The game Borderlands, released at the end of October, includes some wonderful innovations. The game combines first-person-shooter elements with role-playing elements to create a gaming experience that's fresh and unique. The cell-shaded art style makes the game stand out visually. Every gun in the game is randomly-generated - a first for video game - offering the player thousands of different combinations of weaponry. The game is also one of the only shooters to implement a working four-player cooperative experience, which allows four people to play through entire game at the same time. While this experience is familiar to MMOs, it's almost unheard of among non-MMOs, especially within the shooter genre. However, despite these many technical strengths, the game does little to break any gendered conventions within the video game world, situatating itself squarly as a male-dominated play space.
This is perhaps best demonstrated by referring to the Jenkin's article "Complete Freedom of Movement": Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces. Jenkin's describes the space of the of the "boy book" as a one "of adventure, risk-taking" with "no place to seek cover." (Jenkins online*) This accurately describes the environment of Borderlands. When the player is outside of town, the environment is populated with a variety of dangerous monsters and armed thugs, all who attack the players on sight. The environment also encourages adventure and risk-taking, providing an open 3D world, filled with chasms, cliffs, toxic pools, and ominous twisted metal structures. Jenkins also describes the environment of boy books as staged in "exotic ... spaces" taking the form of "quests, journeys, or adventures into the untamed and uncharted regions of the world" (Jenkins). The world of Borderlands matches up completely with this description, with the players following a loosely-justified quest in a largely unpopulated, frontier planet in the far future. The characters in boy books are described by Jenkins as "boys or boy-like adult males". While the main characters of Borderlands are all adults, in one case femal, and all hardened soldiers seemingly devoid of boyish tendencies, they still do lack all of the "professional responsibilities and domestic commitments associated with adults" (Jenkins) - their only responsibility on this frontier planet is to go treasure hunting and shoot anything in the way!
But is there really any problem with structuring a game this way? I am reminded of Brenda Laurel in Utopian Entrepreneur when she describes parent's apprehension of the values expressed through the story-telling in the Secret Paths video game series. One interviewed father said that games like Mortal Combat "don't have any values in them." (Laurel 62) Laurel instantly picked up on how this comment demonstrated that "the values embedded in mainstream videogames are so pervasive... that they were virtually invisible." (Laurel 62) Borderlands serves as a continuation of the invisible value system of games like Mortal Combat, which offer violence as the only solution to the obstacles before the player and the act of killing as the best way to measure a player's abilities.
This value system in the game Borderlands is that most often replicated for the "hardcore gamers" described in Hegemony of Play by Fron et al (Ludica), which "is characterized by an adolescent male sensibility that transcends physical age and embraces highly sylized graphical violence, male fantasies of power and domination, hyper-sexualized, objectified depictions of women, and rampant racial sterotpying and discrimination." (Ludica 7). While Borderlands makes only passing, if any, references to race, the game certainly embraces highly stylized violence, which it's cell-shaded art style strongly reinforces, creating high-contrast, heavily-saturated gore effects, such as the fountains of bright red blood that spew from a persons neck after they get their head shot off (to use a blunt example). And while the female protaganist character is not as highly-sexualized as in other games, she still is clearly an object to be viewed and desired, showing tatoo-ed cleavage and making the occassional suggestive remark.
Another article by Ludica, "A Game of One's Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Digital Space" (Fullerton et al) can be referenced to further demonstrate how Borderlands serves as a strong example of male play space. The article references Gilman's observation of the "universal dominance of the projectice" in male sport and how that is "epitomized in digital games by the contested space of the first-person shooter". (Fullerton et al 2) Borderlands is essentially a FPS and to succeed the player must "solve complex spatial rotation problems in real time" and have "mastery of quick reflexes" which "tend to favor males." (Fullerton et al 2) But Borderlands goes a step further by serving as a glorification of the projectile. In the first paragraph, I described how the randomly-generated guns offers thousands of possibilities for the player. Because of this feature, the gun itself and projectiles it fires - which can come in many different types such as fire, electricity, acid, and mini-rockets - become even more central to the play experience than in a normal FPS. The most common response to picking up a new gun is to fire it off, since the way the gun behaves and the projectiles fire is oftentimes completely unknown, even after hours of playtime.
While Borderlands makes some technical advances, it makes no attempt to break any of the pervasive values that are part of the mainstream gaming culture. It further reinforces those values and, in fact, elevates those values through its stylized glorification of violence and the central role of guns and projectiles to the play experience. Borderlands is definitely a game for boys - or at the very least, for men who wish they still were.
Works Cited
Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (Fullerton et al) (2007). "A Game Of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space." In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia, September 2007.
Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (Ludica) "The Hegemony of Play." In Situated Play: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association 2007 Conference. Tokyo, Japan, September 2007.
Jenkins, Henry. "Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces" The Game Design Reader, ed. Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman.MIT Press:Cambridge, MA, 2006. 330-363.
Laurel, Brenda. (2001). Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
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