As part of my videogame analysis and criticism course, this week’s readings focused on violence, racism, and sex in video games.  Two of the readings, which focus on violence and sex, were mostly from the mouths of game developers; they can be found here. Although these three issues are clearly contentious and controversial in gaming – from all perspectives, including that of the player, creator, and parent of the player – none of the readings, and indeed almost none of the readings I’ve done in this field, actually relate to how these games view women.  Predominantly, I’m finding, as sexual objects, often devoid of the personality found in their male counterparts in the same game.

I found the What They Play piece paricularly disturbing considering that  it addressed sex inside of videogame worlds and narratives, and focused directly on the act rather than the participants as if it were some sort of Roman arena game and the participants unworthy of notice by the spectators as being “people.” Is the sexual act – both as an “unchanging” thing from game to game and the detail in which it is rendered – really the only thing worthy of exploration in a piece like this? I do not think so.

Mass Effect contained a sex scene which generated enormous amounts of controversy. However, as I did not play Mass Effect long enough to develop a sexual relationship, I cannot comment on it directly – but I can comment on what I have experienced. To do this, I look to three games that have captured my attention in recent months, and the suggestions that they make about sexual relationships, those games being The Witcher, Risen, and Champions Online. (Note: Champions Online doesn’t seem to actually have sex acts inside of it, but I am interested in it as far as it portrays physical characteristics of women.)

To begin: The Witcher. A dark, brooding, and often difficult action-RPG game from the eastern side of Europe, The Witcher follows the path of Geralt, a monster hunter, in his quest to figure out what in the hell is going on with the world. While a rather great game on its own that I enjoyed immensely, its treatment of women as sexual objects is nothing less than childish. So childish, in fact, that when Geralt conquers a woman – often by way of showering her in gifts and complements without actually developing any sort of real relationship – a trading-card-style piece of artwork is shown of the woman in an often comprimising position. By comprimising, I mean draped in nothing but a sheet with a black cat centered directly over her crotch. By childish, well -

Although the actual sexual act is shown in blurry, hasty camera shots that reveal no actual details about the act, the process of getting to the act is perhaps more disturbing than anything the act itself could be. Encountering a woman in The Witcher is tantamount to initiating a mini-game; the first question tends to be, “Is she one of the NPC women that will fuck me?” followed by (assuming that the answer was ‘yes’), “How can I get her to fuck me?” The second question is relevant because each woman seemed to have a particular path that must be followed to convince them to engage in coitus; as mentioned above, some women seek gifts, like flowers or chocolate. Some require a topical, conversational relationship and can be rhetorically convinced to disrobe and engorge. Others require Geralt to undertake a quest of sorts, and reward him with fleshy trophies and a trading card.   (Here is a link to a video with all of the sex cards.)

My language concerning the first question asked when encountering a woman is important and intentional: “Is she one of the NPC women that will fuck me?” I feel the most crass language is necessary here, as the object here isn’t even getting to potentially see a naked lady: rather, it’s a mission to collect a trophy. In a game genre dominated by item-collection, little more can be expected when the player is given a trading card for a sexual conquest.

In a similar vein as The Witcher, the recent Pirahna Bites’ game Risen treats women similarly, although doesn’t objectify them quite as literally. For example, as written about by Alec Meer on Rock, Paper, Shotgun , the first woman – and the first NPC the player encounters – is dressed in a bikini top and a long skirt. To quote Meer, “At this earliest of stages, I don’t have the foggiest what the game’s general attitude to women is – but the first example Risen gives of it is not a positive one[,]” and I found that upon finding myself in this situation that I absolutely agreed.

of which lacked women altogether with one notable exception), and found that women exist in quantity only in the whorehouse. Whether it was out of curiosity or chauvenism, I solicitied one of the prostitutes, paying her owner fifty gold pieces.

Almost thankfully, the game neglected to provide me with even a cutscene, instead blacking the screen out and having my character deliver stereotypical lines about how he had places to be. Incidentally, she said I was the best that she’d ever had, and gave me a magical scroll as thanks. At least she didn’t give me a trading card.

The Witcher and Risen, in addition to being similar thematically and in terms of genre, are also direct narratives from the game writers to the player. This sort of relationship forces a certain responsibility on behalf of the game-maker to understand the messages that they are sending: similar to a novelist and a film maker, the views of the artist are often expressed by their characters, whether consciously or not. It’s pretty easy to play through The Witcher and Risen and have eye-roll (or disgust) moments and move on, chalking it up to male chauvinism and sexism at the developer level. They’re both pretty clearly games targeted at 20-something men, and should probably be viewed as such.

(This is one of the screenshots used to display the graphical improvements to the Witcher Enhanced Edition, and is the most common image found when searching on Google for it.  Interesting choice of subject matter.)

However, some games – like Champions Online – are perhaps even more subversive in their views on women than even games like The Witcher and Risen. In Champions Online, as with many other online and role-playing games, the player is allowed to customize the physical appearance of their character. This allows for a veil to be placed in front of the eyes of the player, shielding them from what might be sexist ideas that the game-makers may have: surely, if the player can create their own character, then if it is a false, media-driven idealized image of a woman, then it is the fault of the player.

But what if the player cannot help but create this “idealized woman”? I should probably explain what I mean by “idealized”; the purpose of Champions Online is to create a superhero-type character that can aspire to physical and mental perfection, flawless in physique and in mind. Unfortunately, the “idealized” woman of Cryptic’s otherwise pretty-decent MMORPG happens to be the “idealized” woman of American media; tall, long-legged, large-breasted, seductively-hipped.

(full-size for maximim here, full-size for minimum here)

Alright, so this speaks to what Cryptic views as the “ideal” woman – but what does that have to do with an excellent and staggeringly-flexible character-creation tool? Problematically, for all of the options allowed in character creation, small, reasonable breasts are simply not an option. Literally, not an option – see the screenshots below. Damningly, when creating a new character and enterting the “Custom Body” menu, the “Breasts” slide bar begins fully maxed-out. Further, it appears to be difficult (if not impossible) to create a more masculine-looking woman. One of the variants allowed in character generation is the posturing of the character; average, heroic, huge and beast for the men, and average, heroic, vixen and beast for the women. My favorite posture for male characters it that of the beast; hunched over, ready to lunge, ready to kill – but the beast posture for women is rather a girl leaning forward on one leg, which looks nowhere near as badass or aggressive.

The other stances are also troublingly sexual; even average, which for the males means standing with both feet firmly planted and not favoring either side (you know, standing normally and at-ease) .. but for females means flaring the fingers ever-so-slightly and ever-so-coyly, with one leg bent forward at the knee. In terms of posturing, hip and breast size, it is impossible to create a non-over-sexualized female character.

In The Witcher and in Risen, the player could choose not to progress down avenues of fucking women NPCs, and is actually fully-capable of treating women with respect and dignity in the course of their adventures. However, in Champions Online, the player is explicitly barred from playing anything but a

full-hipped, skinny-but-long-legged, fully-breasted woman that carries an appearance of lustful detachment.

Although the quests are generic and boring and lacking and character and, thus, tend to avoid putting women into any sort of constricting role in the confines oftheir narrative, the female figures of Champions Online have nevertheless managed to be more chauvenist and objectified than any of those found in The Witcher and Risen. Many, many more games provide examples similar to these three in the ways in which women are viewed as sexual objects first and characters second, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find another that managed to do this with its character creation system alone.

Unfortunately, I believe that the reason topics like this aren’t really addressed, either in the form of assigned readings for a class or from the mouths of interviewers and game developers, is because the way that women are viewed just isn’t thought about. Even though there are more female gamers out there now than there ever have been, it’s still very much a male-dominated pastime. I fear that as a result of this, game developers write their female characters exclusively for men. Not that this justifies anything – far from it – but I believe that it explains a lot.

And that’s part of remedying the situation – it isn’t enough to say, “This is happening.” It isn’t remedying anything by saying, “Men make games for men.” If gaming writers are slowly beginning to feel comfortable confronting sex and racism in the context of a game, then they can become comfortable with those most-dreaded of frameworks: feminism. It really strikes me that the best way to shift the perceptions of women inside of a game is to be able to identify bad perceptions where they lie, and point others in that direction. Once people know what to ask for, I’d like to think game developers would be willing to give it to us. Or maybe just me, but hopefully not.

I don’t know, though.  I’ll close with a quote from one of the developers of The Witcher from an interview with 1up:

“In the game, you can pick up girls. I’m going to show you where to find one, and you can go to bed with her.” Um… OK. We hit the village and quickly find a milkmaid willing to chat. After being impressed with a bouquet of flowers, the maid leads Geralt off the screen to do the deed. In return, I am rewarded a playing card and a painting of the milkmaid topless and pouring a ladle of milk over her bare breasts. “Through the whole game, when you pick up a girl and go to bed with her, you receive a card like this,” says Iwanicki. We observe an awkward silence.”

-Michal Iwanicki

Below, some of the other male/female pose comparisons of the Champions Online character creator.  Note: all poses we made using the default costume, face, and body options.  Note the muscle definition of each, and keep in mind: these are supposed to be superheroes.

Heroic Pose:

Vixen and Huge Pose:

And, finally and most damningly, the choices for average:

Although I was an remain quite a fan of the Total War series, there are a variety of things that Creative Assemblies managed to horribly execute in their most recent AAA release, that being Empire: Total War.  Not least among their errs was, at times, horrendous AI and pathing; even after the first major patch to the game, enemy (NPC) armies still could not transport an army over a passage over water and then disembark on the other shore.  This was a particularly strange problem as I have a very clear memory of losing the British Isles to the Spanish during a prolonged game of Medieval II (the predecessor to Empire), so it surprised me to see something so fundamental to the game – especially when, historically speaking, disembarking an army on a shore was the most militarily significant thing a nation could do – to be completely non-present when dealing with enemy, computer-controlled armies.  I, as a player, was fully able to do just that – and indeed, it’s about the only way to conquer far-flung regions.

Stranger and more jarring perhaps was an issue that seems to have gone unfixed in this new DLC/update/whatever the current buzz word is; that of Native American combat.  The 18th century was, for much of the European and even Asian world, a time of heavily-regimented, trained, and organized foot soldiers.  Lines of men three ranks deep, all firing muskets and mounting bayonets for a charge, wasn’t an uncommon sight – for Europeans and Asians.  But for the Native Americans?  Even in the video posted above, legions of them swarm over open ground to close with European musket-lines; are you kidding me?  That sort of regimented combat style took a century of learning, combined with the technology of the musket, in order to produce results.  Even Rome, that obscenely powerful military empire, took several hundred years before it had perfected its system of phalanx and legion.  

What the Eurasian powers of the 18 century and the Roman legions just prior to AD 0 have in common is that they were organized and designed around principles of intimidation, discipline, and an implacable power.  This is why the Romans prevailed over many, many native tribes – a phalanx, with each man armed with a shield a gladius (a short sword), and a few javelins – is going to be nearly-invincible to tribal warriors without armor, light shields, and hatchets.  Incidentally, this is also why the US was able to prevail against the western planes Indians; regimented discipline, historically speaking, almost always prevails over guerilla-style, tribal warfare tactics.  (Note that Rome fell to those tactics – they’re cheaper to keep going over longer periods of time, and have the tendency to slowly bleed the enemy dry.)

What’s genuinely bizarre about Empire is that fighting any tribal group – whether they’re a small sect in India or the Americas – is that they fight in the same regimented, rank-and-file formation of the Europeans.  Sure, this was probably due to game engine considerations – the entire game is built around this type of fighting – but is that really the best that Creative Assemblies could do?  Even the Native Americans, when armed with bow and arrow, stand three men deep and fifteen across while showering the enemy with missiles.  Their melee troops, armed with tomahawk, charge in as a giant unit, 60 men strong.

No bleeding into the forests, no ambushes from swamps with only five men, no quick-and-dirty hatchet work at the rear flank where the cannons are; just march-march-march-SHOOT-reload, repeat.  Which isn’t a problem – Empire makes this process wonderfully and perhaps strangely entertaining (I found this era of warfare dull until playing Empire), but just the same, it’s .. jarring, and almost painful as a student of history, to see Native Americans marching about as if they had uniforms and muskets.

So it will be interesting to see what Creative Assemblies musters for this new DLC-thing: with the focus of the thing to be the natives, I imagine a great many changes are in the pipes for the faction-type as a whole.  But will the engine adapt – will the game itself adapt – to a more Native American and unconventional model of warfare?  It’s hard to say – the video certainly doesn’t look terribly promising.

Any given sentence contains within its confines a host of meanings; that of the topical definition of the sum of words, that of an intended idea implied both in and around the meanings established through topical definition and, often, as a consequence of this composite, a potentially unintended meaning.  I personally hold that any given writer or speaker is responsible for the overall understanding of his words, whether intended or not.  Generally, this holds up well enough in the day-to-day life of reading and hearing and understanding through transitions between media types do not prove difficult.  With this in mind, I’ve chosen to look at a presumably unintended implication of a particular computer game: Command and Conquer: Generals.

In C&C:G, the player chooses from one of three different armies, each having different units and structures, and each with the intent of killing the hell out of whomever deigns to oppose them.  This is pretty standard stuff as far as contemporary real-time strategy games go – since Starcraft, most major RTS releases have had, at minimum, three different factions/races that the player can choose from.  What separates C&C:G from most other RTS games, however, is that it decided to incorporate real-world factions, and all of the weight that each culture brings.

Those three factions are the People’s Republic of China, the United States of America, and the GLA – the Global Liberation Army.  As stated, each army has different units, although there are clear similarities amongst the three.  For example, all three of the factions have a basic, rifle-armed soldier that is responsible for doing a great deal of the grunt work that their factions require of them.  I am not particularly interested in the similarities of the three gun-toting grunt soldiers, but rather their differences – and even then, I’m interested only in the perceived and implied cultural differences among them as established by Electronic Arts, the game’s developers.

What I found to be the most interesting undertone in C&C:G are the voices of individual units.  Similar again to Starcraft, each unit has a different set of speeches that issue forth depending on what you order them to do, or even if one merely selects the unit.  The Ranger – the USA’s grunt soldier – says things like, “Always prepared,” “Ready for action,” and “We’ll lead the way.”  These are pretty standard tropes for American troops to fall back on, boyscout-like in presentation and always spoken from a position of military dominance.  Things get more interesting when one looks to the Chinese, however, whom say things like “We are the red guard,” “Defenders of peace,” and “China, do not forget me!”

The Chinese voice responses from units mostly revolve around China as a collective, communistic entity; the “we” invoked by the Chinese is entirely dissimilar to that of the American “we,” suggesting for the Chinese that they are part of a far larger organization that supersedes even the military conflict and harkening to the Red Army as a whole (and a key component of China), whereas the American “we” is simply “we” in the context of that particular military unit – the soldiers that are immediately present.  These strings can be found throughout the unit voices for both armies, China continually emphasizing Communistic and collective ideas and the USA considering its military force to be the sole consideration.

More or less, the two ideas presented here are clear and aren’t particularly controversial – at least, when one extrapolates China and Communism a few decades into the future.  What I do find to be particularly controversial, however, is the treatment of the third faction, the Global Liberation Army.

The GLA aren’t merely another player in a global war, but rather a similar extrapolation to that of China – only with various Muslim/terrorist groups found throughout the Middle East.  I do not use ‘Muslim groups,’ or even ‘terrorist,’ lightly, as every image and voice presented by EA for the GLA are inarguably Islamic stereotypes and extrapolations of current images.  Even the name of the basic grunt troop for the GLA – “Rebel” – is suggestive of something more sinister than anything either of the other two armies can provide.  As with the China/USA paradigm, things grow more interesting when adding another faction.

Almost every member of the GLA is suicidal and fanatical, with such choice phrases as “No cost is too great!” and “The higher order shall reign.”  The former hardly needs explanation; it’s a pretty clear image of a suicidal soldier fully-prepared to die for his cause.  Not to say that the Americans and the Chinese aren’t willing to do the same, but neither of these factions actually voice it with the conviction – or even voice it at all – of the GLA.  “The higher order shall reign” is also an almost-damning statement; although it doesn’t quite directly state it, when taken with consideration of the rest of the highlights of the GLA faction, it’s almost the same as saying, “Allah is the one true God” or even, “Islam will dominate everything!”  A final GLA quote, “Our courage will be seen by all!” is even further different from anything the other two factions say; whereas the USA and the Chinese are focused on securing military objectives, defeating their enemies, and winning battles with their voice-overs, the GLA seems to, inexplicably, be terribly concerned with how their actions are perceived by “all.”  “All” is another tricky term; do they mean the people of the world as a whole?  Their brethren soldiers and the enemy?  Just one of them?  Regardless, it shifts the focus from the intent of their actions and their goals and into the realm of public opinion.

This is particularly troubling because, while China and the United States arguably have a national identity, at least militarily, that is effectively portrayed by C&C:G, EA decided to instead use stereotype and fear to paint the portrait of a generic, Islamic nation.  Although in the course of the game it is stated that the GLA arises from no clear nationality and is made of a variety of groups, it nonetheless combines Wahabism with terrorism with absolutely no remorse, or even second thought.  Why is it that this region of the world – culturally, philosophically, and politically – can be represented through such gross and inaccurate stereotypes while the far West and East are not?  EA doesn’t say, and I would be remiss to put words in their collective mouths.

None of these ideas would be particularly relevant had the factions been based on fictional groups of people.  There’s a certain power in creating almost-entirely fictional warring cultures, as it allows statements like those above to be made without actually suggesting anything about real-world counterparts; creative and poetic license can go a long way.  But when groups are so clearly based from real-world groups, doesn’t that mean that anything said about them in the confines of the game are more or less also being said about them in real-life?

Not all Muslims – and certainly not all of the soldiers found in that part of the world – are fanatical, suicidal terrorist figures, and yet they are presented as such in C&C:G.  Why is it that the American stereotype attributes – egotism, a sense of entitlement, and an absolute belief in their superiority – aren’t displayed in as damning of terms as that of the GLA?  The same for Chinese collectivism; it’s looked down on in the game (especially when taken in consideration with the structures the Chinese have, like Propaganda Towers), but it isn’t given anywhere nearly the negative connotation that the GLA are.

Further emphasizing this disparity of tone and, indeed, likeability of the factions, are the units themselves; while I’ll not drag this post out even further by examining them, I’ll leave you with this: the auxiliary foot troop for the Americans is the medic, the auxiliary foot troop for the Chinese is the computer hacker, and the auxiliary foot troop for the GLA is, well, the terrorist – a suicide bomber that kills himself to do an amount of damage to an enemy unit or structure.

Here are some things that I want to explore over the semester:

1: Can narrative be an actual game mechanic? 1a: how, exactly, is a game mechanic defined?  Is this a flexible or rigid definition, or has it even been solidly established yet?

2: How in the world to talk about a game like Achron (http://achrongame.com/), which permits two opposing players to move through a window of time on a real-time basis.  For example, a structure that is capable of creating a new unit does so, and that unit travels backwards in time to before it was created – and it then destroys the building that created it, before it was created.  I have a mental image in my mind of how exactly to /think/ of this, but expressing it in words proves difficult.  Paradoxes are fun .. or something.

3: I take to the literary criticism school of thought that authorial intent is irrelevant, and that the only important detail in a work is what the author /does/ say, not what he tries to say.  This becomes more important as the length of time elapsed between the work published and the author’s death (hah) grows longer; we can never ask Shakespeare exactly how we should interpret the character of Feste in Twelfth Night, for example, and are thus left to contextual evidence and our own interpretations for validity.  Does this apply to video games, particularly when developer commentaries are so prevelant?  Is it at all fair for looking at games based on what they /could/ have done, rather than what they did?  I find the only relevant detail to be how the game exists in it’s current state – so how does that apply to game patches and downloadable content?  Can you judge World of Warcraft at release in the same way that you can in it’s current state?  As, ultimately, the patch is nothing more than the “author” trying to “get at what they really meant to do the first time.”

4: Should a game journalist/critic actually beat each game they examine, and if not, what percentage of a game should they complete before forming a solid opinion?  Book critics certainly have to, and to effectively analyze a poem one might spend hours on fifteen lines of text.  How does this apply to video games?  4a: I’m working with a theory that uses similar concepts to statistical polling; if one reads (samples) 33% of a book, can one draw reasonable conclusions about the book, as one could with populations of people?  Surely, the conclusion of story arcs can merely be guessed at, but is it fair to use that 33% (or whatever other number you like) to draw conclusions about the mechanics, dialogue constructions/political messages and styles as one, I would argue, can do with a book?