I usually have quite a lot to say about gender in games, so it was one of the first things my friends suggested I wrote about on my blog. I thought it over for a few weeks, but kept coming back to the same conclusion: I can’t write about gender in games, because I am a man. Of course, this is totally ridiculous – the idea was to write about gender in games, not specifically women; and even if it was, I should be capable of writing about the subject without feeling fraudulent. So what was the problem?

As part of my studies, I recently read a small stack of articles on the subject of games and gender; tellingly, most of them were written by women, about the gender of characters in games. I’ve never entirely understood why this is such a big deal. Obviously, being a man, most games characters share my gender, so I’ve never had the kind of revelatory experience that many female writers have described upon playing as Lara Croft for the first time. I always used to write this off as being due to some kind of misogynistic genetic programming, but my recent work made me think it through more deeply. If suddenly playing a character of the same gender is supposed to have had such a great effect on players, wouldn’t it follow that playing a character of a different gender would have a similarly noticeable effect? Speaking personally, I’ve never really cared what gender Lara was – all I cared about was how quickly she could kill wolves, or how far she could jump. Perhaps I’m just used to playing as female characters? It’s a tempting explanation, but it seems quite arrogant, and if female characters were so prevailant then Lara Croft wouldn’t have had such an effect on people. Why do people get so worked up about something so trivial? Alternatively, why don’t I care about such a crucially important issue?

During my research, the following line jumped out at me from a paper by the delightful Helen Kennedy:

It has been argued that the internal spaces of game worlds stand in for the mysterious and unknowable interior of the female body[.]

I have no idea where this has been argued, but I’m prepared to take her word for it.

The idea stuck in my head. Taking it somewhat out of context, I began to reconsider Tomb Raider‘s gloomy caves as representing “the unknowable interior of the female body”. This, surely, would make Lara herself – the instrument with which I explore these areas – a kind of digital phallus, thrust into an unsuspecting game world so that I may probe its nooks and crannies. This was an interesting new perspective on character gender, and it made more and more sense the longer I thought about it. Generally speaking, I’d say I view Lara as a tool for interfacing with virtual environments; a device with which I exercise my will. I think this is the root of my problems with most existing literature on gender in games – with the exception of Dr Kennedy’s article (which didn’t reach any particular conclusions), everything I have read on the subject focused on looking at the characters and watching them do their thing. I don’t watch Lara kill wolves and steal treasure – I use her to kill wolves and steal the treasure myself!

I think I can surmise my thoughts neatly by saying that Lara Croft is not merely a character, but a player-character. To point at her breasts and call her feminine – or point at her pistols and call her masculine – is to overlook the contribution of the player who dictates her actions. Characters in games will reflect the personality of their handlers, or at least the personality their handlers chose to adopt within the game. The hijacked marionette I see running round in cut-scenes may well be a feisty young lady, but once I take control she becomes a cautious accountant, crawling from room to room while obsessively preserving her ammo and medkits for an emergency that will never have a chance to occur. For any given instance of Lara, her personality is constructed by an on-going negotiation between the player and the game designers; players can generally do what they want, but if they try to overstep the mark, Lara sternly exclaims “No!”. This is the ghost of the designer, using her as a mouthpiece to tell the player to re-think their actions.

So what does all this mean, exactly?

I don’t really believe that you can define a player-character by their appearance, or biography, or any other pre-authored information, because none of that stuff takes into account the fact that there’s an unspecified sentient player making them run and jump and sing. Perhaps you could say this ties in perfectly with saying that Lara Croft is a masculine character because of her guns and insatiable appetite for defiling virgin tombs, but I’d still think you’re an idiot – that kind of logic implies that entering any strange location and exerting your influence to achieve some personally preferred state is a uniquely masculine activity, and I don’t find that argument very convincing. Depending on how far you abstract gameplay out, pretty much anything at all would then become a masculine activity. Shooting wolves; sending your friend a birthday present; breastfeeding a baby; wiping your nose.

I would say that, for any player-character, there is a spectrum of potential playing styles, and if you can define one axis as relating to ‘gender’, or ‘masculinity/femininty’, then it must be always be present. If it is possible to have a masculine or feminine approach to a game as broad as Civilization, then I think you must be able to have a masculine or feminine approach to Tomb Raider. If you really must assign a gender to a player-character, then I think the only real point of reference you can take is that of the player – if there’s a real difference between how men and women think, which seems to be the underlying assumption of terms like ‘gender studies’ or ‘masculinity and femininity’, then the cognitive functions of a player-character must always be rooted in the player’s own gender.

Female characters in games are important for reasons of representation, but that’s a broad topic that goes far beyond mere gender concerns. I think the real issue of ‘gender and games’ lies not in the gender of characters, or even in the actions that they can perform, but in players’ attitudes to ‘play’ itself… but this is a just pet theory that I’ll expand on in a future post sometime.

References:

Kennedy, Helen (2002) – Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?, Published on gamestudies.org

Tomb Raider (1996) – Core Design, various formats
Civilization (1991) – Microprose, various formats