Most modern armed forces, including those in the US, now recruit women as well as men. So do most terrorist organizations – 15% of all suicide bombers in groups that allow women in. Female security guards are not particularly unique – heck, Bioware has several. There are certainly women in prison – nowhere near the rate of men, of course but certainly enough to give Orange is the New Black plenty of story material. In video games, all of these are non-existent, unless they also have a speaking role.
Yes, what I’m saying is that there is a feminist argument that we should be shooting more women in video games.
One of the things I’ve been paying attention to when watching movies and playing games lately has been to the extras. I’m not interested in the named characters. What I want to know instead: if there is an armed or violent force of mostly voiceless extras in a film, are there any women in it? Think of it as kind of a reverse Bechdel test.
As an example, watch this scene from the Avengers, where we are introduced to the SHIELD organization aboard the Helicarrier. Ignore Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders). Do you see any women? Yes. Certainly not a 50/50 split, but there’s at least 4-5 women on the bridge of the ship without speaking lines.
Why is this important? Because it changes Black Widow from being a freakish aberration to being the top of a career arc. And because if you live in a world where it takes being a member of an organization like SHIELD to get things done, showing women as participants at all levels is, I think, important to making them feel like they can be an integral part of that world.
Guardians of the Galaxy is interesting (and remember, for this I don’t care about characters with speaking lines for this, as much as I love Gamora and Nebula). There are several violent forces in the movie. Most of them are not particularly mixed gender: I remember seeing no female faces among the pilots of the Nova Corps, nor among Yondu’s crew. On the flip side, there were several women among the prison population when the team first arrives (and yet, none that I recall among the guards).
Still, the movies seem to be way ahead of video games.
Anita Sarkeesian has gotten some heat for pointing out that you can shoot strippers in Hitman. I think that both Anita and her critics miss the real issue. I have no problem with putting strippers and prostitutes in games. Heck, I like a seedy underbelly to my games, and I have no problem with sex, even casual sex, being implied in my games. No, my problem is that, in this seedy underbelly, the ONLY representation of women tends to be of civilians and sex professionals. I haven’t played too deeply into the Hitman series, but it certainly is true from as far as I’ve gotten. Let’s look at some other recent games that I’m more familiar with from end to end.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Several speaking roles for women, including your pilot, your love interest/rescuable princess, a couple key roles in the enemy conspiracy, and a handful of women who need you to do quest objectives for them. Most of them are, you guessed it, employed at or associated with a brothel in China. On the way to completing the main storyline, you’ll kill or work your way around countless security guards, paramilitary troops, underworld criminals and whatnot. The number of these who are women, but not bosses? Zero.
Splinter Cell: Blacklist. Named female characters: your CO & your daughter, who you call on the phone. On the way to completing the main storyline, you’ll kill or work your way around countless security guards, paramilitary troops, underworld criminals and whatnot. The number of these who are women? Zero.
Tomb Raider. Lara is female of course, as is her sister (the rescue target), and one of her friends and fellow crash survivors who is quite the badass, I might add. On the way to rescuing her sister, Lara has to navigate an endless sea of criminals and thugs. The number who are women? Zero.
Far Cry 3. I really liked Far Cry 3 as a game, but I think it’s actually one of the worst offenders here. This is an open world game, meant to represent a living island. There are speaking roles: your girlfriend, her friend, and the mysterious island princess. However, beyond that, the feminine presence on the island is worse than no women. As you stealth around, all of the cannon fodder you kill or sneak past talk endlessly about whores who gave them the clap. Literally.
No friendly ones either, working to rescue the island they call home. As you successfully take over the island, good guy troops come to help you reinforce the island. These are also all male. There are a couple of civilian women wandering around the citizens. During the tutorial mission, your guide helpfully points out that he could bang any one of them he wanted to.
Far Cry 3 is about the war over the ideological soul of an island paradise, the desperate struggle to save a fundamental way of life. And in this fight, the women of the island are nonparticipants whose offscreen role is to service the enemy for money. They couldn’t add one Vasquez in the background somewhere? Really? On either side? Nope. As far as I remember, there’s not a woman who holds the gun on the whole island.
Now, adding a female character isn’t trivial. In fact, the Assassin’s Creed kerfuffle was one I thought was misguided because animating an entirely new skeleton at AAA levels is hugely time consuming and expensive, with hundreds of animations that need conversion (think about climbing and the other movement the main character has to do). Even more true if you want that character to have her own unique identity. But cannon fodder doesn’t need that much animation, and in the case of Tomb Raider and Far Cry 3, most of the necessary animation definitely exists (Lara for TR, the playable female character in Multiplayer in FC3). Most of the work here is concept and modelling – work you have to do anyway.
MMOs tend to have more inclusive rosters of enemies. A lot of that comes from having a wealth of art assets you can use due to the player customization art, but World of Warcraft went the extra mile and got art assets for both male and female centaurs and ogres. Most men that I’ve pointed this out to have never noticed. Most women that I have did, and they’ve talked about how it instantly gives a sense that women can be active participants in the politics and struggles of these virtual worlds. I suspect that this little detail adds to the sense of belonging that makes MMOs a popular genre for women.
Bioshock does a good job, both with their random splicers you find throughout as well as the Big Sister (introduced in 2, I believe). And I’m also a big fan of both the Tanya unit from Command and Conquer as well as the Succubi in the Diablo series. Sure, both characters lean into stereotypes and are played up for sex appeal, but I actually think a touch of sex appeal in a work of popular culture is appropriate and often good, and anyway, the important thing is that, in a world of conflict, women have some sort of place on the battlefield.
(Incidentally, the sex appeal also makes it clear that they are women! I’m not saying go full-on boob armor, but if you can’t tell that your opponent is a woman instead of a man from the distance and range that you’re fighting them, the distinction is lost!)
Having more females with guns in your game will lessen criticism of other areas. Having the amorphous, faceless women of the world take roles like soldier, mercenary, guard, criminal, and cop – presenting a vision of the world where women can take positions of strength – will make it far less objectionable when you, as an artist, want to include that strip club or whorehouse. A world where women CAN choose a role of strength and power but some choose not to is… well, not just less objectionable, but also far closer to, you know, reality.
So that’s my feminist argument for why you should be able to shoot at more women in games. If you have a military force in your game, it’s good to establish that women could have a place in it, and therefore have a role in the power structure of the world that you’re creating. The important thing is, there should be more women who can shoot back.
The original Mass Effect had one sex of most species, due to modeling and animation constraints. We spent our resources getting a large variety of aliens, rather than creating multiple sexes for each species. I’m pleased we still managed to have lots of women fighting (including some BADASS asari), and I’d argue it ended up with much better representation than most games and action movies, despite our constraints.
That lack of sexual variety actually informed a lot of the racial backstories: Krogan fight wars over the rare fertile females, female salarians typically stay on the homeworld as the heads of huge clans, asari are a single-sexed species able to produce offspring with most sentient races, and quarians of any sex are rare outside of The Migrant Fleet.
All of the following were on the human rig and used the same animations (some species needed minor animation tweaks, done as additives to the base animations):
Human – Male and female
Asari – Female only (alien head models on the human female body)
Salarian – Male only
Turian – Male only
Krogan – Male only
Quarian – Female only
Geth – Robots, (non-sexual, but used male animations)
Batarian – Male only, added via DLC
Other non-humanoid sapient races included:
Rachni – Giant bugs (female and male, on same rig)
Volus – Male only, no combat animations
Elcor – Male only, no combat animations
Hannar – Jellyfish, no combat animations
We also had two types of formerly-human husks (male only), and a bunch of non-humanoid Geth (probes, hoppers, armatures) that weren’t really gendered.
Pleased that in the sequels the opposite sex for krogan, turian, and quarian were added (and I think female salarians and elcor showed up as well, but on the same model as the males).
I’ve thought much the same thing — and correct me if I’m wrong, but in Captain America 2, not a single woman joined Hydra.
(Although I think Anita actually HAS covered the point that it’s not that the representation is bad so much as that it’s the ONLY representation — or at least, I got it from watching her video. I might have been extrapolating the obvious.)
Personally, I feel that if 40-60% of characters in games (not in each game, but in games overall) were women, at each level, (named chars, player chars, target mobs, townsfolk, etc), most of the complaints talked about in the tropes videos would go away. They’re generally symptoms rather than the cause, and in most cases would be fine if they weren’t by far the majority.
The feminists get to see more women in games, the misogynists get to shoot women in the face. It’s win-win!
It’s a fine line to tread.
Do you want a game to reflect an existing mindset or push the boundaries a little?
I’d like to see females treated as equals within the games I play (I remember the dark days of ‘Advanced Dungeons and Dragons’ where it was felt for realism females were not allowed to have the same potential strength as males).
Yes, if this means there needs to be more ‘non-named’ females in the firing ranks so be it.
On the flip side I also think there should be more strip joints with semi-nude male dancers gyrating their bodies. Or, maybe wine bars with well dressed and emotionally mature npcs for characters to interact with.
There was a sensitive period at the start of SWTOR where all the exploitation was one way. Only female characters had the bikinis. Even to the extent that certain armour types (notably the light inquisitor armour) displayed differently between male and female – fully covered on a male, midriff and arms exposed on female.
It’s nice to see with the cartel packs that the new skin revealing outfits are the same for males and female characters.
Minor nitpick: in Tomb Raider, it’s Lara’s friend she rescues, not her sister. And to be fair, it’s implied the reason there are no women among the cultists is because any women who are stranded are sacrificed to Himiko in an attempt to placate her enough to let the men leave. So there is a rationale behind it.
I actually think this whole article is a really good point though. One of the things I like best about Fallout and Skyrim is that they do have women in shootable-fighter-NPC roles. The first time I heard that sneering female Raider voice in Fallout for example, I was thrilled, and for exactly the reasons you state: it meant that women could participate fully in the various roles in that world. If that’s “shootable-NPC,” so be it.
Vhaegrant: In Fallout: New Vegas, the strip club, Gomorrah, has male strippers gyrating on stage alongside female strippers. There is also a sidequest where you have to recruit a well-dressed, emotionally mature male to be a professional escort. Just wanted to mention that.