Games Vs. Women

It's not been a good month for women and videogames. First there was the furore over the new Hitman: Absolution Trailer (the top comment for that particular instance is currently "They should have stayed in the kitchen."). Then there were some disturbing quotes about the new Tomb Raider game in relation to players wanting to protect Lara. Of course there were also the attacks on Anita Sarkeesian and her kickstarter campaign and just the other day I read another article about how a female journalist was treated at E3.

I initially wasn't sure whether to write anything about this, I would be rather late to the party and almost anything I could say about it had probably already been said better by someone else. There was also the feeling that as a man it feels difficult to speak about issues that affect women and not myself directly. I've felt this way in the past when I wrote about Sucker Punch; I had looked around for other reviews and found women who made arguments for it actually being a feminist film so I felt it best to leave that argument alone. I think that was probably one of my weaker pieces on reflection and that feeling of holding myself back could well be part of the problem with it.

In the end I decided to write something mostly about the Tropes Vs. Women campaign. The positive outcome of it must feel like a poisoned chalice since the controversy has brought so much attention. Sadly I doubt I would have otherwise become aware of the project and gone on to watch her previous videos, which I've mostly found to be pretty informative. One video by someone else convinced me that men should not be afraid speak out against these kinds of issues - I don't have any new ideas about how to combat the relentless youtube trolls but I did think it could be interesting to look at how games could be improved on a practical level.

In amongst the insults one question that has been asked repeatedly is what the point of these videos will be; that the clichés are already well known and written about so it doesn't need funding to make videos about them. However I think that for the games industry they could actually end up being quite a useful resource, something that clearly and simply sets out things that you should avoid doing. I know from experience that it's almost always preferable to avoid having to add something to a game in the first place than cut it out later.

With a 10 part series on what not to do though, I could see that some people might wonder how exactly to go about writing better female characters. Like my own difficulty in writing about issues that affect women, I think there's also a fear that men feel they wouldn't be able to write believable female characters and instead fall back on simple stereotypes. I think the first step is not to worry so much about this issue and just write characters the same way as you would any other. In fact there are plenty of examples of female characters who have gone on to become popular, who were initially written as men and changed nothing but their sex at a later date.

Ripley in Alien is one particular example and while it may have been done for slightly dubious reasons ("wouldn't it be funny if the survivor is a girl"), Sigourney Weaver made the role her own and there was no question about whether this was a believable female character. Within the gaming world you could also look at Mass Effect and the character of Shepard. While some of the secondary female characters in the Mass Effect universe don't fare so well, Shepard herself is incredibly strong despite there only being fairly minor differences in dialogue for the male and female choices. I have seen more praise for Jennifer Hale's voice acting than her male counterpart and I have to agree from what I've heard so far. The only area where she hasn't fared quite as well is in her visual representation, with her cup size suspiciously increasing between the second and third game...

This approach might seem a little simplistic and given that one of the tropes that Anita Sarkeesian will be investigating is "Man with Boobs", I did wonder whether that would be about characters that have received a simple gender swap. I'll be interested to see what that video is actually about, I would guess it might be the stereotype of a really butch female character who tries to act the same as the male characters. I think that changing less stereotypical characters in this manner is valid for all sorts of areas that you might not have an in-depth personal knowledge of, including different races and sexual orientations. If you come up against an issue where you don't think you are representing a character very well you can always seek additional advice but I think the important step is getting more variety in the first place.

All of this is probably basic knowledge to any writers out there but I am also thinking of those in the games industry in general. I recently read this article via the Good Games Writing Blog, which gave a good insight into the process of writing for games and how writers are involved in the project. While starting filming without a script normally spells disaster in the film world, it's pretty much standard in games. Even in the best of circumstances where a writer may be working on a game from the start, there will probably still be others heavily involved in shaping the look and feel of it. In the worst case, if a writer is brought on at a later date to do a 'patch job' on some story issues, a request to change the sex/race of a character would probably be laughed at if art and models were already completed.

So while hanging writers out to dry for perpetuating negative female/racist/gay stereotypes is often people's first thought, it's probably not always the whole story. I think that there is a responsibility on everyone involved in the initial planning stages to consider the range of characters that might be in the game and try to create an appropriate balance. I can also imagine it might seem very difficult for someone working on a game to speak out about something offensive, especially if it is not an issue that effects them personally. I'm certainly not sure whether I could be that guy but it's something I'll try to keep in mind in future. Hopefully others will too, better representations are not going to magically appear and somewhere down the line there will have to be an effort from those who aren't directly campaigning for it.