Life, The Universe And Gaming: A Moment Of Appreciation For The Women In Our Games

Yesterday was National Women’s Day in South Africa. The annual public holiday was originally meant to commemorate some 20,000 women marching to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to petition the 1956 Apartheid era Population Registration Act. Today we use the day to celebrate all the women in our lives. Unfortunately, it’s one of the few days a year when we celebrate all the women in our lives (yes, it’s going to be that kind of column today but I urge you to stick with it).

In recent years the topic of sexism has become a massive talking point in videogames. We already know that most publishers see the world with male-focussed tunnel vision and developers have to work extra hard to ensure their version of the game is what’s presented. Now someone could argue as I previously did that the tunnel vision is validated by the purchasing trends of gamers, but let’s ask a slightly tougher question here: What if the issue is not about wanting more women to play ‘male-focussed’ games but rather about ‘male-focussed’ games offering a wider spread of content? In much the same way that The Office has a character for everyone to adore, over and above Jim, Pam and Dwight.

Excuse me for a moment while I recount my fondest memories of The Office. *cries violently*

I think I speak for most of the mature gaming audience (male, female or otherwise) when I say that we do want a wider variety, and we want more of what is missing, but we also want better of what is already there. And that’s a very delicate line to tread, that regularly requires fact-checking, humility, and the willingness to admit when you’ve misread a situation — so basically, not Feminist Frequency’s version. But the push for better representation has got nasty lately, and it’s reached the point when many people are being alienated into opposing something they once stood strongly behind as a direct result of the ensuing conflicts.

I am one of those people.

There was a time when I didn’t dare speak up about representation of women in games. How could I? I am but a young male who has no context for how to effectively represent women in games. I could not hope to fathom why the likes of supporting characters with snarky one-liners were not good enough. So I silently supported the conversation. But as politics embedded itself within the gaming industry, the topic became muddied to the point of losing context. It was inescapable, and so I tried to learn as much as I could about it. And I struggled. For a long time, I struggled to reconcile the very real and serious issues that women were experiencing in gaming, against the sort of bandwagon-riding women who managed to find sexism in air-conditioning. I found myself consistently speaking against what I saw as malpractice in the discussion, constantly pointing out that there are many women who prefer not to be considered perpetual victims, and I ended up coming across as sexist for it. Not at all what I wanted. As if there are only two extremes…

But the truth, as always, can be found somewhere in the middle of all that. And so today, after that lengthy build-up, I’d like to talk about a few games that I feel offer the kind of representation of women that I think should be celebrated. For one, because I am sick and fucking tired of seeing games picked apart for everything wrong with them instead of celebrating the ones that do things right, and for two, because hey, it’s Women’s Day. So why the hell not.

Tomb Raider

This year, at last, I played the Crystal Dynamics 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider. Previous to this, I had only heard bad things about the game. That it was an Uncharted clone (ironic since Uncharted was effectively a Tomb Raider clone), that it constantly put Lara into the most dangerous situations to the point that it became torture porn for players, and that it was strongly dissonant between narrative and gameplay. But then I played the game, and sure enough in the beginning Lara flailed her way around like a ragdoll on a caffeine high. But I kept playing, and later there was a moment, a very distinct moment around halfway through, when I saw in Lara the kind of fire that would ignite the hearts of millions. The kind of inspirational flame that would make Katniss Everdeen look like a glorified cheerleader. I saw in Lara, growth and empowerment, when playing Tomb Raider. She started off the game as a victim of her circumstances, powerless and afraid. By the end of it, she was the embodiment of true empowerment, the victor of her situation. What I found incredulous about all of this was the argument that “true empowerment” in this sense was based on a male perspective of what empowerment is. Meanwhile, the sequel follow-up had been criticised for being disempowering of Lara’s already strong character, in a bizarre twist of logic.

Let’s take a moment to highlight some of these arguments that I’ve struggled with.

• Strong character who fights back with violence — Male empowerment
• Strong character who is beautiful and sexually empowered — Male gaze
• Not so strong character who experiences real and human feelings — Emasculated female stereotype

And so on, ad nauseam until you give up and go home. Poor Lara cannot win.

This one’s called the “euthanised damsel” trope, apparently.

If I had to judge Lara’s personality for myself, I would think of her as a strong female character. One whom, in spite of Crystal Dynamics producers, does not require protection from players, but in many ways is the protector of her friends and fellow survivors. In that way, Lara is the antithesis of many arguments against Tomb Raider, which makes me wonder how many people actually played it, and if they did then how they interpreted all of it.

Let’s take a moment to establish a few things…

I don’t like gendered arguments because I feel they’re often unfair and not contextualised enough, and they will typically be reversed as a means of discrediting them. For example, you’ll often hear complaints that there are actually many female characters in games so what is all the commotion about, or why does nobody take issue with a sexualised male character? The likes of Chell (Portal), Faith (Mirror’s Edge), and Samus (Metroid Prime) are mentioned as strong counter-arguments to the notion that women lack for strong protagonists. And that’s fine, it really is. But the idea in all of these is that you don’t see the characters, and you don’t really get the best idea of their motivations, their character, their agency. And that’s important because in order to fully characterise especially a protagonist, they need to have some backstory, some reason for what they’re doing, and some personality. Nobody gives much thought to Gordon Freeman from Half-Life or Jack from BioShock. But Half-Life and BioShock are considered classics, why? The way the world treats you in Half-Life, and Andrew Ryan (and the subsequent twist) in BioShock. These games are classics because of the worlds they’ve built, the atmosphere they’ve created, the context for which they exist. Not because of their playable characters. So in the cases of Portal, Metroid, and to a lesser extent Mirror’s Edge, the characters themselves are irrelevant. It’s more about why they are who they are, and what is going to make them the people they become.

This is why Elizabeth from BioShock: Infinite is such a strong character, despite being a glorified “press X” object at times. This is also why Ellie from The Last of Us is the star of that particular game. Not because they’re playable characters (for the most part, they aren’t). Not because they’re themselves empowered (for the most part, they aren’t). But because over the course of each game they show real, human growth. In whatever direction that may be. It could be argued that by the end of The Last of Us, Ellie gains a dependence on Joel as her father and protector (and he likewise is dependent on her as a companion and ward). Is that sexist? Of course not. It’s beautiful and harrowing, and the mere notion of it being sexist sounds silly. But that’s what happens, and we’re okay with it because we understand why Ellie (and Joel) reached that point within the context of the game.

We understand her (them).

And that’s, I think, what’s more important. Not just representation for the sake of it. Not a pointless count of the number of female characters at a bunch of press conferences. The point should not ever be, “Let’s pack as many female characters (with different races and sexual orientations for good measure) as we can into this game and release it to the world, to pander to their desires for representation,” but rather: Let’s create believable character development in our games.

Unfortunately, that kind of counter-revolutionary heresy is liable to get you labelled, drawn and quartered on the internet.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

I’m planning an extended piece about this one, so for now let’s just all go and read Paul Sr’s excellent piece on choice and consequence in The Witcher 3, a game that has some of the strongest, most believable and human women ever written for a game.

Other mentionables

Because this is getting a little long now, I’m going to list a few other strong, female characters from games that I feel you should either already have played, or have on your to-play list. They are:

• Jade from Beyond Good & Evil
• Aveline from Assassin’s Creed: Liberation
• Lilith from Borderlands 2
• Sam and Anya from Gears of War 3
• Chloe and Elena from Uncharted
• Bayonetta from Bayonetta (yes really, Tarryn)
• Literally any BioWare-written female character barring a few exceptions

In each of these cases, the characters have agency, motivation, and importantly, show some element of growth throughout your time with the relevant games. In some cases such as with Sam from Gears of War 3, they’re just the coolest, most badass characters in an otherwise overly testosterone-infused game, making for a refreshing breath of fresh air that’s really fresh like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

And that’s where I’m going to leave it today.

I’m hoping we can set our differences aside, for gaming, you monster. (Or: This was a triumph?)

Could there be more well-written, strong female characters in games? Absolutely, there could be. Does that mean male characters are threatened in any way? No, not at all. There can be both, and there is certainly enough potential for all of these characters to share the game-space. The existence of Tomb Raider did not remove the existence of Uncharted. In much the same way, the existence of more well-written, strong female characters in games should not remove (or to use the buzzword, erase) the existence of well-written, strong male characters in games. Yes, even if nobody is actually making a big deal about the existence of well-written, strong male characters in games, even if as I explained above, the issue is not the actual representation but more the way characters are portrayed.

It was recently brought to my attention by fellow writer of the site, AG, that a lot of the women already being represented in games come under a strong microscope of critique, something previously absent from traditional games journalism. In this way, it’s almost self-defeating, this… call for better representation and subsequent tearing apart of anything that ticks the checkbox. In a way it does keep people honest, but I feel it’s also just a means to perpetuate a misleading, badly intended sub-narrative of an otherwise pertinent and relevant discussion.

Put simply, the internet is full of shit. People on the internet are full of shit. Don’t let the horrendously vitriolic and vile sentiments of some outweigh the well-intended conversation topics of the rest. It’s true that the politicking in gaming is getting a bit much, but that should not discredit everything being said. In much the same way that only a few trolls ruin it for the rest of us gamers, no matter how loud their arguments may be, don’t allow your contempt for the bad apples to cloud your appreciation of the arguments of the good.

Let’s be humans about this. We could all stand to gain from it. I know I did, from the awesome games I played, as mentioned above.

Happy Women’s Day to everyone reading this, and in the words of Tupac Shakur: “I think it’s time to kill for our women, time to heal our women, be real to our women.” It’s not about being a white knight or anything (although I’d find it hilarious if I was actually accused of that, after I’ve been called fifty different kinds of misogynist) but about respect. Pure and simple. I’ll leave it at that.

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