So a while ago, I posted two articles, one was a retrospective look at Populous 3 and how it and it’s female lead represented a time in the industries output of video-games to be more sans-gender-inclusive. The next was a bit of a ramble (albeit admittedly not thoroughly thought out) about gender choice problems in Video-game design.
Now to get my personal opinions out of the way, here is what I think is going on. We basically have misandrist “Feminists” making outrages claims about gamers being misogynists, a claim made with absolutely not creditable peer-reviewed data to back up their claims. People are not dumb, we want a side order of citation and proof with our statement pie, but suddenly it’s the consumers fault for ordering the side rather than the supplier not being able to provide it. But rest assured my one viewer (that’s you), most intellectual feminists with personal and professional integrity are on the same page as us, the skeptics: “Where is the evidence for this? Because we’re doing the research, and coming up with the exact opposite conclusion than you.”
To cleverly segway into the game I want to talk to you about, I want to mention an overlooked point here. Video-games are not Hitman, Call of Duty, Halo, and World of Warcraft. Video-games are Adventure, Action, Mystery, Story, Shooting, Characters, Puzzles, other worlds, interactive concepts of the minds of artists. To some up the Gaming industry as just violent testosterone fueled engines of male rage release is like looking at the library of the work of Michael Bay and saying that it encompasses everything about the film industry. Please.
In the late 80’s through the early 90’s, the two predominant companies of gaming were Sierra and Lucasarts. PC gaming (and console) was predominately side scrolling adventure games. Rich in character, settings, and humor. Things simply changed when the FPS genre was born and the market got over saturated and has been drowning in shooters ever since. But any marketing department worth a damn knows how to get the teenage male demographic. The promise of pixelated tits. And thus Duke Nukem as we know him now was born. This isn’t promotion of sexist behavior, it’s exploitation of puberty to meet a market quota. I can only name three games that I personally found sexist without any justification in story, setting, or historical context, and not to sound too Sarkesian about it, I won’t name them here, but I’ll let it leak somehow. Games do NOT promote sexism or misogyny. Simply the games that are being accused of such, are blockbuster games that meet a target demographic of teenagers trying to figure out what this strange angsts their feeling is. If we’re not part of that demographic, male or female we’re going to have a bad time and should probably go over to the greener side of the field, oh look, left 4 dead 2.
So what about the rest of that field? Can I point to a first-person shooter with a strong realistic female protagonist who don’t need no man? Yes!
Jurassic Park: Trespasser.
Released in 1998, Trespasser had a very interesting but ultimately detrimental production process. It was a little to far ahead of the technology curve thanks to Seamus Blackley of Looking Glass fame, the game was hard to run, extremely experimental, and ultimate was released unfinished and barely resembled the design briefs of the original concept.
Set after Jurassic Park: The lost world, we find ourselves the only survivor of a plane crash on site B. We are Anne. Anne is only familiar with her predicament due to recalling reading Richard Hammond’s auto-biography, which is voiced by the one and only Richard Attenborough. It actually works quite well as Anne’s internal thought process, trying to get as much of that information out of her head and into something malleable to help her survive. “To a radio” she thinks, “If I’m going to survive I need to haul ass”. Anne isn’t a gun totting maniac, she tries to keep track of her ammo, and comments on what it’s like to shoot a velociraptor in the face with a 12 gauge. She even has a moment of ethical dilemma when she is in a position to steal InGens data on dinosaur replication. Long story short she survives and takes a kickass raptor claw as a trophy.
The Game was originally meant to be a survival horror game, but ultimately due to technical and deadline issues, the game was released as an unfinished action game. It’s broken, but rather important to the history of gaming. and I believe that Anne is part of that history in a more integral way. She isn’t a “damsel in distress”, she is a person with a good mind for self-preservation. A survivor, as determined to live as the player is determined to finish the game.
I think an issue that people may have with the game is that it’s lack of a heads-up display requires some creative thinking on the part of the designers to relay information about ammo count and health to the player. The latter is done by Anne talking to the player (herself) about the weight and amount of rounds in the gun, but health is tracked by a tattoo on her breast that the player has to look down and look at. I don’t think this is sexist, I just think it’s distracting, but this is a social stigma that will remedy over time.
It’s a remarkable game, with a remarkably character. I’d advice anyone and everyone to play it. Fans of Penumbra, Amnesia, and Alien Isolation, will feel right at home with this title. If you can get around the experimental interface, odd interface, and look at it for what it could have been, you’ll be glad you played it.
Is Anne the progenitor of Amanda Ripley in Alien Isolation? Yes! Is she a more realistic depiction of female portrayal in a video-game? No. But then again I don’t think any character male or female in a first person shooter is ever depicted realistically. I think Anne would have the same odds as any of us on an island full of dinosaurs; none to very little. But her persona and thought process is realistic. She has realistic intelligent goals of survival, empathy towards the dead employees she finds, and a wonderful characteristic of pragmatism and possible greed. She isn’t perfect, nor is she an anti-hero. Rather she has the personality of a real person. It is flaws in characters that make them so approachable, their limitations that aspire us to relate and cheer on. I’ve already said enough about what I think about this argument about sexism being propagated by this industry, but allow me to share one last opinion.
How do you want your heroine? In a game with character customization, where the player wears the protagonist like a glove, it’s your fantasy and he or she can be whatever you want. But in a story driven game where you play as a rounded out character, I’d rather see men and women I can relate to in ambition and drive. I don’t care about aesthetics, but playing as an idiot or a bullet sponge isn’t my idea of fun. Alien Isolation’s horror came not just from it’s setting, but how our character and in turn ourselves reacted to the predicament, and the realistic use of limited ammo, health, and a good sense of wit and survival instinct.
Thanks for reading, please leave comments below, if you don’t agree with me, please comment politely and talk to each other with politeness.