them in the game, they still looked like they could belong elsewhere. While the dancing and stripping women did not. Not at a cricket match, in any event.

Naked girl tied by slime
Naked girl suspended by slimeNaked girl restrained to alien postNaked girl empaled by alien post
Naked girl in slime cocoonStripperYet another stripperProstitute

Yes, we have much to answer for. This is true.

Duke Nukem 3D, in addition to having these sprites in the game at all, decided to make them interactive as well, in two ways that I think caused upset in some circles at the time. Firstly, you could walk up to them, the dancers, strippers and prostitutes and hit the USE button, which otherwise activated things in the game, and you would give them money, say something like “Shake it Baby”, and the strippers would, in exchange, flash you and shake their.. er, tassels, at you. Of course, this illicit act is pixilated all to hell and isn’t alluring, but it’s still something that might have best been left on the drawing board (but given the things reportedly seen and done in GTA: San Andreas, I suppose it could have been worse)

Which brings me to the second thing you can do in Duke Nukem with these characters that brings us to that worseness, which is kill them. You can blow away any of the NPC’s, which range from the strippers, to the alien-goop-bound girls. When you do, Duke says “Dammit” to himself (we’re really feeling for him at those times) and usually, this causes more enemies to appear. So I guess that’s one thing, it punishes you for killing them. To me, that’s not too bad really. But if they had some male NPC’s, and didn’t sexualize them as much, then it would have just been by-standers getting killed and it would be up to the player to avoid them since it just produced more enemies.

But, from the pictures, pixilated as they may be, I think the game goes overboard. And also for male sexism too, look at him, all muscle, all attitude, probably flooded with steroids. He screams he male version of the sexist attitude, but it doesn’t affect men as much it seems. Well, researchers say that it does have some effect, and I can well believe that. But for some reason, a man can just be a man, as long as he’s not grotesquely fat or ugly or anything. I have yet to see a game where a serious lead character was some fat guy, because no one, not guys, nor women, would want to play such a character. But you can have an average built guy character, but the women have to be these bombshells.

Now it gets tricky after that, why would women want this anyway, why aspire to the female “ideal” (and I really do mean the quoting there). They do seem overly preoccupied with how they look. Of course, there’s a trap right there, as from their point of view, men might be thought of as insufficiently preoccupied by how they look, suggesting some baseline “normal” level, that itself shares the type of quotes I put around “ideal” earlier. I really don’t know, but back to Duke Nukem 3D

Duke standing on a broken barrel with money in his hand

Duke standing on a broken barrel with money in his hand

If you need further evidence of this game’s general sexist theme, one need only listen to the last bit of audio once you beat the game.
Duke: “My name’s Duke Nukem. After a few days of R & R, I’ll be ready for more action”
Woman: “Ohh, come back to bed Duke. I’m ready for some action, now!”
[grunting, moaning, and Duke ending with a bit of a laugh]

Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project took the character and the attitude to a 3D sidescroller, where to beat each level you needed to find a key, and also disarm a bomb that would mutate some captured pneumatic woman. On rescuing them, they show their appreciation by jumping up and down. I decided to fix her reaction by quoting Rocky Horror Picture show.

Duke getting shot down

Ooooh, burn! Duke is denied! [general Fox audience noises]

I remember an article, can’t seem to find it (but as this is still an opinion piece, I’ll just say stuff without evidence). Anyway, I remember this article about a game development studio that was working on a title, and they were trying to decide whether to have multiple characters. I don’t recall if the change was anything other than cosmetic, but they had a guy character, and a girl character, and they found themselves asking internally if people played one more than the other, and if so, why? And as it turned out from their own investigation, no one was really playing the male character, and the reasons are kind of funny. Girls play girls, since it’s a reflection of themselves in the game-world they are in. Guys, however, play girls, since they like looking at girls. Huzzah.

Of course, the above recollection doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (it did play out like that, but I can’t remember why exactly they did their investigation) since most games give different skills to the different playable classes, so playing as a woman would be different than playing as a man (if those were the only options)

Which is sort where the title of this entry comes from, since I’m reminded of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. It was the first of that series-types-whatever of games I had played. Curtis and I were playing as a duo (not the whole time, we imported around a bit), I played as the gruff Dwarf, and he played as the unnecessarily buxom and pert Elven Sorceress. And it’s funny how that went, since of course the woman is weak in nearly every way, which were two important ways: Firstly, she couldn’t carry much, and half the point of the areas was to get weapons and then sell them for gold to buy the good stuff later on. Secondly, she couldn’t really fight. She had some spells, but it was a lot of hit and run tactics when Curtis was playing alone. There were areas early in the game (when we had been playing separately) where I had run up and just slashed my way through, where he had to cast, cast, cast, refill on mana, and cast again to survive. Then we teamed up, I went barreling in, while I got magic backup. And we both got experience as we went, and the Sorceress got quite powerful in fact. Ball Lightning, a somewhat cheap semi-area affecting spell, was leveled up until basically it killed everything before I could get there, even when using my Dwarven Magic Flatulence. Still, she couldn’t carry much. Now I’m not sure what the point of this section was, oh well.

And I think the telling factor of the Tomb Raider series is that when I was looking for game shots, I also found lots of fairly suggestive fan art, and then the fairly suggestive game shots on which they were based. There’s not much of a challenge there, people have been going after that series for years.

Lara Croft and her charms

90% of the polygon count was allocated to the stars of the game

Here’s one final bit from a game I liked way back when I played in arcades. It was called Astyanax, but being a non-word, it took me quite a long time to track down a ROM for it. I played through it in MAME, it’s your typical side scrolling monster killing quarter guzzler. You’re some muscle bound guy, hurrah, killing monsters and grasshoppers, hurrah, and then in one of the later levels, you attack women. Okay, fine, but part of defeating them is cutting off their tops, they expose themselves (in 16 by 16 pixel glory) and run around embarassed, where you can finish them off without further defiance. How sporting.

Lara Croft and her charms

Will I get 1000 points if I disrobe someone? Now that’s imitatable

And I think it’s important to show that, at least in a single sample, that it’s not just the games alone that have succum to this effect, but even in the basic notion of 3D gaming itself. Here again is the picture of the 3D game programming book I bought a while ago. I rest my case…. oh, sorry, I thought that was just a figure of speech… case closed.

Cover for Game Coding Complete, complete with sex symbol

3D basics: vectors, matricies, half-naked-ninja-women

Anyway, I think I’ve prattled on enough. I don’t offer any solutions, just pointing out some of our past difficulties. I think, and hope, that as more women enter the technical fields, such as programming, and become involved in these projects, that there will be a balancing out of concept and perhaps women will be portrayed better. Unless this is what everyone wants, women included.

In which case sorry for wasting your time

4 Comments »

  1. NO! You are SO right, I HATE all this fucking portrayal of women in video games. My own boyfriend does exactly that: plays women in every game cos he wants to see their tits ‘n ass. I mean really, WTF? They’re fucking PIXELS. God it makes me seethe with rage. HELLO. I don’t play MALES and the fucking males aren’t even sexy enough. Oh man I’m going to break the keyboard if I continue.

    Comment by Christina — 2006-03-02 @ 13:15:23

  2. go ahead and break it. I’m just glad someone commented on anything, heh.

    Comment by 19day — 2006-03-02 @ 22:37:11

  3. Well, I’ve tried to leave comments before, but your stupid validation script kept telling me what I’d entered didn’t match the crappy image above it. I figured IT was wrong, but apparently I’m just blind. Goddamnit, I hate those things. Anyway, that happened like 17 billion times (okay, more like 3) and I decided to give up. I was just lucky on the above post (and maybe on this one?) that it worked this time! Or else I really would have broken the keyboard, the mood I was in. Hah.

    Comment by Christina — 2006-03-03 @ 15:50:25

  4. Okay, well I took out the spray function, turned the alpha crap off, and reduced the number of lines that get drawn over it. It looks a lot clearer now, to me, and I ran some tests and it accepted each of my inputs. I may go back and fix it so it doesn’t use I’s or 1’s or O’s (oh), it already doesn’t use 0 (zero), but I should remove all copies of confusing letters.

    So hopefully I will get more comments now, heh, but I haven’t had any spam since I implemented the captcha. I was shocked that my unknown blog somehow managed to generate dozens and dozens of spams a day (at it’s worst)

    Comment by 19day — 2006-03-03 @ 17:43:09

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