Game Design as Cultural Practice

Blogpost 5: Gender, Race & Representation.

I like Super Paper Mario. It is a cute game, is played using familiar mechanics in a new environment, and has an interesting cast of characters who actually have some emotional response. I am not referring to the silent Mario, Cowardly Luigi, buffoonish Bowser, or the ditzy inhuman Princess Peach however. The staples of the Mario crowd at this point are only caricatures of any being we would recognize as having human emotions and values. The real “people” in this game are the supporting cast, specifically Tippi a pixl butterfly and Count Blek who is trying to end all reality.

Mario and his crew, after the introductory plot which I won't spoil here, engage in their traditional head stomping antics to save reality with an occasional cut scene or save the princess break from game play. Additionally, the game has several hidden zones, a collection mini-game, and hidden characters to fill in the back story. The game play is fundamentally 2D, traditional, Mario however.

The tone of the game is dark, sinister, and cynical. As I mentioned earlier, the main villain is trying to end reality and the NPC's are well aware and afraid of this fact. Worse, the Count has several goons who seem intelligent and emotional working for him. These characters don't flinch at the thought of destroying the world however. Finally, the game constant lampoons the game industry as a whole. The over dramatizations of the player characters, the mocking of video game conventions, and an entire level focused on mocking the sexualization obsessed, social misfit, “hardcore” gamers make this game seem as much of social commentary as bop heads and save the world.

Peach's character is emotionally explosive (with actual explosions). She is a stereotype of the girl who pitches a fit every time someone offends her, gets in her way, or otherwise annoys her. Her over the top reactions become almost farcical. When compared to the other female characters who exhibit human responses to situations, Peach becomes less of an offense and more of an acknowledgment. It is as if the content team looked at the female audience to say, “We understand your pain. We are still working on these things. Ms. Laurel, we are sorry about the marshmallows.”

Finding information on the Internet about the internals of development processes for this game, or any game, isn't easy. Why certain choices were made. For instance, I don't know if the collection mini-game was put in to pad out game play or to appeal to female audiences. In the paper, “Hegemony of Play”, the authors discuss that the game development world has an echo chamber like effect. Male producers create games built by majority male development teams which are tested by majority male testers. In my experience the software development world rarely focuses on testing “How does this make me feel?”, but instead on “How can I break it?”. I would like to think, however, that Super Paper Mario had a bit of this extra treatment. It is a great game and it would be nice to think that it made efforts to attract other people and not to simply tack on what had been proven popular with certain demographics in other games targeted to them.

Gender Appeal and Changing the World.

    So I play World of Warcraft on a regular basis. Also I've recently taken Knights of the Old Republic 2 through its paces. Both of these games are rpgs and both allow you to pick a character from a certain list of character models with gender race and basic things like face and hair as variables. Neither of these games are completely free character creation ala City of Heros and Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. So what I get from these screens is a decent number of various models available to me as my avatar but all the models are from the developers fancy. The one thing that struck me was that I'm almost certain that despite the two years or so since I last played KotOR 2 I picked the exact same female model to play as. I didn't pick a male model, I picked a female model that appealed to me. That in and of itself makes me wonder about the topics of gender representation and targeting to specific demographics.
    "For instance, when successful female game producer Nour Polloni insisted that the female leading character in a new game wear baggy pants, she had difficulties negotiating with the all-male creative team, who wanted to dress her in a string bikini."  (pg 2) So does this imply that women developers are always at odds against male developers in game appeal design? Polloni's arguments aren't mentioned here but lets think for a minute on how that argument could go. The male dev team wants to appeal demographic by making the female character model provocative supposedly. Or maybe just one of the dev members really likes looking at women wearing bikinis. I want to speak more on the why such a situation but the writing is lacking in details on this subject. So lets suppose Polloni took the stance that the character model would appeal more universally in pants than in a bikini. I believe that there is a lot of precedents for this in gaming at this point. After all one of the biggest icons of PC gaming is Lara Croft and consistantly through that series of games her model is clothed in pants. Perhaps the purpose of this story in the writing isn't to specificaly answer the described situation but instead open the reader to the questions of what motivations are there for characterizing game models in the way they are today and who makes the final decision on games.

    Another issue that at first glance doesn't seem to be related to the previous one is brought up by this question. "But is there a larger picture here? Is it possible that the difficulty in producing “games for girls” or games for adults, or games for “everyone” lies in the inherent properties of the technology of digital games themselves?" Two topics spring to my mind when I read this question. One was already spoken of a bit earlier in the paper and that is marketing targets and market pressures. Its less risky for companies to use marketing that has already proven successful and thereby raise their investment return vs. loss ratio and that will always be a driving force. But you can't just condemn them as evil for going with more obvious popular ideas just because the ideas used aren't new. The second topic is the technology aspect of the question. What are the affordances of the technology available to produce video games with today? I believe that the technologies available today are more than enough to produce any vision a creative developer can think of. The developer simply has to make decisions and plan out how to get the creative vision to the audience. Sometimes those plans don't work out such as in the instance of the company Purple Moon which is written about in the second reading Utopian Entrepreneur.
    I don't believe that the issue facing the video game creators today needs to be pared down into specific topics like gender and race. I think the bigger the question is to start with the more possibilities you have for answering it. That means to me that for all the details of the situations involved in developing games everybody can achieve their goals. Take the advice of Brenda Laurel in Utopian Entrepreneur:"I stopped describing myself as a) an artist and b)  a political activist. Both of those definitions resulted in what I now see as my own self-marginalization. I couldn't labor myself as a subversive or a member of the elite. I had to mentally place myself and my values at the center, not at the margin. I had to understand that what I was about was not critiquing but manifesting" (pg 10). Thats the strongest message I can share from this reading. Strive to achieve growth both of yourself and the world and critique or belittle achievements.

Jerald Parker

Battalion Wars and Stereotyping

Bias and stereotyping can strongly influence a game, from concept to completion; this is evident in the 2005 Gamecube game Battalion Wars, which demonstrated a strong cultural, sexual, and racial bias. In Battalion Wars, the player is a field officer participating in what begins as a battle between the Western Frontier and the Tundran Territories. As a member of the Western Frontier, the player is briefed by the stout General Herman and petite Brigadier Betty before each battle with the Tundran Territories. However, both sides soon are compelled to join together as a much more dangerous foe appears, the Xylvanians, led by Kaiser Vlad and the traitorous Tsar Gorgi, who was originally on the side of the Tundran Territories. The battle escalates into a full-blown war as drama ensues among the leaders of the three armies.

While this seems like a load of gibberish, it is actually a load of gibberish sprinkled with historical commentary and filled with plenty of cultural stereotype bits. The battles, countries, and even characters of Battalion Wars, despite the goofy names, are based on counterparts in “the real world.” The Western Frontier is the United States of America, complete with easily-angered, overweight Texans (such as General Herman) and skinny, blond-haired babes (Brigadier Betty). The other nations were not as obvious stereotypes, as their characters' archetypes were extreme. The Tundran Territories were the game's stand-in for the Soviet Union, even going as far as using weapons and vehicles famous to Americans as pure Soviet engineering (such as AK-47's). Tsar Gorgi, the previous leader of the Territories, possesses a heavy Russian accent and an exaggerated belief in family honor and leadership. Xylvania becomes the most twisted representation of the three. Roughly based on the German Empire around the 1915's (World War I), it is shown as a country unlike a cartoon version of Transylvania, complete with vampire citizens. Vlad has the German title “Kaiser” (Emperor) and is shown as a ruthless (albeit clumsy and foolish) vampire ruler, while his army's uniforms and vehicles mimic that of the Imperial and Nazi Germany eras. Even many of the battles of the game mimic real-life events; Mission Twelve is named “X-Day,” modeled after the invasion of Normandy (D-Day).

 Battalion Wars is a prime example of a game that uses stereotypes and cultural bias as part of the gameplay and representation. While they are amusing, some of the stereotypes can push things a bit far; mimicking the past can be a bit dangerous, and if some were to make the connection they could turn it into one of the “stories of our [time] that pose [a great threat] to our children and our future” by putting a bias on what happened. (Utopian Entrepreneur, pg. 65) Meanwhile, the creators of the game could not  escape classic marketing research, aiming for the male players with the Barbie-bodied Betty,  continuing the game practice of being “alienating to women.” (The Hegemony of Play, pg. 3) Betty will even, and often, flirt with other officers, as well as the player (doing a part to label the player as a male “character”). Thus, Battalion Wars falls to the “Hegemony of Play,” connecting with biases of modern cultural stereotypes despite being a strong game.

Emily Cribb

Female Characters as Represented in Lufia 2

 I have played video games as long as I can remember. Some of my fondest and most vivid childhood memories involve playing these games and enjoying the narratives that they presented. Because of this, many of my conceptual models of how people behave and how the world works stem from the experiences I had in these various game worlds as I grew up relating them to my life. I often find myself wondering what sort of values and expectations these games have ingrained into my psyche and I decided that I would explore a game that I think is largely responsible for how I view gender and gender relations. The game, Lufia 2, is a cult classic Japanese role playing game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System produced by a small game development studio called Neverland. The game builds its narrative on the progression of the hero Maxim throughout the world and the relationships that he establishes along the way, most notably the various female characters that play a strong role in the establishment of the his character. I think that the creators of this game did a surprisingly good job in depicting certain types of female personalities.

There are three main Female leads in the story, Tia maxim’s childhood friend, Selan the warrior captain of Parcelyte’s army, and the mysterious soothsayer Iris who starts Maxim on his journey. The first, Tia, is a merchant by trade; she is the sole owner and proprietor of a merchant shop where Maxim goes to collect money for the monsters he has slain. She has had a strong romantic interest in Maxim since they were children, but he has never really shared her affections because he aspires to adventure and she wants him to settle down and work with her in the shop. As Maxim begins his adventure, she decides to accompany him so that she may share in his passion and perhaps gain his love. The second of the two women is Selan, she is the Captain of the guard and is considered a peerless among the fighters in her nation. Maxim and his fellow adventures happen across this nation and through Maxim’s reputation as a powerful warrior the two are forcefully paired by the king to rescue his coveted Treasure. The two stubborn and willful characters butt heads at first as they struggle to recover the treasure, but as a greater evil makes its presence known, the two become bound by their common destiny and eventually fall in love. Tia realizes that Maxim has found the companion in Selan that she could never be so she abandons the group to find her way back home. Maxim and Selan are shortly there-after married and have a child. The mystic Iris appears at the beginning of Maxim’s adventure in the form of “the woman in the Red Dress” to tell him of his destiny and to start him on his journey. Her demeanor is always somber and collected and she repeatedly shows up to help guide the hero and to help comfort them during times of great loss, she even rescues Maxim and Selan’s child from the hands of the boy’s would-be murderer. But when the game draws close to its conclusion, she appears to Maxim as a ghost revealing herself as the Goddess of Death whom Maxim and his companions have just slain. As a great catastrophe is about to unfold Maxim appeals to the goddess, who still in the form of the compassionate Iris, who decides to aid Maxim in preventing it.

The depiction of the female gender in this game is very classical, but I do believe that their representation is a fairly good example of how games should portray them. I think that the characters are very well established and built upon certain archetypes so that they are easy to empathize with, but not so stereotypical as to be insulting. The reason I chose to do my blog post on this game and give a description of some of the more potent female characters is because I thought that most people would be writing theirs on the numerous negative portrayals of gender and race in the video game industry. My other motive is that I’ve often considered writing about this game and this was the only blog post topic whose range I thought encompassed this game.

 I’d really like to get some feedback, if anyone else has played this game or if you have some sort of insight based off of my descriptions please feel free to let me know. I’d really love to get an alternate perspective.

How to design games for girls?

Like other media, most games have gender inclination in terms of themes, stories, representations, mechanisms etc. The game that I want to write about is SIMS, which was my favorite game several years ago. It is the best-selling game of all time for personal computers. And it is also seen as a girl-friendly game because the social elements and constructive play pattern that is introduced in the game. The inspiration of the game comes from the creator, Will Wright's obsession with building models to simulate real life. The book of "Designing Interactions" (Bill Moggridge, 2007) quotes the interview with the designer, in which he contributes the success to the community design; the game creates a social space where people connects with each other. When I played the game, the social interaction was reinforced by the rewarding system. For example, if the avatar do not get enough social interaction, they are going to have a bad temper, and the balance of life is messed up. Will Wright also mentioned that there is more sex in the game then most of the other games, and the rationality behind this design is all based on the simulation of real life. This simulation makes the game play to be constructive, which matches well with the game plan pattern of girls. Although this game is liked by many female players, the author took a more neutral method, which is simulating the real life and putting the mechanisms there so that players can control their avatar's life from the manipulation level (control mechanism) to the need level (to fulfill the different requirements for multiple aspects of life), and the community level. This neutral method is actually very different from the method mentioned in Brenda Laurel's book. She takes the stance of a social activist, and trying to promote that girls should get enough chance to be involved in the computer world by computer games. Although the company did not survive due to business reasons, the games that they created had a strong cultural influence, especially for girls between 8 to 14 years old. She talked about the anthropology research method that they took to understand the girls and how they play, and pointed out that this kind of research is very different from "market research". The research is not merely based on statistics, it is more focused on the quantitative findings, and the purpose is "innovation is for the creative." The difficulties of creating games for girls within the boy's world is not only hard because of the demographics of developing and designing team, it is a deeply embedded in every aspects of life - in play, identity, work, technology and business (Laurel, 2001).
But comparing the difficult of creating successful blockbuster games for girls in the digital age, to the success of the board game among female audiences in pre-computer age, it seems that technology gets in the way for the games designed for girls and women. This issue is discussed in the paper of "the hegemony of play", and there are many things that we can learn from the 19th and early 20th century board game industry. The role of the power of the player is more flexible than computer enforcing and dictating all the rules; producers of the game pieces have more room for their personal creativity; the game space is more shared than separated; more girls are involved in the play testing of the game. Many of these are good lessons to encourage better design for games that's more fun to girls.

Laurel wrote that, "the strategy of culture work is to inject new material into the culture without activating its immune system." It seems that the cultural changes always cause reactions of the "immune system" to feel pain. That's why we need to take multiple methods, including activist methods, anthropology methods, and the improvement of the technology.

Yan Xu
yxu7@gatech.edu

Gender in VF5

Virtua Fighter 5 Online is the newest game in a series of well-tuned fighting games. The cast of the game is from all around the world, and diverse in style and appearance, but compared to other fighters like Tekken or Soul Calibur might seem fairly bland. The game's major focus and strong point is on real combat without any tricks or magic, and very deep, realistic fighting styles for each character. The female characters in the game are just as strong as their male counterparts, avoiding the general trend of all females being the weaker, more agile ones. In a game with completely different fighting styles for each character, their appearance and character are secondary to their style; despite that, the game does not tend to treat the female characters much different than the males.
    While fighting games have been known to be the type of game with female characters wearing next to nothing, Virtua Fighter has, for the most part, been able to avoid that. One example to the contrary, however, is the character of Vanessa, a military trained fighter. In the previous game, she (here) was introduced as a large, muscular African American woman. In Virtua Fighter 5 (here), she recieved an appearance overhaul, and while keeping some of her muscle, now has lighter skin and is more feminine in appearance. Her costume has also changed, and her camo jacket has been unbuttoned to reveal a bikini top underneath. Compared to the males' costumes, it's not very revealing, but it's odd that in a game where unnecessary sex appeal is avoided that such a change would happen, but ultimately Sega might change things like this to get more money from their core demographic. Ultimately, the quick, twitch gameplay of fighting games, while having a female audience, tends to be more male dominated; in The Hegemony of Play, it states "games that demand a high level of certain types of spatial rotation skills, such as First Person Shooters, are actually more difficult for women and girls to master"(4). If the game is catered towards a certain group of people, why not add something to appease that group, especially if other games that are doing well are going much farther.
    It seems that in a genre filled with large amounts of code devoted to things like excessive chest size and physics, Virtua Fighter's females stray from the Hegemony of Play, and have as diverse stories and styles as the males do. While the women are modeled to be beautiful, a few of the males are more effeminate.The development team of the game has done a good job in showing that the ideas of The Hegemony of Play aren't prevalent everywhere.

Here are images of the characters.

Andy Korzik
gth707g

Punchout: Find Value in Stereotypes

One of the most popular games of the 1980’s Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! was developed and published by Nintendo. The game features a boxer named Little Mac progressing his way up the professional boxing circuit. The protagonist faces a series of fictional boxers from multiple countries leading up to the final championship fight. This final match is against then-World Heavyweight Champion, Mike Tyson.

 

This game has some of the most racially stereotypical characters made in videogames. Little Mac has a trainer in the game named Doc Louis. Doc Louis is shown with large googly-eyes, dark skin, and large pinkish lips; somewhat resembling “blackface.” This is further exemplified by the bewildered, bug-eyed look that he has. 

Lil’ Mac’s first opponent is French boxer, Glass Joe. Glass Joe is the weakest opponent in the game and also the most defenseless looking character in the game. The character has red hair and a timid, almost petrified, look on his face. It is blatantly obvious the developers reason for having the brash, American protagonist first face the feeble French boxer. Lil Mac’s second opponent is Von Kaiser. Von Kaiser is depicted in typical German caricature and besides not looking as scared, is just as easily beatable as Lil’ Mac’s previous French opponent. Lil’ Mac continues his beatings of other countries greatest champions as he continues his conquest. Lil’ Mac’s next opponents include Piston Honda (a Japanese boxer with a headband resembling that of Daniel from Karate Kid), Don Flamenco (an effeminate, Spanish fighter), and Great Tiger (an Indian, turban wearing Sikh who brings a tiger with him to his matches).  

At first glance, one might see Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! as a classic, fighter game that allows its player to imagine themselves as professional boxers; starting out as a lowly novice and moving up the later to face the world famous, heavy weight champion. Though the game may serve this purpose, is there a deeper value or meaning to the game? One topic of Brenda Laurel’s book Utopian Entrepreneur, is that while not all media has profound influence on values, there are values everywhere.  Laurel states that values are “embedded in every aspect of our culture and lurking in the very natures of media and our technologies” (Laurel 62). Keeping Laurels view in mind, what values can be taken from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!!?

It can be obviously seen that the American protagonist goes throughout the world defeating the greatest champions from every country. This obviously draws a connection to the view that the United States has the power to conquer any nation. This theory also links somewhat to the colonialist view of conquering other, weaker nations. The stereotypical caricature given to the characters is also a point of interest, some critics deeming this game as racist. While the value’s that can be drawn from this game are debatable, the existence of them is apparent.

Jarryd McCree

Gender and Race in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

One of my favorite video games to play right now is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It is a great example of a modern adventure game because the world in which it is set so vast and the paths of exploration are so open-ended. However, while on one hand it is a great example of a modern video game, on the other it still seems to fall prey to the same gender and race stereotypes as many of the video games that came before it.

To be honest, at first I did not realize how much of a role gender played in the game. In fact, I was quite pleased to see that sexuality seems to play almost no role in the game at all. While the female characters do wear different clothing (skirts and dresses instead of pants) the clothing is far from sexually charged. In addition, the facial structures and hair styles are different depending on gender, but also tastefully so. (You can see an example of the typical female character below.) However, I found out only later in the game that the differences between males and females are even greater than I realized. It turns out (and this is not made obvious in the game) that gender effects the basic skills of your character. Males often have higher strength, agility and endurance while females excel in intelligence willpower and speed. Unfortunately, these differences seems to be quite stereotypical and somewhat biased towards male characters.

Nevertheless, the gender differences pale in comparison to the use of race in the game. Oblivion has ten 'races' total. Among these are the three more 'animal' races: Khajiit (jaguar men), Orc, and Argonians (reptilian); the seemingly white races: Wood Elves, High Elves, Nords, Bretons, and Imperials; the black race: Redguard; and the Dark Elves (which are "dark-skinned," but in a more purplish way [1]). Not only are the Redguard clearly outnumbered, but they seem to be stereotypically black. The Redguard are "the most naturally talented warriors" benefitting from increased speed and strength [2]. What is most interesting about this set up is that it is totally unnecessary. The character creation screen already has a skin tone adjustment. Why not just let any of the characters be adjustable to any skin tone? Why limit the "the most naturally talented warriors" to black and all others (excluding the animals) to white?

In these ways Oblivion fails to break free of the common biases that seem to plague the video game industry. It is somewhat disheartening that such cultural set-backs can persist in an industry that is advancing so rapidly.

[1] http://www.elderscrolls.com/codex/races_darkelf.htm
[2] http://www.elderscrolls.com/codex/races_redguard.htm

KotOR, Bastila, and a Failure in Values

When creating its content, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR) has the advantage of drawing from an IP that has been fleshed out tremendously since its inception.  As such, there is an impressive array of character types - both physically and mentally - which illustrates several positions the designers have taken (perhaps inadvertently) on issues of race and gender: the link between African tribes and Wookies with respect to selling their own people as slaves, Jedi Jolee Bindo as a magical negro, the treatment of the Mandalorian race, and many others.  However, all of these are overshadowed by the character of the primary female NPC, Bastila Shan.  The attitudes towards gender encapsulated by her character, both in a narrative sense and a gameplay sense, ultimately imply a much less positive image than one would expect from a character intended as a "strong woman."

At the opening of the game, Bastila is presented as a war hero, almost a superhero - a woman chosen for a crack assault team, responsible for defeating the present Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Revan, and user of an incredibly rare force power, Battle Meditation, that increases the morale of her allies while decreasing that of her foes in a scope that can include battles on a planetary scale.  All of these are swiftly subverted.  The player's avatar and another character ridicule her for being captured upon crash-landing on the first planet in the game in an escape pod because her lightsaber rolled under her seat, totally ignoring the fact that when your (possibly, and by official word canonically, male) character crash-landed, they were tended to by another party member until they regained consciousness.  She is shown to have been included in the strike force sent to capture Revan not because her own skill or merit - in fact, she's frequently derided as hotheaded - but singularly because of her special ability, in a manner echoing a woman receiving a position not on merit but because of a desirable physical attribute.  Lastly, in the largest reveal of the game, she is shown to have not defeated Revan - Revan's apprentice Darth Malak had actually done that - but rather saved Revan's life while erasing their mind so the Jedi council could use Revan as a tool to find a powerful Jedi artifact.  In the scenes that follow, she is captured (for the second time in the game) and eventually falls to the Dark Side herself, prompting the player to fight her on several occasions.  She is redeemable, but in another questionable decision, this is only easy to do if the main character is male and has followed through a romantic subplot with Bastila.  As such, over the course of the game, her persona - a strong female character - is picked apart as a facade for plot purposes.

Her prowess in-game reflects elements of this as well.  Firstly, her weapon of choice is a double-bladed lightsaber, a weapon that all but the most devoted of Star Wars fans will remember as used exclusively by the villain of Episode I, Darth Maul.  Of the dual-weapon-wielding options within the game, it is the weaker choice, as it allows less customization of special weapon properties than two lightsabers; nearly all strategy guides suggest two separate weapons if dual-wielding is to be used.  More notably, over the course of the game Bastila leaves the party, when she is taken captive and subsequently turns to the Dark Side; when the player has her rejoin, either redeemed or otherwise, the player has no control over how her skills and powers are assigned, to the extent that she may have lost what abilities the player gave her when she *was* part of the team.  In many cases the game reconfigures her to have less-than useful abilities; in effect, the game makes her a substandard choice, compared to *any* of the other characters, all of whose growth the player has control over from the point where they join on.  Lastly, if a player *had* chosen to use her, but did not expect that she would be captured or turn, the player is suddenly without a their primary team member, in a manner that does not happen to any other character over the course of the game.  These factors combine to make Bastila one of the least attractive characters, and certainly least attractive Jedi option, for inclusion in the player's party.

What exactly does this tell us of the attitude of the developers towards women?  It rather neatly fits into the model of the Hegemony of Play: nearly all of the design team for the game was male; we see the game designed as pandering to a male player, with official Star Wars canon placing the main character as male and the 'most fulfilling' ending being most obtainable only if the main character is male; the character notionally introduced as the strong female is deconstructed into a thoroughly flawed, often contradictory, and frequently unlikeable character, a fact lampooned in the second game by one of the returning characters, an assassin droid:

"Statement: Oh, yes. My master had quite the collection of tortured individuals that seemed unable to confront their basic personality conflicts. Let me cite some specific examples. [...] [impersonates Bastila Shan] Mockery: "Oh, master, I love you but I hate everything you stand for, but I think we should go press our slimy, mucous-covered lips together in the cargo hold!" Conclusion: Such pheromone-driven Human responses never cease to decrease the charge in my capacitors and make me wish I could press a blaster pistol to my behavior core and pull the trigger. I am pleased that this does not seem to be the case with your current entourage."

If one agrees with Laurel's ideas about values (62-66), then one might wonder: what exactly is Bastila teaching us?  That women are only useful for their 'special talents'?  That they will act irrationally and turn on you whenever it is convenient for them to do so?  That their poor decisions will make them ineffective and ruin whatever plans that men (as clearly the player is intended to be male) have to do Important Things?  She allows no change, no real possibility to solve her problems in a natural, rational way; her change of sides is written in stone, as are her mood swings.  The best the player can do is redeem her - if seen through the eyes of KotOR, does every woman need a man watching over her to keep her from a fall, from madness?  In this respect, the game makes no effort at all to bring a positive change, to display values better than that toed by the hegemonic line.

When asked for their opinions on Bastila, many KotOR players will use words like "annoying," "hypocritical," even "bitchy."  Considering the image she is originally presented with - war heroine, shining ray of hope for the good guys, overall a positive character - it makes it difficult to take other gender and race issues the game raises seriously, or conceive of them in a positive life.  Perhaps the designers embrace better, less offensive values there, but given the level of outright offensiveness and failure that they manifested in Bastila, it somehow seems a little farfetched.

--Evan

The Women of Red Alert 2

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 was released in 2000. It was released during a period where the ideal market was still the hardcore gamer (unlike the more casual gamers being targeted today). The designers and producers were still mostly run by white, middle-aged men. As such, women tended to be modeled in ways that would appeal to the ideals of the producers and the perceived audience. Women in Red Alert 2 are actually portrayed in two very different ways, and both seem to fit well into the male stereotype.

 

The American forces have a specialty unit named Tanya. Tanya is a specially trained super agent. Despite this, she does not wear professional military gear. Instead she wears a low cut tank top and fairly high-cut shorts. She carries a pair of pistols and can take out almost any unit before they even get a chance to attack. She talks tough and doesn’t take crap from anyone. Tanya portrays a dominant woman in a world ruled by men. However, this is where the gameplay plays into this stereotype. Red Alert 2 is a tactics game, so the players are in control of the units. In this case, the player is given direct control over this hot-headed woman. He gets to decide how she moves and what actions she takes. And as if that wasn’t good enough, Tanya carries a set of thermal detonators. She can blow up buildings.

 

On the Soviet side there is another woman, this one more subtle. Lieutenant Zofia first represents the American idea of the Soviets as traitorous. She starts out by watching from the sidelines. But as time progresses and the player proves himself in a series of battles, she begins to make herself known to the player. Eventually Zofia sides with the player (who plays as the Soviet general) because she claims she believe he will win. But the entire time she is seen to be hedging her bets slightly. It is not until the very end when the player has won that she throws her full support behind him. Zofia is also used as a subtle seductress who sometimes makes overt remarks to the player. She tries to play up her sex appeal to give the player some eye candy while he tries to pretend to be fighting for “The Honor of Mother Russia!”

 

The game industry has a history of playing up the female stereotype. Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 is certainly a guilty party. But things are changing. Characters are becoming more vague, allowing men and women to play the same game and project themselves onto the character. The industry is searching for the next low budget casual game like Brain Age or Puzzle Quest that still sells millions of copies to combat the rising price of game production. Nintendo is leading the way in opening the market to more casual players. But other companies are also following suit. Electronic Arts is doing similar things with Pogo and Rock Band. The industry is headed towards a more all encompassing strategy that will include everyone under the title of “gamer.”

 

-Michael Gorbsky