I’m an avid gamer. I grew up with a NES and a Sega Genesis, we’ve had every Playstation ever put out, still have a working Dreamcast and Gameboy color, and bought an Xbox 360 in early 2007 after a friend-of-a-friend introduced me to Gears of War. Chances are if I haven’t played it I still know about it. The world of video games is wide and vast: it varies in style and theme, target age group, and from single player to interactivity between thousands.
A (male) friend of mine who writes about comic books and had an upcoming article about sexism and misogyny in comics recently linked a video on facebook about the exploitation of the female body in gaming and the differences between how male and female characters are presented. The video makes an excellent point about body language and characterization:
A recently released picture for the upcoming Mass Effect 3 illustrates this point particularly well:
For those not particularly familiar with the characters of the Mass Effect universe, the above characters are from Mass Effect 1 (and briefly 2): Ashley and Kaidan. Only one of these characters survives the first game and which one it is depends on choices you make as the player.
Both of these characters are equal – they’re both Alliance soldiers (Ash in the Soldier class, Kaidan in the Adept), both are promoted in rank in Mass Effect 2, and both reach the highly elite Spectre status in Mass Effect 3. Effectively, it doesn’t matter which one you choose to survive the first game, they come out as equals in rank and importance in the final game.
But despite her Spectre status, Ashley is drawn primarily as a sex figure. Her body language presents her as an object for men to ogle, eyes averted, hips skewed. It says nothing about her character and in fact can be argued to be directly contrary to her actual characterization in the games. One of the stills is even of her turned around so that the gamer can see what her ass will look like in ME3. Kaidan, on the other hand, holds a firm and confident pose, facing forward. Keep in mind, these characters are supposed to be interchangeable and equal.
While I agree with Bob Chipman about how clothing is or isn’t worn, I do think he misses the mark on whether or not clothing (or lack thereof) is a concern (and should be) to female gamers. Let’s continue with the Mass Effect example before moving on:
In Mass Effect 1, Ashley is introduced as a “tough” character – she’s the sole survivor in her unit of an attack on the human colony on the planet Eden Prime by Geth invaders. However, even with her initial introduction, her clothing is the bigger statement: she’s wearing bright pink and white armor. Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with conventional femininity and women wearing pink. “Feminine” isn’t inherently anti-feminist or bad. The fact that there is pink and white armor (and yellow and black and every other color) in the game is not the problem. The problem is that out of every single recruitment in the game, Ashley is the only one in an armor color that isn’t remotely suitable for any sort of combat situation wherein concealing oneself might make the difference between life and death. She is othered for her sex.
In Mass Effect 2, your team consists of many male and female companions. See if you can spot a difference between the men and the women in this picture:
With exception to Tali (third from Left), none of the women are wearing armor suited to intergalactic combat despite every single one of the male companions being dressed for the occasion. Jack (far right) has belts for a top, Samara (second from left) – a warrior hundreds of years old – wears a catsuit with a revealing cut down to her navel, and Miranda (center) wears a bodysuit so revealing you can see literally every contour of her body during the game.
The problem is not simply that these characters are hyper-feminized, or that their outfits are revealing, it’s that they are explicitly treated differently from the male characters and are dressed entirely inappropriately for the situations which they are presented with in the game. They are all presented primarily as sex objects and secondarily as characters (and their characters leave something to be desired – Miranda, Tali, Ashley, and in a way Jack all have major father issues that define everything about their actions).
Just to clarify because I don’t want it to seem like I’m railing only on Mass Effect, it’s one of my favorite games. It’s in no way unique in the problems it has with female characters.
As another example, let’s look at Anya Stroud and Sam in the recent release Gears of War 3 alongside their male counterparts:
Gears of War 3 takes place decades after Emergence Day, the apocalyptic cataclysm between humans and Locust on the planet Sera.
Let’s do some math. The first Gears of War takes place 14 years after Emergence Day (4 years after the incarceration of the protagonist, Marcus Fenix). It’s established that Marcus, his best friend Dom, and Anya are all veterans of the previous war on Sera, the Pendulum Wars. So, assuming they only fought one year of the Pendulum Wars and all enlisted at 17 (which isn’t true because Anya is an academy grad officer and Marcus is a decorated hero from the wars, but for argument’s sake, we’ll lowball the numbers), at the onset of the first game they’re all 32 years old at the absolute youngest. The second game takes place six months after the first, and the third eighteen months after that. So 34 is the absolute youngest any of these people are.
In the third game Marcus, Dom, Cole and Baird are all visibly older. They’re grizzled, worn, scarred and dirty. They’ve been fighting an unstoppable and unrelenting foe for sixteen years! Anya and Sam, however, remain ageless and clean. They have flawless makeup, no wrinkles, no scars, and cute haircuts (as opposed to keeping their hair tied back and out of their eyes, or cut short).
Again, the problem is not that they are attractive, busty, and thin women. There’s inherently nothing wrong with being attractive or having large breasts or being lithe from a lifetime of being on the run (though it’s more than a little unrealistic). The issue is that these women are presented so clearly different from the men with whom they have shared identical experiences and time alive. These women should have battle scars, they should have lines around their eyes from peering down a rifle scope for years. It takes away from the realism of a “this is the end of the world” mood when all the women seem immune to everything around them including physical damage and the space time continuum.
It’s interesting to consider this problem when applied to games with visible female protagonists, such as Lara Croft and Bayonetta, versus games with completely covered or not visible (first person) female protagonists like Samus Aran (of Metroid) and Chell (of Portal). There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been said about Lara before (she’s actually a poor role model and protagonist, her character is more or less void of characterization beyond her sex appeal though the reboot may attempt to change that) and the “subversiveness” of Bayonetta and the destruction of her foes through her femininity is arguably the most offensive ploy at “see, using/commoditizing sex and sex appeal to get what or where you want or need to be is empowering!” in gaming, but Samus and Chell are actually interesting to examine.
Samus is probably one of the, if not the most highly regarded female lead in gaming. The reveal the the end of Metroid that the form under the power armor was that of a woman was a great twist and really forced the player to re-examine any misconceptions he or she might have had about heroines (even if it was done in the sleaziest “look, a girl in a bikini!” way). Up until the unlockable Samus in Super Smash Brothers Brawl and later Other M, Samus kept her power armor on most of the time (unless you unlocked “good endings”), which was met by an interesting dichotomy: some game critics rightfully though it was pandering her character should have been above while others heralded it as an “about time” as if somehow, despite years of space ass kicking, she was totally unaccomplished until they could see her body on constant display (there’s multiple articles on “hot babes” in video games pointing out her curvaceous backside and large breasts).
Chell is seemingly the bright light in female game leads: she’s pretty average looking, she’s a woman of color, and the fact that she’s a woman is entirely inconsequential to the game. In Portal she’s a woman trapped in an experiment gone wrong, using her wits and some neat technology to escape a homicidal artificial intelligence. But what does it say about the industry when the best female character they can make is one that’s never seen, heard, or given a background?
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The Feminist Menagerie 