With all the attention being brought towards the industries standards on female protagonists in video-games, it’s time to start looking back at a time before the issues was brought to the front-lines. With Ubisoft taking flak for the lack of female protagonists in their games, and media-critics like Anita Sarkeesian making radical claims about the industry practices and consumer tastes, the gaming industry is starting to look like a very sexist organization right?
Any contemporary gamer can point toward the heroines in the gaming sphere; Samus from Metroid, Alex Denton from Deus Ex: Invisible War, Alexandra Munro from Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force, and Lara Croft from Tomb Raider. Then there are the games where the games narrative, choices, and abilities changes depending on the gender of the avatar; the Guardian in Ultima: Underworld, the Lone-Wanderer in Fallout 3, the Childe in Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Finally there is the massive praise that Bioware received for the female version of Commander Sheppard or FemShep in Mass Effect. I’m male, and I replayed the Mass Effect trilogy as an evil, lesbian, red-head, no-nonsense woman, and I was amazed at how well that combination was realized in the game. I never lost interest, or belief in my character. It was mature, fun, and very well acted by the wonderful Jennifer Hale.
Strong female characters isn’t a new phenomenon in the gaming industry. The character I want to talk about is the Shaman from the 1998 game by Bullfrog Studios; Populous: The Beginning.
There are simply no tropes involved with this character, she is the Shaman of the tribe, who will take them to dominance over all, and ascend to god-hood amongst the stars. During this period of gaming in 1998, other females characters would become fleshed out, but what stands as unique even today, is that those characters had much more of a matriarchy in their strength. Kerrigan and the Protoss from Starcraft, SHODAN from System Shock 2, then the complete opposite in the case of Unreal were the cannon stakes that Prisoner 849 was female (Contradicted in the expansion pack) a character that has no power, just her understanding of survival and gun-play which is for the player to construct in terms of logic. This also being the era when gaming was only just going mainstream as we understand it today, and there weren’t many female gamers on record.
Female characters were commanders, they ruled an empire, their morality was either straight forward or player driven. Their claim to power, unquestioned by players. In Populous: The beginning the Shaman is already seen as a god by her followers, but what is more odd is that she is the only female they see. All the workers, warriors, priests, you name it, they’re all male. The only other females in the game were the Shamans of the enemy tribes. This merits some conversation, its women pitting women against each-other, a matriarchy against matriarchy, playing chess with their male subjects.
The Shaman could use magic and cause lightning storms, volcanoes, even civilize savage men. She could return from the dead, she could take the tribe to other worlds. and only she could unlock new technologies. I wonder how many readers at this point have wondered, “if I swap the gender roles in the last paragraph, isn’t that the complaint of some people today?”, well it’s food for though. It isn’t far-fetched. Many cultures have had matriarchal structures, I live in a monarchy with a woman on the throne. With the exception of the magic and resurrecting from the dead, nothing presented here is demonstrably wrong here.
I think the only thing worth complaining about with this incarnation of a strong female protagonist, is that she has very little character, she has only a few words and they’re spoken in the intro video that I’ve linked in below. She is just a woman on a mission; get godhood, kill enemies, ????, profit? But at the same time, this might be the saving grace of the character, by not forcing a strong sense of character on her, the player whether male or female can interface with her much better. We don’t need her to be fleshed out, we already know in our minds who she is, where she is going, and why.
Is this the be all and end all of the problem, no. But it shows a sensibility and a take on the female role that I feel is overlooked. Populous: the Beginning is a remarkable game, but I think it deserves a place in the debate about how women are depicted in games; now, then, and how they should in the future.
