Much personal rage was felt last week after the announcement of the makeover in store for Lara Croft, Tomb Raider’s DD-cup heroine. Gone are the comically oversized, anatomically impossible breasts. She now gets to wear an actual outfit comprised of garments one would reasonably wear while engaged in a bloody crime fighting mission: a shirt that covers her midriff and a pair of pants that covers her ass. So far, this is (sadly) exciting progress in the realm of women’s representation in video games. Game makers have apparently moved beyond the “fuckable vixen/hero” trope. Great. But what terrible trope have they replaced her with?Kotaku’s Jason Schreier spoke with Tomb Raider’s executive producer Ron Rosenberg about the female protagonist’s new presentation in the game’s forthcoming reboot. Because men playing the game don’t necessarily project themselves into the character (because she is a woman) the creators strove to create a character that the (mostly male) audience would want to “protect.” Gone is the hypersexualization, but it’s been replaced with a harrowing backstory.Rosenberg describes her transformation thusly: “She literally goes from zero to hero… we’re sort of building her up and just when she gets confident, we break her down again.” Sounds awesome. See, the trick is to build up a rare, nonsexualized female hero, but then break her down each time she gets too confident in her own abilities. Teenage boys to the rescue!And how, exactly, are the game’s creators going to “break her down?” By including an attempted gang rape in the opening sequence. Fantastic. These are truly the trailblazers on the road to accurate depictions of women in media.Croft will apparently be taken prisoner by some island scavengers, and then they try to rape her. “She is literally turned into a cornered animal,” Rosenberg said. “It’s a huge step in her evolution: she’s forced to either fight back or die.” Now you, noble person holding a PS3 controller, are responsible for the welfare of a diminished, punished-for-getting-too-confident, supremely rape-able female character.And while this origin-story might be particularly offensive, bizarre, sexually charged misrepresentations of women in video games are by no means uncommon. Recently Anita Sarkeesian — host of the video series Feminist Frequency, which promotes conversation on women’s portrayal in pop culture and media – sought to expand her online video series “Women Vs. Tropes” to include female tropes found in video games. She started a Kickstarter page in hopes of raising $6,000 dollars to aid her in research and production for the series.Her premise isn’t exactly groundbreaking – that women characters in video games are often reduced to a set of easily digestible, if painfully insubstantial tropes. She laid out five tropes she hoped to cover in the web series: the Damsel in Distress, the Fighting F#@k Toy, the Sexy Sidekick, the Sexy Villainess, and Background Decoration.But the Internet trolls latched onto this video as if it represented some sort of imminent threat to their video gaming pleasure. Sarkeesian’s Wikipedia page was defaced, a pornographic image put up in place of her own picture. And the comments on her YouTube video read like a rabid misogynist free for all. She gets death threats; she gets called a slut; her Jewishness is repeatedly discussed. Men on the Internet are, apparently, very touchy when it comes to discussions of female representations in video games.According to the NPD Group, U.S. consumers on average purchased eight computer and/or video games during every second of every day in 2010. This is a huge business and game makers are scrambling to create engaging worlds and characters that push the boundaries and draw consumers. Interestingly, the 2012 sales, demographic, and usage data (PDF) compiled by the Entertainment Software Association shows that women over the age of eighteen is the video game industry’s fastest growing consumer demographic. It’s important to note, however, that this data is compiled from all kinds of video and computer games – from puzzle and word games to role-playing games – and that gender differences within those categories likely exist.Nevertheless, the stereotype of a twenty-five year old guy sitting around playing his first person shooters in a dimly lit room is gone. With women comprising nearly half of the industry’s consumers, maybe it’s time that women’s voices on their own representations be heard. I don’t think Sarkeesian meant to start an Internet war; it seems more likely she wanted to start a dialogue.Of course the logical detraction is that men’s representations in video games are also skewed, and I would agree with that. Although there are certainly exceptions, there are countless examples of hyper masculine, violent, muscle-bound male characters in gaming. And that’s not the healthiest representation of a gender either. Video games are meant to be fantasy. If they weren’t then why would we play them?While it’s easy for game writers to rely on tired tropes that they know bring in the dollars, it’s not really creating new and exciting characters and pushing our depictions of both genders any further. And when writers glibly attempt to deepen a character by replacing blatant sexual objectification with weird sexual assault undertones, then I think it’s time we all think about women’s representations in games.
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