Rescuing Princesses in Arkham Knight

I generally like Anita’s work.  However, one place where I’ve felt it to be weak is in regards to Damseling.  It’s not that I don’t agree that it’s an overused trope.  The issue is that a number of issues converge to make damseling difficult to fix. These same issues make the Bechdel Test worthless for games.  To wit:

1) Story-based games tend to center on one character.  Unlike an ensemble movie, like say the Avengers, pretty much all interactions must center on the main character and his conflicts. All core characters are defined by their relation to that main character.  If that main character’s gender is preset as male (as it is frequently, especially in licensed games such as an Arkham game), then all other relationships, male or female, will effectively be defined by that character.

2) While Anita & other cultural critics find it tiring to talk about women continually being rescue targets and motivations, the truth of the matter is that virtually any experienced screenwriter will tell you that saving an ally or loved one is a far more compelling narrative than saving the world by finding/disabling/destroying some interchangeable quest foozle.  Most game stories have TWENTY or so of these quest foozles to pad out a 20 hour playtime, and need to have rescues and similar ‘personal’ missions in order to relieve the banality and add more personal stake Which means that if you want to include female allies in your game, it’s hard NOT to trip over one of these tropes unless you put your female characters in a closet where they aren’t actually interacting with the plot much at all – obviously not desirable either.

So yeah, I tend to think that handwringing over damseling tends to be overwrought.  As such, I was fully prepared to pooh pooh this writeup on the game.  But once I sat down and made time to play, I found Arkham Knight to be pretty disquieting in this regard.  Which is an odd step backwards for a game that’s a sequel to a game that gave us a significantly playable and awesome Catwoman.

I’m loving the game , although so far I’m only 30% of the way in (I have a tendency to get sidetracked chasing Riddler trophies).  As a huge fan of Arkham City and Arkham Asylum.  I definitely consider it a must own all the same for fans of the genre.  In many respects, though, it’s not as good at its predecessors – I found Arkham City to be the high point of the series.  In particular, Arkham Knight has a lot to love, particularly the Joker sequences, balanced out by just too god damn much batmobile.

But let’s not talk about that.  Let’s talk about how Arkham Knight sets the table by immediately damselling every female ally in the game.  In or near the opening sequence, Batman rescues Poison Ivy, a reluctant ally.  Shortly afterwards, you encounter a Catwoman, who apparently will take lots of Riddler-placating to free.  Before the second hour of gameplay is completed, Oracle is captured.

Which is to say, every single female ally in Gotham is a rescue princess from damn near the outset of the game.  Batman starts with seven notable allies.  The four male ones (Gordon, Alfred, Nightwing, and Lucius Fox) are still doing just fine – at 30% in, I’ve had to escort Gordon on one relatively non-threatening car chase.  This is despite the fact that three of them don’t have any form of superpowers.

The rescue princesses are not powerless Vicki Vale characters who cannot possibly stand up to Scarecrow.  The 3 captured women are some of the strongest, most capable characters in the Gotham canon.  But their ability to take action is not why they were captured.  Poison Ivy was imprisoned solely to act as bait for a trap for Batman.  Catwoman, similarly, is captured solely so Riddler can taunt Batman into chasing question-mark shaped trophies.  Oracle isn’t captured because she’s your eyes and ears (Lucius Fox immediately does everything she was doing with little interruption), but because, as Jim Gordon’s daughter, she’s useful for driving a wedge between Batman and the commish.

Matters are made worse by the fact that, so far, I’ve noticed no other feminine presence in the game at all.  I assume that Harley Quinn will make an appearance at some point, but she hasn’t yet as far as I can recall.  There are no female cops on your side.  And in something that is a pet peeve of mine (something I’ve written about before that Anita echoes to some extent), there are no women among the dozens of bruisers and thugs you’re asked to defeat along the way.  Seriously, it would kill Batman’s enemies to hire just a Michelle Rodriguez/Gina Torres style badass women to add some variety to the endless sausage fest on the streets of Gotham?  Seeing women at all ranks of the superhero/supervillian ladder helps create a sense that women belong in this world.  That they can, too, aspire to be power brokers in this world.

And it would be so simple to fix as well.  Have the initial Poison Ivy encounter be a boss fight capture scenario instead of a rescue, as is befitting her role as a supervillian.  Flip Nightwing and Catwoman’s roles in the story.  I’ve heard that Nightwing  does get captured later and require rescue (as does Lucius) so swapping that would only delay Catwoman’s damselling.  Spreading out the gal rescues and mixing them with male rescues would go a long way.

Instead, look at how Arkham Knight sets the table with its early experience.  By having ALL THREE start off nearly simultaneously in peril, and no other female presence in the game, the overall message is clear:  women don’t belong in this world.  

And just like that, you’ve alienated half your potential market in a license with enormous broad market awareness.

As a final note, when I posted that the game has too much batmobile to Twitter,  no one felt the urge to tell me that I didn’t know games, didn’t understand the market for Batman games, was a filthy SJW, or didn’t appreciate or respect the artists’ vision.

Things are quite a different story when you mention that you’ve got a problem with how women (or minorities) are treated in a game.  Undoubtedly, people will ignore the fact that I’m loving the game except for this, and all the God Damn Batmobile play.  Seriously, anyone who likes previous Arkhams should pick it up.  I find it vastly superior to AC: Unity, for example.  And the Joker makes everything worthwhile – trust me.  It’s 88% on Metacritic shows that the media pretty much agrees.

And no, I don’t think the Rocksteady crew are misogynist assholes.  I simply think that they didn’t look at this problem from this direction.  Believe it or not, a shit ton of issues creep through game development like this because team members simply don’t realize how a vision will look when it coalesces.  This is an issue that is hard to fix, but can be helped greatly by having more team diversity in decision making roles.  But if you don’t catch these problems in the design early, it may be almost impossible to rearrange or fix things later on, because we’re talking about huge structural choices made to the narrative.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with me on this one — many designers would disagree with my assertions, and many others would claim that I don’t go far enough. But discussions like these are important so that designers start thinking about the impacts of these decisions earlier in development.  Because putting aside whatever social justice angle you do or don’t care about, there’s potentially millions of dollars at stake when you include or exclude potential customers.

And no, I’m not saying that all games should appeal to all people.  There is plenty of room for Bayonetta and GTA V as well as for the Sims and Kim Kardashian’s Hollywood.  But when you have a broad based, mass market license that has worldwide recognition and appeal to people of all ages, you’re leaving money on the table when you don’t do just the simple stupid things that can frequently be done without compromising one iota what makes the game great.