Gender, Race & Representation: Overlord II

It may be a mistake to try to do any serious analysis of Overlord II (2009), a game that aims to be a caricature of role-playing games and of the whole epic-fantasy genre, a game that is self-conscious parody from start to finish.  It makes not the slightest effort to take itself seriously, and is completely unapologetic in its crassness, which is part of why it’s so much fun.  Nevertheless, it’s not what one would call “socially progressive” in terms of its game mechanic and representation of gender!

 

O2 takes place in a magical fantasy realm full of elves, gnomes, halflings and all the usual trappings of epic fantasy in the Tolkien tradition.  And of course there is a massive epic battle for power going on, but the difference is that you play as the evil Dark Lord seeking to cover all the lands in darkness.  To help you are hordes of psychotic pintsized minions who rather closely resemble Gremlins in appearance and manner(s).  With this army of oddly endearing creeps following you around, you journey across the land, slaughtering whiny elves, dominating human simpletons, clubbing gooey-eyed baby seals and collecting all manner of shiny treasure.

 

O2 takes place in a male-dominated world, by which I mean not that male characters outnumber female ones (although they do), but that those doing the domination are male.  The Overlord and all his minions are unambiguously male.  When women make an appearance, they are usually in passive roles, or they are enemies who get destroyed.

 

One symptom of what Fron et. al. (2007) call the “hegemony of play,” and one common complaint about role-playing games, is that the available avatar choices are ridiculously hypergendered, even hypersexualized bodies dressed in what Pearce refers to as “kombat lingerie” (Fullerton et. al. 2007: 3).  The Overlord – the only type of “avatar” available in O2 – is not really hypersexualized, but is arguably hypergendered as an imposing figure who takes up a lot of space, but who remains hidden and mysterious.  He’s certainly big, strong dude, but he has no visible muscularity.  He’s clad from head to toe in big, heavy, spiky amour that reveals only his glowing yellow eyes peering out underneath his helmet from a blackness that might be some kind of deep shadow, or might actually be the colour of his face.  He doesn’t really seem quite human (maybe he’s more like a big humanoid gremlin in amour).  He also has no expression and no dialogue.  Despite being the game’s namesake and main character, the Overlord seems to have no real identity of his own.  Yet, while it would be possible to cast such an identity-less Overlord as either gender, since we never really see the body underneath, the game narrative is quite clear on this point: the Overlord is male.  Perhaps the designers could not imagine what a female Overlord would look like, swinging a giant axe in the heat of battle to cleave unicorns in half.  Perhaps they felt that a female ought to have more form-fitting, less fully-covering amour than their male counterparts, as is the convention for avatar design in MMOGs like EverQuest.  While male characters can be big, ugly and hidden under layers of metal, designers seem to feel that females need to be properly proportioned, attractive and visible.  It’s also possible that the designers just didn’t think women would enjoy going around smiting stuff very much.

 

The most active women in the game are the Overlord’s three mistresses, whom he picks up over the course of the game and brings back with him to the Dark Tower.  And they’re pretty passive.  Kelda, the Overlord’s childhood sweetheart (yes), still acts like a little teenage girl with a crush on him, but at least she dresses modestly, something that can’t be said of Juno, the vain, self-involved daughter of a Senator from the Glorious Empire.  She likes to shop, expects gifts of jewelry, and attempts to use seduction to get her way.  Finally, Queen Fay, a fairy queen and defender of all magical life, has the most active female role in the whole game, as she is for a time the Overlord’s arch-nemesis.  Then, they make an uneasy alliance against the Glorious Empire, which ultimately leads to her sacrificing her power and coming under the corrupting influence of the Overlord.  After this point, she takes a wholly passive role, returning to the Dark Tower and wandering around like a pretty ornament, making the occasional self-important remark.  Even as she leaves the Sanctuary, her former domain and a safe-haven for magical creatures, she points to the Overlord and tells the dumbfounded elves, “He is your ruler now.”  Although she’s become evil, like the other women, she seems incapable of being a free agent, becoming instead one of the Overlord’s hangers-on.

 

Space is strongly gendered in the O2 universe.  On the one hand, there are the ugly, chaotic spaces that are the domain of the male Overlord.  One such space is the Dark Tower, made of black, angular stone with waterfalls of lava cascading down the side (they don’t seem to bother the Overlord any when he steps in them).  Then there’s the hostile, zombie-infested wasteland, a blackened, blasted region that was corrupted by some past “magic cataclysm.”  These are the sorts of spaces that Fullerton et. al. suggest are preferred by male players and keep appearing in video games (2007: 3).  The magical sanctuaries, full of unicorns, fairies, dryads, flowers, sparkly gems and effeminate hippie elves, are the female domain belonging to Queen Fay.  The Overlord’s task is ultimately to build up his (male) space, while utterly destroying the sanctuaries.  In Jenkins’ model, 19^th and 20^th century boys inhabited hostile, adventurous play spaces, while girls sought out the secret paths and gardens (Jenkins 1998: 348).  But the point of this game is that the boys go out and destroy the secret gardens (literally)!  It is as if they are symbolically fighting against the very ability for girls and women to have a place—or game—of their own (Fullerton et. al. 2007).

 

To briefly address mechanics, this is a combat game that, as Fullerton et. al. (2007: 9) might say, is “focused on tactical agency and strategic exploitation of spatial constraints.”  The good player mobilizes minions effectively and takes advantage of the environment (e.g. stationing fire-throwing minions on high ground) to get the upper hand in battle.  According to Fullerton et. al (2007: 3), these sorts of skills are the province of male fantasies, but are “not necessarily ‘indigenous’ to the way that women and girls experience space… .”  Fullerton et. al. also describe the notion of progressing through power acquisition and geographic domination as part of the male fantasies.  In the case of O2, the power acquisition and domination is not metaphorical, it is quite literal.

 

When Laurel (2001: 60) asks, “What stories will shape our future?” she hopes it will be stories that are inclusive and motivating, rather than exclusive and alienating.  These should be stories from the “androgynous mind of game design” (Fullerton et. al. 2007: 9), stories like Myst, The Longest Journey, and The Sims.  Overlord II tells precisely the kind of story that fueled and emerged from the hegemony of male-dominated play narratives.  My hope would be that it does so with enough self-consciousness and over-the-top gimmickry that it either subverts the hegemonic narrative, or at least renders itself harmless.  Besides, if O2 does reinforce the hegemony of play, then getting more women into the male-dominated world of game design (Fron et. al. 2007: 3) isn’t necessarily the solution, as the O2 narrative was written by Rhianna Pratchett, a woman.

 

In any case, I’m inclined to defend the game, because I enjoyed it so thoroughly.  When it comes down to it, I find that smashing and destroying things is plain old good fun.

 

But maybe that’s just because I’m a man.

 

 

 

REFERENCES:

 

Fron, J et. al. (aka Ludica).  "The Hegemony of Play."  In Situated Play: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association 2007 Conference. Tokyo, Japan, September 2007. http://lcc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/PearcePubs/HegemonyOfPlayFINAL.pdf

 

Fullerton, T. et. al. "A Game Of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space." In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia, September 2007. http://lcc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/PearcePubs/LudicaDAC07.pdf

 

Jenkins, Henry.  1998.  “Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces.”  In K. Salen and E. Zimmerman (Eds.), The Game Design Reader.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.

 

Laurel, Brenda.  2001. Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.