Even before I joined this group for the final project and settled in to looking at horror games specifically, I was very interested in the portrayal of gender, especially women, in video games. Considering female game characters, I automatically think of Lara Croft- in some ways a positive female figure and in some ways not. Sure, she's the heroine and doesn't seem to rely on men to kick some serious mummy butt, but her highly idealized and sexualized body does not portray the most positive message to male or female gamers. Still, over all I consider the Lara Croft character a positive portrayal of a female in a genre of entertainment that often portrays women as insignificant, in the way, and sometimes flat-out malicious characters
In Bioshock, the creepiest characters are the little girls who attack you and I literally screamed when a mother bending over a stroller turned out to be monster-like zombie----the message I felt this particular scenario sent was that any corruption of the typical subservent wife and nurturing mother was hideous and evil.
Of the five boss zombies in Left 4 Dead, one is "the witch," a female zombie who's high-pitched scream attracts hordes of zombies. The female boss is clearly made the most annoying- it's like when men complain about their nagging wives- she just makes pointless noise that leads other zombies to do the work for her and attack you. Similarly, an Impulse Gamer review painted the witch as thus- "a female being of alabaster skin- think of Wolverine with PMS, you get the idea."
Why couldn't the female boss be the incredibly agile one, or the one who is extremely powerful. Other reviews I read of the game all spoke of the excitement of killing zombies, but only one described killing a boss zombie and the author wrote about killing the witch, saying "Whenever my co-players and I heard the sobbing of a Witch, we would freeze up and instantly switch into what we dubbed 'witch mode' where we would turn off all the flashlights and enter every room SWAT-style with one of us at the ready with a Molotov cocktail to torch her ass."
Do you think male players enjoy killing female enemies in horror games more than killing male enemies? What about female players?? I think how gender is represented is relevant to all video games, but it is particularly interesting to discuss in the horror genre.
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Jane, I think you're missing a second side to your analysis of gender in these horror games. In Left 4 Dead, the witch is easily the creepiest part of the game. She is one of the two most powerful zombies in the game (the other one being the tank). If you startle her she can kill you in like 5 seconds. She's incredibly fast and strong. If you're going to criticize the portrayal of the witch as sexist, you should consider how she's crying until you startle her. Only then does she scream(the hunter and the smoker also scream in a very similar way). I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the witch crying like a little girl. Its awfully creepy. You could argue that the witch SUBVERTS gender roles. She's scary because she is so powerful, even though she initially appears helpless.
ReplyDeleteOne of the main characters in L4D is female (Zoey), and I think she's pretty cool. Not whiny at all and she can kick zombie ass as well as anyone else. She isn't even hyper-sexualized like women usually are in the type of B zombie movies that left 4 dead is making fun of. She's attractive, but in a realistic way (not like Laura Croft), and she wears a zip-up hoodie that covers everything (also not like Laura Croft).
Also, the little girls in Bioshock don't actually ever attack you. They're creepy because they repeatedly stab their huge hypodermic needle into corpses. And as for the woman with the stroller -- inside of the stroller was not a baby but a gun. I don't think that "any corruption of the typical subservent wife and nurturing mother was hideous and evil" is what they were going for at all. Almost all of the characters in the game have gone totally crazy. The message of the game is more about the dark side of Ayn Rand's objectivist ideas (the biggest bad guy is unsubtly named Andrew Ryan). The audio recordings that you find scattered around the world portray many interesting and nuanced female characters.
In my opinion, here is the interesting thing about all of your examples: they show the player something that she will have a visceral response to (a little girl with pig-tails, a crying woman, a "mother" bending over a crib), and then they totally reverse that image (the little sisters are anything but innocent, the crying woman could eat you for breakfast, the mother is actually crooning over a gun, not a baby). I'm not sure where to take this point, though.
I agree with kent. I have never seen as sexist any of these female character portrayals you mention. Witch encounters are, the way I've heard my friends at home talk about L4D matches they've played, easily the most tense parts of the game. She's dangerous, not 'nagging'. There's absolutely no relationship between the Witch and a nagging wife. While playing with Kent yesterday, I got to see a witch disembowel him and come after me-- she IS "the incredibly agile one, or the one who is extremely powerful". There are also plenty of female regular infected in that game, and they are all exactly equal to all the male regular infected.
ReplyDeleteBioshock 2, which is currently in production, is going to feature huge female bosses known as 'Big Sisters' who can climb walls and attack you in extremely fast and aggressive ways.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-nInbioFaM
I think a lot of the horror that comes from females in horror games or movies comes from overturning societal expectations about passivity. Little girls are terrifying in horror films because they don't behave the way girls are 'supposed' to. Alma from FEAR is that way when she appears as a little girl. However, you could easily make the claim that the treatment of women in horror films and games as these incredibly scary and powerful people is also a kind of sexist attitude, because they often relies on negative female stereotypes to make them into these twisted and evil things. You could go either way, really, when it comes to interpretation, so long as you have evidence to make a point. You could use that Impulse Gamer quote you have, Jane, if you wanted to do something about the way gamers or game journalists perceive these females, but you'd need more evidence than just that.
We've played a LOT of games with women in them as a group this term. I've actually been heartened by this: horror games seem to feature a lot more women than other genres do. Though some of them are highly sexualized and silly, like the woman in RE5, others, like Zoey in L4D, are very reasonable. Meanwhile, war shooter games, racing games, sports games, strategy war games, and so on have VERY few women in them. A lot of RPGS let you be a woman-- they're the only genre I think approaches horror games in equality. Sure, the games industry has a long way to go before I'd never call it sexist, but so does the action-movies industry.
Here's something disturbing that I ran across yesterday.
ReplyDeletehttp://xbox.gamespy.com/xbox/fatal-frame-ii-directors-cut/559395p1.html
Apparently, you can unlock bikini outfits for the little girls in Fatal Frame II.
Fatal Frame II: Sex, death, and video games.
ReplyDeleteFatal Frame II beach volleyball ftw.
ReplyDelete