Wet (does saying that name make anyone else feel a bit dirty?) brings with it a forcible reminder of something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while, and that’s female characters in gaming. Yes, it’s an old games journalism chestnut, but I’m not going to go the usual route of complaining about how they’ve all got cleavages that could trap a ferret. Partly because both men and women in games have always been portrayed as generically attractive, and partly because anyone who claims to be put off by tits is a joyless loser.
No, my problem with a lot of female characterization these days is that it goes too far in the opposite direction. To put it succinctly, they’re all complete bitches.
Watch me as I backpedal hastily out of the shit that last sentence could heap upon me. Here I go. I’m not saying female characters should stay in the kitchen and peek demurely at their male rescuers over a wazza pair of jugs (WHEEEEEE BACKPEDALLING IS FUN), if a female character is in a game then they’ll most likely be in a combat zone, so they can’t exactly saunter about in ankle-length hoop skirts drinking tea with their pinkies extended. But a lot of game story writers can’t seem to tell the difference between “tough and independent” and “being a complete bitch.”
Rubi from Wet (urggh) is a character with precisely zero redeeming qualities. Her response to the slightest opposition is foulmouthed threats, if she doesn’t just jump straight to murder. Even to her allies she’s surly, abrupt and contemptible, happily leading them into mortal danger to meet her objective, which is usually either mindless personal vengeance or getting her hands on huge bricks of money.
You could argue that this was all done “ironically” (a word that is swiftly becoming the equivalent of the word “NOT” in the movie Wayne’s World) to stay in keeping with the deliberate ‘exploitation movie’ style. But I don’t accept that. I like my game stories, that should be painfully obvious by now, and I can’t like a game if I can’t relate to or understand the protagonist. Rubi is not a badass. A “badass” is something to aspire to, someone who can handle a situation. She’s more like the female equivalent of 50 Cent as depicted in Blood On The Sand: thoughtless, insecure, thick as pigshit and quite, quite mad.
Not that being psychotic need preclude you from being an enjoyable character. Kratos from God of War, for example, or Tommy Vercetti from GTA: Vice City, both apparently lacking any kind of moral code and both fascinating enough to carry a game while still being fairly unrelatable. But even those two have their moments of humanity that help keep us interested – Tommy petulantly explaining that he likes his Hawaiian shirt; Kratos’ exhaustively-explained tragic backstory that, while not excusing his actions, gives them something of a framing device. Rubi has no backstory and no apparent justification. Without those we’re forced to come up with our own explanation for her actions, which for most of us will be “because she’s a massive bitch.”
There are plenty of examples of this kind of bad female characterization. Lara Croft, the classic feminist hate figure, and her murderous kleptomania. Whatshername from Dead Space, yelling at you to fix everything while she sits behind a monitor eating cakes. There’s a particular scene in Crysis that sticks out in my mind when you rescue a female archaeologist (generically hot and skinny, natch) who gets offended and sarcastic when your outrageously Cockney colleague addresses her as “love.” Anyone familiar with English colloquial dialects could tell you that “love” in this context is not necessarily diminutive, but more an equivalent of “dude” or “mate,” so her reaction struck me as hypersensitive and thick.
Females in this vein don’t come across as “independent” or “strong.” They act like neurotic feminists who feel that their every action and expression has to illustrate the fact that they’re just as capable as the men, and don’t like being looked upon amorously (hence why they all dress so conservatively, I suppose). They’re as shallow as any traditional kidnapped princess because they only have one character trait, and still define themselves by the men that surround them.
You want to make a strong female character, you do the same thing you do to make a strong anything character. Give them a life, a backstory, hopes, dreams, desires. Give them the capacity to feel the whole gamut of emotions. Yes, let them be tough, but let them laugh, and cry, and find things to enjoy in life. And why not give them a wazza pair of jugs, too. That’s always fun.
Anyway.
“I had really been hoping for something newer… oh wait I forgot – he’s in Australia, “Land of Late Released Games” and all that.”
– Venatio, from the Wet comments (eeeesh)
“Next up Brutal Legend……please?”
– crotalidian, from the comments attached to the review of the aforementioned game
This seems as good a time as any to talk about how my schedule works, before crotalidian gets disappointed. I usually don’t get review copies, because it’s The Escapist offices that gets them, and by the time it could be sorted out and sent to me it’d probably have been released anyway. So I usually get them the same time as everyone else, more often than not imported from the US to sidestep the Australia release dates thing. Once I have the game, it takes a week to play it and a week to make the video, and the video doesn’t actually go up until the week after that. They’d probably take less time to play if I didn’t have to do so at the same time I’m making the video for the game I was playing the week before, and if I could play games for more than five or six hours at a time without my eyes bleeding.
All of which means that Brütal Legend will be next week’s video, not this week’s one. Sorry. But as was pointed out to me once, coming later than all the other reviews could be to my benefit. By the time I get my feelings across most people have had a chance to play through it and so understand what I’m talking about, and all the milky white hype and excitement has drained away to the point that everyone’s ready to take another look in the bucket to see the horrible gelatinous thing that they’ve been drinking from for the last two weeks.
Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder. When he isn’t talking very fast into a headset mic he also designs freeware adventure games and writes the back page column for PC Gamer, who are too important to mention us. His personal site is www.fullyramblomatic.com.
