Into the Looking Glass: Games, Women, Violence, and Society

[ultranos]

beanpot asked for an expansion of a discussion I had with her today about the gaming industry, women, violence, and ethics. As this is a topic near and dear to my heart, as well as somewhat close to an essay I've been meaning to write for approximately forever, you are about to witness a very lengthy essay on the topic. Look what happens when I don't have homework.



I am a female gamer. I grew up being a female gamer, which wasn't always easy even in 1990s-early 2000s Midwestern America. I have always been acutely aware that I had certain stereotypes leveled against me. That I would be no good at them. That I clearly didn't want to buy the game in my hand. Not only that, but I never had nearly the same sorts of representation in games that my brother did. That is, I didn't want to be limited to the demure white mage in my party. I didn't want only the scantily-clad fighters. (Although I learned to take great pleasure in stomping people into the ground with Chun-Li) There's a reason why my default icon is of Cecilia Adlhyde, spunky black and white mage princess from the original Wild ARMs, and why I honestly never really warmed to her contemporaries Aeris or Tifa fromFinal Fantasy VII.

According to the PAX East program guide, gamers are about 43% female. However, those demographics don't quite match up to the industry itself. I went to a panel with one of the lead writers and producers of Rock Band II and some of the Guitar Hero games before the property left Harmonix. She mentioned how often it felt like she was often the only woman in the room, and that the majority of women in the game industry still were in HR departments, not the technical staff. By and large, the gaming industry is still very much a "boy's club". In fact, it is often so much of a "boy's club" that women are often invisible or just playing within the system, and sometimes that's the better part of the deal. What's worse is to end up as even more of a sex-object, about on par with the "booth babes" that accompany companies at trade shows like the old E3. And, yes, PAX. Why else would my friends and I have been looking on in utter confusion at two attractive women dancing onstage at the Ubisoft booth and wondering what in god's name it had to do with Prince of Persia.

Speaking of Ubisoft, all of the above is made very clear in the case of Jade Raymond. Raymond was the lead producer in a quite awesome little game called Assassin's Creed. Raymond was pretty much the team leader on the project, and the team made a really good game. Raymond happens to be an attractive woman. When the game came out, Ubisoft let it be known that a rather attractive woman was the producer for the team that made the game.

Jade Raymond got dragged through the mud by some of the gaming community, being accused of "selling herself" instead of the game. [1] And got pornographic webcomics about her made. Nevermind that all she wanted was to talk about the game she helped make to the press, given that it's her job. [2]

It's attitudes like that that drove some of the founders of the game industry like Brenda Laurel to create the sadly now defunct company Purple Moon. Laurel entered the game industry back in the 1980s, when Atari was king, so she knows her way around. In her book Utopian Entrepreneur, she describes what supplied the impetus to create a company that focused on making good games for girls, ones that were every bit as fun and gameplay challenging as the ones for boys:

"Throughout my two decades in the computer game business, I had ached for a chance to create alternatives to the chasing, shooting, fighting, exploding, hyper-male world of games. Why weren't there any computer games for girls? And why did I end up losing my job every time I suggested it? It couldn't be just a sexist conspiracy. The boy's game business generated billions of dollars; surely even the most sexist in Silicon Valley would be perfectly happy to reap the corresponding billions form girls if he could figure out how to do it. Nor was the male culture of computer games simply an artifact of the history of the industry. Something more complex and subtle was going on, and I knew it had to do with the construction of gender embedded in every aspect of our lives -- in play, identity, work, technology, and business." [3]

Arguably, the game industry is a young one. It really only started 30 years ago, in the late 1970s-early 1980s, and is thus still in its growing pains. The fact that PAX East had a panel specifically on women and the video game industry is a sign that people are paying attention and trying to do better. Game developers are only just starting to look beyond themselves for ideas of who their market is. They look at themselves and think "what do I want to play". Therefore, for every heroine like Jill Valentine from Resident Evil or Jade from Beyond Good and Evil, we get, well, the cast of Dead or Alive.

Games are not being made in a vacuum. Laurel pointed that out, and the constructions that enter into our video games end up being fed back to us, reinforcing themselves in a seemingly-endless loop. Shouldn't, then, game developers have some sort of responsibility for the content of the games they produce? If games treat women simply as sex objects, why should one be surprised when players treat women as sex objects only, then? Bayonetta might play just like Dante from Devil May Cry, but Dante's clothes don't disappear when he does a huge attack combo. Is there something morally or ethically wrong about how an acceptable strategy in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is to gain back health by having sex with a prostitute, and then killing her to regain the money spent? Is there something wrong with games like the GTA series anyway, which puts the player on the wrong side of the law and expects them to play as a criminal to advance in the game?

And then there's the controversy surrounding Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Released last year, the game generated controversy from various groups due to the content of the "No Russian" level (link here. Warning: extremely violent and disturbing content). In it, you play a CIA operative sent to infiltrate a Russian terrorist organization. You are told to get close to the leader, at any cost, in order to glean any information to prevent a war between the US and Russia. The terrorists decide to attack an airport full of civilians. You can choose to not shoot and just walk along following the terrorists doing the shooting. But you cannot shoot the actual "bad guys", they will kill you. You cannot save anyone. And in the end, the leader knows you are a mole and shoots you. And the body of a dead American in terrorist gear...sparks a war between the US and Russia.

Infinity Ward pulls no punches in the content. It's graphic and disturbing. The level is optional, but of course, media outlets latched onto it and yelled about playing terrorists. As Matt Turner, producer of Army of Two: 40th Day said, "it's designed to show the atrocities... it's pretty awful and if you fail to see that side of it than you're not getting the whole picture. That being said, I thought it took it a little far; it was pretty out there. But I like seeing that they have guts like that." [4] The script-writer Jesse Stern thinks that the risk was worth it, to see what the response was, to make it a great game. [5]

Stern works for TV and writes scripts for NCIS as well. But one difference between the level of violence in "No Russian" and TV and movies is that TV and movies rarely, if ever, actually show the level of violence shown in video games in general. "No Russian" just takes that to a different level. Not only that, but games are interactive, instead of passive. It's the interactivity that makes people so wary and uneasy about video game violence.

As Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios says, "We as an industry do have a moral responsibility...Anyone who does something for a mass market has a responsibility. You tread carefully on the lessons that you teach. That line that 'if a game is fun, it is okay'-that sounds trivial. If it is obvious this is an artificial world and you can't do these things in real life, then that is more acceptable. But if it parades itself as a real world, you have to be careful about that." [6]

This is different from the old argument of "distinguishing between fantasy and reality" that gets dragged up every time a minor with a gun comes around. I admit to my own biases on the subject, saying that argument drives me up the wall and is in fact obscuring the real issue by making game developers a scapegoat. Game developers cannot be held responsible for the actions of every person who has ever played their games. However, at the same time, with game designers trying to push the envelope more and more in the argument of making games as an acceptable form of legit media on the level of novels, television, and movies, there is a bit of responsibility there. If designers want to show something, be it the atrocities of war in Modern Warfare 2, or the craft of a story as in Heavy Rain, or a thousand other things, and have it be taken just as seriously as if the topic were addressed in a movie or novel, then they have to do it in a way that does not belittle the material.

Not every game is going to be like that, however. We can no more police games about violent or sexual content than we can police movies about grindhouse/slaughter or pornography. Or, to be more correct, police them more than movies. The United States has the ERSB, which has its problems mainly stemming from the fact that their ratings are not as familiar as the MPAA's and that they are not as enforced. But possibly the key issue with games as opposed to movies or TV is in their interactivity. There's a differences between watching the two brothers in Boondock Saints calmly execute people, and controlling Alex Mercer as he executes people by throwing them into buildings or slamming down helicopters in Prototype. While the latter is certainly more fantastical, the former has a certain distance that's maintained between the viewer and the action. And it's the presence of that distance, or lack thereof, which is at the crux of the issue of violence, misogyny, racism, and all other such things in games.

Amazingly, this is the same problem that faces us in society. In our real lives, we have no artificial distance that separates the action from the viewer. In that way, games are very much a reflection of our society and ourselves and how we perceive the world.

At PAX East, the representation of gamers was vast: genders, orientations, ages, races, and creeds all varied. The game industry may be young, but the people who operate within it, from developers to players, will take and internalize what they have played now. And the kids of today will be making the games of tomorrow, and will be drawing on their own experiences to do so. They will be the ones asking "what game would I want to play?"


[1]Jade Raymond is for Real. game girl advance. Retrieved on 03.30.2010.
[2]The Trouble with Jade. Feministe. Retrieved on 03.30.2010.
[3]Laurel, Brenda. Utopian Entrepreneur. MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2001.
[4]Army of Two Producer Says Modern Warfare 2 Went Too Far. The Escapist. Retrieved on 03.30.2010.
[5]Modern Warfare 2 Writer Claims Controversy Was Worth the Risk. The Escapist. Retrieved on 03.30.2010.
[6]Ethics of Game Design. Gamasutra. Retrieved on 03.30.2010.