A thank you to Hugh Ristik in the comment section of my last piece for inspiring this.
I have actually managed to find a positive in the whole Duke Nukem thing: at least in DN you’re gunning down aliens and not your fellow man; that’s something FPS games (First Person Shooters) were all about at one point.
Looking over the history of video games, these days one does seem to get a strong sense that they are feeding into the myth in our society of men as expendable. I’ve never been a big fan of RTS (Real Time Strategy) games for that very reason — having to create a barracks to house your recruits, only to then send them off to die, sometimes only to advance a few yards up the game map.
When games were in their infancy back in the 80s and 90s, and graphics made everything look, well, like a game, there was a barrier between you the player and what was going on, on screen. You weren’t shooting a man, you were shooting a cartoon-like graphical representation of a man, there was some degree of distancing. So you could merrily mow down enemies in a game like Wolfenstein 3D and not feel anything, because it really was just a game.
As games have gotten more sophisticated however, with the advent of motion capture and HD graphics making games seem more real than ever — especially in the areas of facial expression — this barrier has all but been removed. These days there’s not much to distinguish the soldier you kill in game, who might look exactly like the guy you might have seen walking down the street with his family.
We’ve had to find a way of coping, to get that distancing effect back; the easiest way to do that is to dehumanise that character (who is almost always exclusively male), a tactic the actual military uses to effectively train recruits. What I’m saying is I worry we’re training ourselves not to notice and not to care about all the punishment we dish out in games as long as the charicter is male.
The relentless drive towards realism has given us amazingly realistic 3D environments and what do we use them for? Well, to kill young men in a variety of visceral and often gruesome ways, and the technology to do this is always improving — just this year we’ll see Modern Warfare 3, Battle Field 3, Dust 501, Ghost Recon online and Farcry 3.
I guess you could say these new ultra-modern FPS’s can be useful in teaching young men some very harsh truths about the nature of war. A game that illustrates this perfectly is the first Modern Warfare game, which actually had the guts to kill off one of its main protagonists in a nuclear explosion. I still remember playing the game in college and the shock I experienced on reaching that scene. I remember watching open-mouthed as the young US Marine Corps recruit I’d been playing as for at least a good quarter of the game dropped to his knees, as radioactive dust particles whipped around and him, coughing and spluttering out his last breath miles away from home, before succumbing to radiation poisoning. No saves, no continues, no extra lives, no going back to the start of the level and doing things differently* but death — a very real possibility for many young men who join up to serve their country. But this is the exception rather than the rule.
I don’t want this piece to be seen as an attack on violent video games, and let me assure everyone that I am fiercely anti-censorship. I’ve been consuming violent media all my life, and it’s had no detrimental effects on my psyche. I just feel that there’s a lot of stuff that needs unpacking about video gaming culture, and men’s place within it. I will be returning to this subject, maybe not right now, but some time in the future. For now I hope this serves as a primer for things to come.
*A couple of my friends actually tried this.
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I am a video game designer with a number of FPS titles under my belt, currently working on one of the forthcoming titles you list above. Speaking from experience I doubt you’ll find the sexual politics of the industry to have any deep philosophy to them. They do, however, have a very significant commercial dimension.
It’s important to note that big decisions in this area are more often taken by marketing rather than the devs. I have been in several design conversations in which the depiction of killings of children, unarmed civilians and armed women has been seriously considered. Generally, marketing have been uncomfortable with these ideas to varying degrees.
Reasons vary. Age rating is one issue. For those of us developing in Europe, games with PEGI ratings of 18 are becoming more common, where 15 used to be the norm. But the distinction here is often more graphic death and foul language than adding a sexual component.
Of course, shootings of civilians, including women, have appeared frequently in canned cut scenes. See Far Cry 3’s demo at this year’s E3 where we see a woman executed by a gunshot to the head. More problematic is giving the player agency to kill unarmed civilians. The most striking recent example was when Activision scored a marketing coup with its graphic airport massacre scene in Modern Warfare 2. Though it’s notable that this was a one-off optional mission that could be skipped or disabled by parental access. Also it didn’t break the taboo of killing children.
Leaving aside the killing of unarmed civilians, the killing of armed women in FPS is another problem area. Rationales for not doing this vary.
For example, they may be related to technology and memory budgets. I worked on one FPS project where the animation budgets only stretched to a single male rig. Having a separate rig for women would have resulted in graphic compromises elsewhere. Other titles don’t have this problem because they budget for the rigs and the associated variety of textures and audio barks to support women. In some cases they just rig female figures with male anim rigs and add some scaling factor. However, I’m making the point that this decision can in some cases be the product of a development tradeoff.
In historical military shooters, such as the glut of World War II FPS, there are not a lot of reasons to incorporate armed women as antagonists. Now that devs are covering modern war subjects, such as the Modern Warfare and Battlefield series, this might change. But if like Medal of Honour your OPFOR are Tier 1 Taliban, you get a solid justification for not putting women there. Indeed, given that the majority of Armies containing significant numbers of women soldiers are Western democracies, you are more likely to find them on the good guy side than that of the enemy.
For non-military shooters there are not a lot of good excuses other than, again, in any kind of real-world depiction having women as cannon fodder might seem unreal. Would Far Cry’s Indian Ocean pirates look more or less authentic for adding expendable women? There is a legitimate argument for saying that sometimes these things reflect the real world rather than the world as we would like it to be.
It’s worth noting that I have only been talking about my experience of FPS development here. My experiences are not true for other genres. MMOs, for example, feature far more female antagonists. A recent playing of RIFT, for example, reveals a lot of clearly identified female enemies to kill, often in their droves.
So rather than going off half-cocked, it might be important to:
(a) Identify those genres where female antagonists are under-represented.
(b) Find sample titles where there is representation and under-representation.
(c) Look at the reasons for that. (Is it an historical setting, etc.)
Not that I don’t necessarily agree with some points made by the above poster (aside from being a little disturbed that one of a few reasons why we may not see unarmed women being shot in the head is that marketing are uncomfortable with it…), but I think you’re doing an interesting thing in examining the male role in video games. I don’t think it diminishes the importance of looking at the role of women (and nowhere did you imply that), it’s just an interesting and valuable thing to do, given how popular these games are among young men. Keep going!
I think the point I was trying to make is that Marketing are often the gatekeepers on controversial issues. Their view is largely influenced by commercial concerns. But that doesn’t mean they are not influenced by wider ethical considerations. You’re not going to sell a lot of product if it allows players to indulge in taboo activities. Killing unarmed civilians and children being amongst those.
If we accept that killing unarmed civilians is a gender-neutral issue (and I reckon it largely is). Then our focus can be on the representation or lack of representation of armed women antagonists in games.
Well:
World War 2 games that take place in the Soviet Union don’t get that kind of an excuse. Women were made wide use of as snipers, they had a few squadrons of fighters and bombers , and there were even a very few ground infantrywomen, so to speak. So there’s no reason you can’t play a female sniper or , if you want to play the German side as some of those games allow , take out a Russian woman sniper.
Well, certainly if you want to rummage around in history you can find odd examples of women antagonists. Yes, you could have Lilya Litvak turn up in a game of Il-2 Sturmovik (though in that case only as a voice). As I wrote my first reply it had occurred to me that partisan activity might yield a few examples, such as women Maquis.
But going back to Marc’s original post, the problem is not adding token women but providing some kind of gender balance. Lone women snipers are one thing, but a human wave of them howling at you from out of a Stalingrad tractor factory is entirely another.
One more thing: I think we need to make a clear distinction between women as leads/allies and as antagonists in games. I believe I would have a lot less of a problem trying to insert a woman as an (ahem) ‘good guy’ into a game than as enemy cannon fodder.
Yes, the Marketing guys with their focus test results based on interviews with mall rats in Peoria will invariably tell us they want this or that male lead. Joanna Dark notwithstanding, female leads are few in FPSs. But as allies they are more frequent. For example, Far Cry 2 gave you women as sidekicks who would haul you out of battle if you got shot. More and more frequently, four-player co-op games, such as Left 4 Dead, provide a woman in the party. (Token or not? You decide.) And with co-op modes becoming increasingly common I expect we’ll see more of this.
Women as opposition is another matter. Though here you have to look around, since the situation is not clear-cut by any means. The further you go from the real world, the more you dip into SF and fantasy, the more likely it is that you will see women in lead and enemy roles. Looking at Mass Effect (a third-person shooter rather than an FPS) we see a lot more female presence. Let’s tick off the ways:
* Option of a woman as lead. Though to date the female option has never been featured in the promotional material–the ads all show the male Shepard.
* Option of a woman as sidekick (IIRC three in the original game and four or five in ME2).
* Women antagonists. Mass Effect has an entire race of attractive feminine aliens and they frequently appear as commandos and mercenaries to gun down. Human women also appear as targets.
As one of the biggest-selling franchises of recent years, I feel that Mass Effect at least points in an encouraging direction.
Here’s an interesting thing to explore: four-player co-operative FPS and TPS are about to explode in numbers, if recent trends are to be believed. However, without doing much research, I believe I have detected a ‘rule of quarters’ applying to such games; which is to say that with four players there seems to be only one woman offered as a play option. (Think Left 4 Dead and Borderlands.)
That might be an interesting line of inquiry, as to whether this is something that will change.
Thanks for your replies, Percyprune.
I have no comments as to where the gaming industry as going, having never much looked at that. I merely play the games,( and sometimes if there’s a new fad its hard to find the kind of shooters, builders, or adventures I like)and don’t much look into trends except when new consoles come out. I’ve never played Mass Effect (though I’ve read several reviews) so thank you for cluing me in to that.
I don’t expect ( or even desire) “gender parity” in terms of mooks in video games, shooters, adventures or whatever type they are. War has historically been a Man’s Game (even though women usually had some say in whether it would be conducted) and this is for sexist reasons both benevolent and misandrist as well as practical reasons. Let’s take the Soviet Union in World War 2 again, because it was such an unusual yet useful case to investigate this stuff. During the first year to year and a half of the war, I’m lead to understand there were actually divisions of women troops. These were disbanded or attrited over that time period and as units not replaced because the “performance of the unit” was degraded compared to male ones. The remaining female soldiers were either assigned to bootcamps as training officers or dispatched into the various mostly male regular army units. So the “female infrantryperson” experiment was not a success overall. However, females were successful and widely used as both snipers and bomber/fighter pilots. There were also a very signficant number (at least 50 thousand if not considerably more) of female partisans who, besides conducting raids/spying would sometimes come into direct combat along with the men (usually forced, back against the wall type of stuff).
So there’s plenty of opportunities for female mooks in Soviet Russia during World War 2. Yet, you know as well as I in the vast majority of World War 2 games, even ones that take place in Russia, such women don’t exist as either protagonists or mooks. That’s problematic in and of itself on a whole bunch of levels. I dare say there weren’t many German soldiers who were on the “Eastern Front” for any length of time over a year who didn’t encounter women in some sort of combat role, even if it was just having the fun of being bombed by them.
The relative silence by most games over the years of this issue -and even in fantasy settings until recently most such things were rather rare- indicates it is still a very potent cultural meme that women are always innocent in wars and never participate in combat. Of course that’s linked to the sexist assumptions that they either can’t – or shouldn’t- and so overall I suspect we’ll never unravel this totally. As with gay/lesbian issues and other problematic characterizations in games I don’t ask for proportional representation – just some occasional imagination and sensitivity towards handling these issues. And games that take place in a historical milieu should be historically accurate – so it should be common in most “Russian Campaign” games to have women involved in some way.
We seem to have been sidetracked by the Soviet thing, so let’s address that briefly. Yes, large numbers of women served in combat roles. Anna Krylova puts it 120,000 of 820,000 women who served in total. An impressive number. Though compared to the 70 million men who served in the Soviet forces this was a small percentage of the total.
And here’s the problem of representing women in East Front scenarios. Only a handful of air regiments flew in combat (two bomber regiments and one fighter regiment) out of more than a thousand established regiments. The total number of qualified women snipers for the entire war was just 1,000. So while there are opportunities for putting women into East Front scenarios, it is not a common thing either.
So while I’d encourage the creation of, say, Call of Duty missions with Soviet women, we should be careful of pronouncing them inauthentic if they don’t do so. I suspect the great majority of German soldiers on the Eastern Front *did* spend much of their service without encountering women combatants.
I highly recommend Anna Krylova’s excellent ‘Soviet Women in Combat’ on this subject.
Percyprune:
Where are you getting 70 million combatant men in the Soviet Union in World War 2? The entire population of the freaking country at that time was around 100 million, and the Red Army was never bigger than around 11 million.Seriously, did you make a typo there?
And why did you forget about women partisans, women tank commanders, and women infantry?
My apologies, Clarence, you are quite correct. I misquoted a source. On checking I see that total male combatants during the Great Patriotic War were around 34 million, out of a 1939 population of approx 168 million.
I wasn’t forgetting the others you mentioned. I was just giving examples to illustrate the relative size of the contingents of women combatants. The point I was making was that encountering fighting women on the Eastern Front was not as common as you suggested.
I think their absence in games is notable and think there should be a corrective. However, that’s not the same thing as saying these representations should be common or the norm.
Not exactly on topic, but related…and this post made me remember this: About a year ago my partner and I were watching one of the many versions of the “Saw” movies on DVD at home on a weeknight and got into a discussion about the fact that it was sort of disturbing that we were so NOT disturbed by the extreme and graphic violence we were watching, and that the level of desensitization that comes from watching modern media might be worth giving some thought. Then we expanded on that to porn, specifically online porn (we’re both pro-porn with caveats like no one being actually hurt or coerced and avoidance of some things that squick either of us…which are usually different for the two of us but contain some overlap) and how being able to watch a huge variety of sexual and violent expression can create some desensitization that may or may not be a problem (I have no answers, just a lot of questions at this point). Anyways, I can see where first-person shooter games may have a similar effect and wondering how large or extensive the ripple effects are…interesting point to ponder.
I too am very curious as to how much violence and sex in the media affects us… Not sure where to start with research though, I’m assuming quite a lot has been done already? I usually only come across the ‘I played violent video games and I’m not violent’ way of thinking, which might be accurate, but sounds a bit simplistic…
I don’t think it’s as simple as cause and effect, and correlation is not the same as causation, but my gut feeling is that the desensitization that comes from being exposed to lots of sex and violence affects us in some smaller or larger ways…not so much in making us do or not do something, but in modulating our reactions to real violence (rape in the Congo, shooting of rioters in the Middle East, casualties of war, etc.).
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Society has just been conditioned to see males as expendable, but male death just doesn’t phase most people. I just watched an animated review of a game called Painkiller (by Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation). He freely says the phrase “murdering dudes” many, many times in his review: “It’s not to say that Painkiller is nothing but murdering tons of dudes; there is a series of unlockable cards that make it easier to murder tons of dudes. There is a soul collecting gameplay element that results in a new and interesting way to murder tons of dudes. Okay, so maybe there is nothing but murdering tons of dudes, but it does it so well, what more could you want?”
Seriously, replace “dudes” with “girls” and . . . well, that review would not even exist, because our society would no frickin way allow a game about “murdering tons of girls”.