The Video Game Gender Wars Explode!

There is a huge battle of the sexes going on right now in the world of video games. Two battles in fact, one between the developers of Tomb Raider and some angry women, another between a blogger and some hostile boys and men. In both cases there is a target – the blogger, Tomb Raider – in both cases there are attackers – angry males, angry females – and in both cases the attackers are reacting less to what their targets are actually doing and more to their own underlying fears and concerns.

Case 1: Tropes vs. Women in Video Games

Let’s start with the blogger.  Her name is Anita Sarkeesian, and she recently started a Kickstarter project to raise money for “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” which is to be a series of videos “exploring female character stereotypes throughout the history of the gaming industry.”

The series is a follow up to “Tropes vs. Women,” which dealt with certain common film stereotypes of women, like the “evil demon seductress” and the “manic pixie dream girl.” The video game version will include such game staples as the “damsel in distress,” the “fighting fuck toy,” and the “sexy villainous.”

Sarkeesian figured she could make her series for $6,000. She raised that quickly. But she also raised the fury of male gamers who posted savage comments on the kickstarter video’s youtube page mixing rage, sexism and a big dose of anti-semitism. Sarkeesian encountered a lot of hostility elsewhere, including the hacking of her wikipedia page.

The hostility was particularly extraordinary because her proposal was so mild. She said she wanted to look at clichéd female video game characters. Anyone who’s not a complete idiot would have to readily admit that these are quite common. But the attackers acted as though she were going to single-handedly destroy all they hold dear with her series of feminist videos. True, many of the attackers were certainly just sullen 13-year-old boys, but sadly, there are a lot of asshole gamers of every age. On the bright side, this nastiness resulted in a strong counterpunch; Sarkeesian’s project received almost $159,000, and will now have over twice as many videos with higher production values. 

Case 2: Tomb Raider

Around the same time this was going on, a trailer for the upcoming Tomb Raider game and an interview with its executive producer created a massive feminist backlash against the game, which, like the Sarkeesian’s video series, does not actually exist yet.

Tomb Raider aims to be a “reboot” of a series that has been rebooted several times before. The game, to be released next year, focuses on Lara Croft before she became the self-assured adventurer of previous games. In the trailer we see a young woman lost in the jungle and terrified, desperately trying to make her way to safety and getting bruised and injured in the process. She is far more vulnerable (and less endowed) than previous incarnations.

There is also a scene where she encounters armed bad guys. While her hands are bound, one of them corners her and does something you’ve seen in dozens of films, he leers at her and runs his hand down her thigh. Then, in a less common occurrence, she bites his ear, gets his gun and shoots him.

At the same time this trailer came out, the game’s executive producer, Ron Rosenberg, was interviewed by Kotaku. During the interview, as he was explaining how the game makes the player feel for Lara, he said “they try to rape her.”

That created a huge explosion. Tomb Raider would be a game in which Lara Croft is bruised and bloodied, almost raped, tortured for the pleasure of male gamers. The developers quickly declared that there was no attempted rape, that what you saw in the video was all there was, but by then all hell had broken loose. It didn’t help that Rosenberg had also said that players see Lara not as an extension of themselves but rather as someone to protect, which suggested that he thought all gamers were male (and that all males could not emphathize with women).

The irony is that one of the purported goals of the game was to create a less sexualized, cartoonish Lara Croft, a goal furthered by choosing as lead writer is Rhianna Pratchett, who has been working on the game since “it’s early inception” and whose game Mirror’s Edge contains one of Anita Sarkeesian “all time favorite female characters.”

What is Going On?

So, a woman says, I’m going to talk about sexism in video games and she is met with outrage, an outrage that seems to have bypassed her previous series on film sexism. A game’s few seconds of sexual menace becomes a huge controversy, even though movies have shown far worse.

What’s going on?  Here’s my take on it:

In the early days of video games they were primarily a male pursuit. In fact, they were primarily a nerd male pursuit. But over the years they became more mainstream and less geeky. While at first only the nerd females were joining the nerd males, eventually gaming was a huge part of the culture, and as women became more and more interested in video games, they began to ask to be treated as something more than interlopers.

Women started asking questions like, why if I choose a female character in a MMORPG do I have to wear a bikini? Why do so many games feature heroic men and simpering women? Why can’t we have games where women are cool, smart, tough, and properly dressed for being shot at?

And when they asked those questions, men who thought of video games as their thing heard, “we are going to ruin games. We want them to be really easy and full of unicorns with pink saddles. We want to get rid of foul language and blood and have lots of games with Barbies. We are going to ruin the thing you love most, because we are terrible bitches who don’t want boys to have any fun.”

And that is the subtext underlying these reactions. Furious boys look at Tropes vs. Women in Video Games and see women coming to take their toys away. Women hear talk of rape in Tomb Raider and think, those men are doing it again, turning us into pathetic torture-porn mannequins.

What is really happening is: video games are evolving. It’s an inevitable process in any art form, but it’s a very messy process, action and reaction, steps forward and backward. And the final irony of these two controversies is that those under attack are essentially on the same side. Sarkeesian wants a dialogue about how women are portrayed in games. Tomb Raider is attempting to portray a tough and resourceful human being rather than a buxom cartoon. Both want games to evolve.

There is something very personal about video games. You do not watch them, you inhabit them, and the video game gender wars are not just about what we play, but what we want our second world to be like. Video games have a pre-feminist quality, and women are fighting battles in the video game world that their mothers fought decades ago in the real world.

Expect the yelling to continue.

Now this is the Internet

Recently a blogger got access to a backup drive of a shared network from Infocom, which published most of the great text adventure games of the '80s. He decided to post correspondence about a proposed
Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that was abandoned.

For fans of Infocom it's an interesting article, but the most interesting part is an almost endless comments section populated with posts from old Infocom employees. The comments make a lively discussion. Michael Bywater, who is the subject of some negative correspondence, expresses fury that the blogger didn't bother to contact anyone involved to get a fuller story, and there's a lively discussion about the responsibility of journalists and bloggers and the legality of releasing this information. There are also a lot of nasty shots at Bywater, whose fury does not sit well with the blogger's fans (the nastiest comments were apparently removed by the blogger). This is mixed in with comments from other Infocomers discussing and clarifying the game, most notably a long, detailed post by Steve Meretzky. The best post is from Bywater, who after a couple of days of furious emails calms down and posts a wildly funny mock up of a text adventure and announces that he has agreed to write about the abandoned game for Wired. There are also a lot of people writing in just to say they loved Infocom games, which is less interesting (Bywater, by the way, apparently was the main writer on my favorite Infocom game Beauracracy).

Before the Internet, where could you read a corporation's internal memos and then have a lively discussion with the people who wrote those memos? It's so cool.

screw you, fanboys

Recently I came across a pretty aggravating thread trashing me for my review of Bioshock. It was remarkable both because it was a collection of furious diatribes against me in spite of my generally glowing review and because it was full of nonsense, include a statement that I just took over the column from a guy who has never written it.

It annoyed me enough that I decided to register for the forum so I could reply to that thread, but it seems new members have to be okayed by a moderator who has apparently gone AWOL, since it's been a couple of weeks and I'm still not able to post. So just for the record I'm putting my reply here. I'd been meaning to blog at some point in more detail about the problems with Bioshock's story anyway; it drives me crazy how critics keep acclaiming the game's storytelling, which is really quite weak.

Some fanboy also recently graffitied my wikipedia entry; probably someone mad that I didn't declare Halo 3 the greatest game in the history of the universe.

Here's the reply I was going to post to quartertothree [WARNING: BIOSHOCK SPOILERS BELOW].

Just came across this thread. It’s fine that you disagree with me, I disagree with critics all the time. Although I don’t usually rant and rave about people who positively review something I like because I disagree with a couple of points. (The last thing I felt like ranting about was the San Francisco movie critic who said “Click!” was almost perfect; that’s just insane.) But there are a lot of things said about me in this thread that simply are untrue, so I wanted to respond.

First off, I played BioShock all the way through, down to the very sweet final cut scene where you grow old and all the little girls love you. I saved almost all the little sisters and only killed one just to see what it was like, but restarted from a save point after that so I wouldn’t sully my good guy status (I like playing good guys in games, it’s just a preference).

I don’t know why, since I repeatedly talked about how great the game was, you would assume I hadn’t played it. Why would I not play a brilliant game? Is it really impossible to believe someone could play the same game as you and disagree with your take on it?

Second, Seth Schiesel never wrote the game theory column, except for a couple of columns when the Times was auditioning new game columnists. I have been writing the column for years and years. Seth writes articles on gaming but not, for the Times, reviews (with one or two exceptions). But I imagine it’s more fun for some of you to read Seth’s articles because, since they are reporting rather than reviewing, they don’t say anything critical about a game that could upset you.

What I write are reviews, in spite of what one poster said. This poster also mentioned my review of Daikatana, which is odd since I never reviewed Daikatana for the Times, although I did briefly pan it for some long-forgotten publication that I’m sure he never read.

The reason I write about more than one game in a review is because that’s what the Times wants from me (it started when they changed the column from weekly to biweekly and decided they didn’t want to lessen the number of games reviewed). Rather than trying to find two thematically similar games, I try to find the games I feel most deserve attention and then write a transition between them. People have complained about this before, but I have actually grown to like the approach. Anyway, there are already so many good games I don’t have space for that I would hate to leave out any more than I already have to.

Now as for the Art Deco thing, people seem to be making the assumption that I believe all the buildings should have been rebuilt to reflect modern architecture. Yes, that would be a stupid point, but it’s certainly not one I was making. Keep in mind that Art Deco doesn’t just mean the shell of the buildings. It means all the furnishings, fixtures, posters and ads on the walls. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that it’s odd that a society would stay that aesthetically static for so long; it would suggest that there is not a single creative person trying out new ideas. But it was a pretty brief comment so I don’t know why there’s such a focus on it. I love Art Deco, it’s my favorite architectural style and I think it’s a tragedy that when it went out of fashion many of those buildings were destroyed because people considered them tacky. But I don’t think it’s wrong to point out that it is highly unusual for a city to be so creatively stagnant.

I did not, as a couple of people pointed out, write the article’s headline, and I was surprised that was what the editors focused on, but I am okay with their choice. Since my main concern was telling people what a great game BioShock was, I did not spend much time on the faults with the story, but here’s something I wrote to someone who emailed me when the game came out:

----------------------------------------------------
Because of a lack of space I didn't get to critique the narrative structure of BioShock as much as I would have liked. I actually find the seemingly universal ecstasy over the story puzzling. The game starts strong, but once it gets started it really just relies on that momentum. Half-Life had an interesting twist (discovering the army was trying to kill you) and the intriguing ongoing mystery of the guy in the suit. Max Payne started off with a cool opener, but it also had cool dream sequences to keep up that sense that this was a game that was really trying. I don’t feel BioShock made the same effort to keep the story moving. BioShock has a completely expected twist and a wandering plot; a big chunk of the game is simply killing people for some guy; that's not a story that moves forward, that's a story that wanders off into the alley and does some shit and then wanders back into the main plot.

BioShock is like Myst; the only real story is the back story. I don't say that's terrible, but I really don't think it's an especially brilliant approach either. To me it seems like the praise for the story has more to do with how poorly most action games tell stories than it does with the quality of BioShock's own narrative.

I was also disappointed when someone told me that even if you kill all the Little Sisters, they still save you at that point in the game where you are lead to safety by them. To me, that seems lazy; if I play the game as a bad guy, I expect the story to change as a result. I don’t just want a different final cut scene. (If the guy who told me that is wrong, and the little girls don’t save you if you kill them all, then I apologize for this criticism.)

Fortunately it’s easy to find critics that will give every popular game a rating of 100, so it should be pretty easy to avoid nasty people like me who dare to offer minor criticisms of a game in their rave review of it.

I thank the couple of people who pointed out themselves some of the things I have just pointed out. I salute your thoughtful consideration.

what some say in 1200 words, others say in 7

I spent about 1200 words talking about how I thought Halo 3 was just Halo 2 in better graphics. But in the user review section of metacritic, someone beautifully summed up everything I had to say in only 7 words:

A very fancy patch for Halo 2.

The Christian thing to do: use the Virginia Tech tragedy for some free press

Yesterday I received this press release:

Hi Charles,

In the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, it is now more important than ever to take a serious look at what violent video games are teaching America's youth. One company, Digital Praise Inc., has been trying to change the content of computer and video games for a few years now, and as more and more of these horrific events take hold, it becomes clearer as to why Digital Praise is working so hard to do what they do. As a leading manufacturer of Christian themed, family-friendly entertainment software, Digital Praise has created six popular game series that combat the ever-growing trend of violent video games.

Would you be interested in learning more about these games? I can also arrange an interview with the founders about their views on how violent video games influence and affect our kids.

This is disgusting on so many levels. First off, while the VT killer did play videogames in high school, like 99.9% of teenage boys, there is no indication that he was a serious gamer, and only nut jobs like anti-game activist and crafter of unconstitutional anti-video game legislation are suggesting otherwise. So this doesn't have any real basis in anything. And I also think it's foolish for a game publisher to be trashing the video game industry; like it or not you are a part of that industry and if some forms of free expression start being censored there is no guarantee that this won't come around to bit you sooner or later.

But mainly, it's just really, really disgusting that a game company is trying to use a terrible tragedy to sell its games. It is reprehensible, and the people involved should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Although I am often amazed at the capacity of some Christians to not feel shame at grotesque behavior.

One last point: Christian preacher Jim Jones killed a lot more people than any video game fanatic I can think of. So what's more dangerous, Counter-strike or The Bible?

God of War II review

Due to reasons I'm not going to get into, the review I wrote for my column in the New York Times of God of War II is not going to run. Since it's quite a good review, IMO, and it would be a shame for it to remain unread, I'm putting it here for anyone who wanders this way.

GOD OF WAR II

I have slain gods. I have snapped the spines of minotaurs. I have bent time to my will and brought Olympus to its knees. So bow down. Bow down! Not to me, but to the designers of SCEA’s incredible action adventure game God of War II, which turns every player into a raging force of destruction.

God of War 2 continues the story of Kratos, a brutish soldier who in the first God of War game set out to kill Ares, the God of War, and ended by replacing him.

As the sequel begins, the god Kratos is leading his Spartan worshipers to bloody victories. Things are going pretty well for Kratos for the first few minutes of the game, but things take a turn for the worse when Zeus comes along and kills him.

Death slows most people down, but it just makes Kratos mad, and with the help of gods opposed to Zeus he sets out to persuade the Three Fates to return him to his last minute of life for a do over.

God of War was a game of massive scale, full of giant beasts and mammoth structures, but the sequel aspires to dwarf its predecessor. The game kicks off with a battle against a living, hundred foot tall statue, and then just gets bigger. At times the game’s immensity is overwhelming. At one point Kratos must bring to life four metal horses, each one hundreds of feet tall. He reaches them by walking along their harness, a chain thousands of feet long. Elsewhere he must free his mount, Pegasus, from a rock monster whose fingernails are longer than Kratos.

Kratos himself seems unimpressed by his outsized opponents. A conscienceless anti-hero, he is masculinity run amok, unafraid of death and pain, throwing himself into every insanely dangerous situation in a way that suggests extreme bravery or severe psychosis.

As in the first game, God of War II is divided between savage battles and clever environmental puzzles. Everything about the game has a magnificent intensity. Amidst stone ruins, Kratos swings his deadly chained blades at soldiers and monsters or hurls them into the air and then pummels them back into the ground. As enemies become more powerful, Kratos gains additional powers, learning to slow time and generate earthquakes. When an icon appears over an opponent’s head, the player can press key combinations to perform remarkably savage and deadly attacks that spray blood over the scenery.

Puzzles are often just as savage, as when Kratos throws a wounded soldier to his death to breach a wall or uses heavy machinery to smash and trap the many arms of yet another gigantic creature. It might seem rather odd that every monster in ancient Greece happens to be surrounded by mechanisms whose only possible use would be to vanquish those monsters, but it certainly is convenient.

Zeus isn’t the only mythological figure Kratos has to deal with, and he gets along with few of them; when Kratos needs to glide a long distance he grabs Icarus and tears his wings off.

No matter how many times I use words like huge and immense and vast, I just can’t properly convey the grand sweep of God of War II. With an epic story that brings its twisted Greek mythology to ferocious life, gripping battles, logical, challenging puzzles and awe-inspiring visuals, the game is electrifying. And pitch perfect game mechanics that include responsive controls and a camera that always supplies the ideal view make the experience seamless. The original God of War was an almost perfect gaming experience; the sequel doesn’t need that “almost.”

Let the prostration commence.