AmericanWiki: Cultural Practices: Women as Characters in Video Games
Women as Characters in Video Games
 Screenshot from the introductory cutscene to Borderlands (Gearbox 2009)
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Video games are an increasingly important cultural product of the United States. Americans are the primary consumers of video games, and the majority of mainstream video game titles—those that have budgets in the millions of dollars and extensive advertising campaigns associated with them, often called “AAA games”—are marketed towards, if not necessarily developed in, the United States. To a certain extent, games developed in other nations but sold in the United States are even more powerful representations of the construction of American identity than those that are developed within the US, as they are often specifically developed for and marketed toward an American audience.
So it is important to question exactly what ideas of America and American Culture are being constructed by, and recieved through, these games. While the video game market is made up of a great deal more than simply those big-budget “AAA” titles, they are the driving force behind the industry, and they are the games most likely to be played and interpolated by the mainstream American public. So the messages being constructed and received through mainstream video games should be investigated along a number of cultural studies lines. To that end, this article outlines what presence women have in mainstream narrative video games as of this time, the quality of their characterization, and the roles they play, both in the narrative and in the game-play elements.
Narrative in Video Games
This is a condensed summary; click the title for the full article.
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The poorly-translated and often ridiculed introduction to Zero Wing (Taoplan 1989)
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Modern game narrative takes most of its cues from Hollywood story-telling. Major story elements are most frequently revealed to the player by cinematic-style “cut-scenes,” where the player loses control of the action in order to watch characters interacting along pre-scripted sequences, often in pre-rendered visuals (which means that the images were created ahead of time in the developers studios and don’t use the game’s “engine” to create the images “on the fly”). These are, in essence, short films set in the game’s world which advance player understanding of his or her character’s place and role in the events which surround the game. They can be a powerful tool, and came to prominence with an influx of Japanese games in the late 1990s with the introduction of the Playstation (and especially the Playstation 2), which used CD-ROM storage, allowing for more information to be sent to the player than ever before.
There is another kind of narrative at work in video games, though. The act of “playing” the game, interacting with the mechanics and game-play elements, often allows players to perform actions totally unrelated to, and often in contradiction of, the narrative elements provided by developers. This interaction is discussed by game developers and critics as “ludic” or “ludonarrative” elements, from the latin for “play.”
Demographics
When discussing how games construct or reinforce ideas about identity and gender portrayals, it is important to know just who is experiencing these games, and who is making them. Unfortunately, hard data about the gender demographics of game playing and game creating are not widely available. However, anectodal evidence from industry insiders, as well as marketing ideas that the game publishers put forth, make it abundantly clear that the major focus for mainstream games is a male demographic. The general assumption is that this gender inequality in game playing is evening out, especially in the “casual” gaming market. Games like The Sims and Bejeweled, huge sellers in their own right, are thought to be more popular among women than men. But even in the “AAA” titles, it is thought that the number of women playing games is increasing. Long-time developers have also seen an increase in the number of women involved in the creation of and debate around video games. Where previously there might be a single woman (being constantly propositioned) at a video game industry exposition, at a recent DICE (Design Innovate Communicate Entertain) summit, given annually by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, Tom Bissell noted “quite a few women, all of whom… appeared fully engaged with rampant game talk” (73).
One case where there are some hard demographic data availble, however, is in the field of female representation in video games. In 2000, Elizabeth Buchanan headed a survey which Kline et al. described thusly:
It lists issues such as visibility (“do women appear at all in video games?”), agency (“do they have a significant role[…]”), point of view (“do games offer the ability of aligning oneself with a female character?”), intent (“what is it games are teaching to girls and young women?”), and address (“does the game industry as a whole ‘speak’ to women[…]”). (256)
This survey, sponsored by Children Now, found only sixteen percent of games investigated had female characters, and even fewer had female characters that could be player-controlled. This survey is of the games industry as a whole, but it is reasonable to assume that the “mainstream” games as a sub-group are similar, even ten years later.
Role Portrayal of Women
As the Buchanan report suggested, most portrayals of women in video games reduce the women to a “prop,” rather than a character in her own sense with agency and development (Kline et al. 256). One way to tell if a film has point-of-view that will relate to women is called the “Bechdel Test,” which is named after the cartoonist who popularized the idea. It suggests that a story will only have a female point-of-view if it has 1) at least two female characters who 2) talk to each other 3) about something other than a man (Bechdel). This works well for films, where viewers have little formal interaction with the work, but video games involve more choices on the part of the player.
To determine if a video game has a positive potrayal of women or not would be a complex task, so I decided to simply look at how women were characterized, whether players could choose a female character to use in the game, whether those characters were as useful in the game-play mechanics as the male characters, and if interactions between those female and male characters involved anything other than romance. For the most part, what I found was that, as in the Buchanan study, women were generally placed into one of a handful of specific roles that limited their characterization and agency. Video games in general have problems with stereotypes (especially games that ape the cinematic techniques of Hollywood blockbusters, which thrive on stereotypes), but the limitation of women was particularly egregious. Investigating these games for issues of representation for other genders, especially homosexual and transgendered individuals, would be very interesting, but is outside the scope of this article.
The roles for women that most commonly appeared were that of plot device—or “MacGuffin” to use Hitchcock’s term—voice of god, support, or sex object.
MacGuffin
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A MacGuffin is a plot device, or element which drives the narrative of a film by giving the characters motivation, but is often inconsequential to the viewer. It was popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, who in a 1939 lecture said "It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers" (Oxford English Dictionary). When a woman’s only purpose in a story is to give the main character a reason to quest, she becomes a MacGuffin. This occurred frequently with early melodramas, where the villian would place the love interest of the main character in danger, such as tied to the railroad tracks before an oncoming train. Examples include Princess Peach from Super Mario Brothers, Princess Zelda from The Legend of Zelda, and Beatrice from Dante's Inferno.
Voice of God
This is a condensed summary; click the title for the full article.
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Cortana, who lives inside the main character's armor in Halo (Bungie 2001)
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A number of games that do include female characters have them relegated to the role of “Voice of God.” While on the surface, this seems like an important and powerful role, since the voice of god directs the player towards the objectives he or she is to complete, in truth it is a role without agency, and with very little chance for characterization or development. Examples include the character of Cortana from Halo, who is a computer intelligence who spends most of the game inside the armor of the main character, Angel from Borderlands, and Anya Stroud from Gears of War.
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This is all the player sees of Foehammer, the dropship pilot in Halo (Bungie 2001)
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Background Support
If a female character in a game has much power at all, it is likely that she exists to support the player-character. These roles can take the form of traditionally feminine positions, such as nurses or healers, emotional support such as distant but loved family members (mothers, wives, girlfriends), and talented but physically weak spell-casters that are often referred to as priestesses or something similar, whose abilities usually “buff” or assist the abilities of other characters. Sometimes, female characters will be skilled in traditionally male roles, such as the dropship pilot Foehammer (her call-sign, one assumes) in Halo. But it is more common to find magical women such as the fairy in The Legend of Zelda, who can heal the character with a kiss.
Sexual Objects
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Women in popular media have often been portrayed as sexual objects, and video games are no different. A number of the most prominent female player-characters are custom-made for the viewing pleasure of the player, such as Lara Croft or Bayonetta, whose proportions are intentionally unrealistic, with long arms and legs. The finicky camera-positioning of Tomb Raider (1996) was joked about as being almost more adept at finding the character’s rear than it was at showing the player where they were trying to go. And a number of games recently have included mini-games for the player to direct the main character through sexual acts with women, including the Saint’s Row games and the God of War franchise.
Invisible in War
This is a condensed summary; click the title for the full article.
A majority of mainstream video game titles occur in “militarized” spaces: that of the battlefield, be it on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 or extraterrestrial planets in the near or far future. The modern military apparatus of the United States is still largely a male space, despite the advances that women have made in the military. Game makers expect military games to appeal mostly to men, so they don’t worry too much about including a female perspective. This adds up to making women invisible on the battlefield, wich is vastly unfair to reality, as it is to women who play games.
Women as Enemies
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Vary rarely are women ever enemies in video games
Sometimes they will play the “big bad” as in System Shock 2 or (we think) Borderlands
The only common female enemies are usually harpies, succubi, or other sexualized demonic female monsters (okay, Zombies, too, but that’s unique?)
Positive Characterizations
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Jill Valentine, the player-character from Resident Evil (Capcom 1996)
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Works Cited
This is a list of works cited on this page. To see a list of works cited for the whole article click here.
Bechdel, Alison. “The Rule.” Dikes to Watch Out For. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, October 1986. 22. Print.
Bungie Studios. Halo: Combat Evolved. Redmond, WA: Microsoft, 2001. Video Game.
Capcom Co., Ltd. Resident Evil. Osaka, Japan: Capcom Co., Ltd., 1996. Video Game
Gearbox Software. Borderlands. Novato, CA: 2K Games, 2009. Video Game.
Kline, Stephen, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter. Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing. Montreal: Queen’s University Press, 2003. Print
Nintendo Co., Ltd. Super Mario Brothers. Kyoto: Japan: Nintendo Co., Ltd., 1985. Video Game.
Platinum Games. Bayonetta. Tokyo, Japan: Sega Corporation, 2010. Video Game
Taoplan. Zero Wing. Tokyo, Japan: Taito Corporation, 1989. Video Game.
AmericanWiki: Cultural Practices: Women as Characters in Video Games
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