Post-industrial high capitalist economies are
developing into cultures of "play" where a
pervasive "play ethic" is superseding the work
ethic.1 Within technoculture and disseminating out
across class, ethnic and geographical barriers,
younger generations are devoting increasing
recreation time to addictive computer games.
Echoing the re-patterning of society in the wake of
print, and later radio and television, computer
games are socializing the younger generations of
post-industrial citizens, reorganizing their
world-view and thought parameters along the axes of
fighting games, first person shooters, adventure
games, strategy games, MUDs and networked Internet
games.2
Yet postmodern and feminist
theoreticians, art and technology critics and even
popular culture critics have for the most part
shunned the increasing popularity of computer
games, lending their attention to the far less
ubiquitous technologies of Virtual Reality or even
of the Web. Within this theoretical vacuum, my
research of the "1st person shooter/adventure game
with female heroine" genre, exemplified in the
popular game "Tombraider",3 has roved from gender
analysis of film, particularly the horror film
genre, to science fiction, to Virtual Reality
theory, to Internet/Identity theory, to Queer
theory, to my own ethnographic surveys conducted on
the Internet.4 My research and analysis then delve
into the subculture of subversive game hacking and
the production of game patches, an art strategy
that provides an opportunity for feminists to
influence the formation of new computer game gender
configurations.
- Before
Tombraider
"When one considers the
progress that has been made during the
mediums first 25 years, it is enormous.
Even film, another rapidly developing medium,
was, for the most part, still black and white
and silent after its first quarter century.
Comparing Pong to 64-bit CD-ROM-based games,
it is difficult to say what even the next
five years will bring, much less what the
effects of such future technology will
be."
-Mark J. P. Wolf, Prof. of
Communications5
"Sometimes a killer body just
isnt enough."
-back of "Tombraider" cd
case
The first computer games
displayed simple abstract graphics, structuring
visual on/off-screen space and interactivity in
a variety of novel configurations.6 With ever
increasing graphical processessing speed,
computer games are catching up to the dream of
virtual reality, of a holistic Cartesian 3-D
space navigated/created by the individual
viewer, a dream rooted in Western culture from
Renaissance painting to film. The actions
occurring in this cyberspace are not virtual
replacements of everyday social relations, as
predicted by cyberpunk novelists, but a codified
set of behaviors particular to certain game
genres. In the case of the first person
shooter/adventure game, itself a hybrid of what
were once two genres (1st person shooter and
adventure), activities are relegated to fighting
attackers, exploration of "undiscovered" spaces,
and puzzle solving.
Until recently, the
avatars in these games were almost exclusively
male, with the exception of the princess offered
as game prize in "Prince of Persia", "Double
Dragon" and other games with women as battle
trophies. This notable feminine absence led
feminist theoretician Gillian Skirrow to locate
femininity in the computer games womb-like
tunneling architecture. Enter Lara Croft, (1996)
the first immensely popular female game action
heroine. Countless fan Web sites attest to her
international status as "cyberstar" but she
embodies a complex and impure history which
shares little in common with the networked,
non-individualistic, community-oriented values
heralded by cyberfeminists on the
Internet.
The
Gender Make-up of Lara Croft
My approach to the Lara
Croft archetype is best served by using an
analytical model that is cyborgian, piece-meal,
an analysis that contains multiple lines of
simultaneous processing. This analysis does not
privilege one theoretical lens antithetically to
others; its form resembles rather a
multidimensional matrix stack of interlocking
data whose shifting gender matrices push upward
to the surface.
a.
Lara Croft is the monstrous offspring of
science, an idealized eternally young female
automaton, a malleable, well-trained
techno-puppet created by and for the male gaze.7
The popular Nuderaider patch, a game add-on that
strips Lara Crofts clothing is evidence of this
gender-subject configuration. The fusion of
femininity, death and technology in characters
like Lara Croft is a lucrative and enduring
formula in capitalist market-based economies, a
potent combination noted as early as 1951 in
Marshall McLuhans essay, "The Mechanical
Bride"8. Lara Croft traces her lineage to the
female robot in Fritz Langs "Metropolis",
mannequins, blow-up dolls and comic book
heroines. She is a product of the mechanization
of bodies beginning in the Industrial
Revolution9; her fetishized beauty resides in
her slick and glistening 3-D generated polygons,
evolved from clunky robotic metals into more
appropriate attire for Information
Society.
Figure 1. Screenshot from
Nuderaider
b.
Lara Croft is a drag queen. The predominantly
male players of games like "Tombraider" identify
with the female avatar, immersed in the
conflicts of the game. Rigid gender roles are
broken down, allowing young boys and men to
experiment with "wearing" a feminine identity,
mirroring the phenomenon of gender crossing in
Internet chat rooms and MUDs as described by
Internet sociologists Sandy Stone and Sherry
Turkle.10 Carol Clover has constructed a less
celebratory reading of "the final girl", the
female protaganist in slasher films like "Texas
Chainsaw Massacre II"11. The "final girl" alone
survives bloody conflict, her "phallicized body"
operates as a "stand-in" vehicle for the male
viewers repressed (never acknowledged)
homoeroticism.
c.
Lara Croft is a dominatrix, a femme-fatale. Some
male game players in my ethnographic survey
indicated an affinity for the victims of the
female computer game protagonist. These players
may likely derive masochistic pleasure from Lara
Crofts "cruel" and repeated destruction of
her enemies. This subject configuration is also
apparent in plug-ins and patches for games
available on the Internet, for example the
Marathon patch which replaces all the male
attackers in "Marathon" with scantily-clad
Amazons.
d.
Lara Croft is a positive role model for women
and girls. Following the lead of the tough
fictional women characters who predated women
cyberpunk writers and a female cyberpunk
audience, strong female characters in video
games offer a possible entry point and a
positive role model to women game players. In
the sense that "being a bad girl can be good for
women," (the inverse logic of Deborah Tolman and
Tracy Higgins article
entitled "How Being a Good Girl can be Bad for
Women,"12) violent, tough and sexy women like
Lara Croft would be better role models for girls
than the few games produced for girls (not for
women) like "Barbie-Dressup", "Ms. Pacman" and
the gentle, graphically simple games put out by
the "games for girls" company, Purple
Moon.13
e.
Lara Croft watches Xena, Amazon Princess.
B-grade television heroine, Xena (actress, Lucy
Lawless) has made several appearances in New
York lesbian night clubs, a crowd where she is
quite popular. Why should fantasies of violence
be exclusively a heterosexist and/or masculine
domain? Cogent female heroines like Xena and
Lara Croft offer women an opportunity to indulge
in the abject pleasures of violent bloody
conflict.14
Figure 2. Screen shot from
Tombraider II
- Game
Plugins and Patches as (Feminist?) Hacker
Art
"It's nice to think of
artists as hackers who endeavor to get inside
cultural systems and make them do things they
were never intended to do: artists as culture
hackers."
-Brett Stalbaum15
The Internet provides the
technoculture researcher with a visible mapping
of desire, digital evidence of an
internationally shared lust for the Nuderaider
patch.16
A Web search
for Tombraider produces innumerable fan sites
requesting the Nuderaider patch and displaying
Nuderaider screen shots. An older version of the
official Tombraider homepage even contained a
link to the NudeRaider patch. Nuderaider strips
Lara Crofts already scant clothing to
reveal polygonal tits and ass as she fights her
way up the game levels, operating within the
bounds of gender-subject configuration "a", Lara
as object of the male gaze. Not all game patches
so explicitly echo or reinforce a particular
feature of the original game, (in the case of
Nuderaider, an absurd exaggeration of Lara
Crofts sex appeal). A more exhaustive,
in-depth search for almost any first person
shooter produces a strata of alternate and more
subversive game scenarios in the form of game
plugins and patches offered (usually for free)
on game fans personal Web sites. Some game
companies, like the producers of Marathon and
the producers of Quake, have even capitalized on
this wide-spread game hacking by packaging
software with their games that makes it easier
to manipulate and create new game
scenarios.
Some of the more amusing
patches created by game hacker artists, (and
they often create more than one), include the
Doom patch that changes the attackers into
monster-sized chickens and kangaroos, the Doom
patch entitled "Barney and his Minions" and the
Marathon patch that replaces all the characters
with different colored Gumby dolls. These
patches poke fun at the extremely macho codes of
interaction in these games by replacing the
standard adult male characters with androgynous
animals and androgynous, goofy childrens
fantasy characters.Although the category of
"feminist game hacker art" is premature since
there are very few women participating in this
realm of cultural production17, there are gender
configurations with female protagonists in
patches that predate Tombraider, Resident Evil,
and Forsaken. The Marathon Infinity patch "Tina
Shapes" and "Tina Sounds" replaces the
protagonist, "Infinity Bob" with a female
"Tina." A Japanese Doom patch entitled "Otakon
Doom" replaces the protagonist with a Japanese
animation girlfighter named "Priss." Another
Doom patch replaces all the characters in Doom
with the cast from the movie "Aliens", including
substituting Sigourney Weaver for the male
protagonist.
These patches suggest that
the boundary between game patches and official
games is permeable, that game patches not only
subvert and diversify gender stereotypes in
official games, but game hacker artists also are
influencing the kinds of gender subject
configurations that will pattern the production
of future games. As such, game patches not only
provide an index to what may be the next
"Tombraider", game hacking offers a possible
strategical means for feminists to participate
in the formation of new gender
configurations.
End Notes
- Stone, Sandy. 1995.
The War of Desire and Technology at the Close
of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge: MIT Press,
p. 9.
- McCluhan, Marshall,
"The Gutenberg Galaxy" in the Essential
McLuhan, edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank
Zingron, New York, NY : BasicBooks, 1995.
- "Tombraider", starring
Lara Croft, came out in 1996, followed by
Tombraider II and is soon to be a major
motion picture. There are rumors of other
similar games soon to be released.
- The survey contained
multiple choice questions in respect to
different power relations between game player
and avatar and also collected demographic
information regarding the gender and
sexuality of game players. The survey was
distributed to Tombraider fans on the
Internet over a period of two months.
- Wolf, Mark P.,
"Inventing Space: Toward a Taxonomy of On-
and Off-Screen Space in Video Games" in Film
Quarterly, Volume 51, Number 1, Fall 1997, p.
22.
- Ibid.
- Csikszentmihalyi,
Chris, lecture presented at San Jose State
University in April, 1998.
- McCluhan, Marshall,
"The Mechanical Bride" in the Essential
McLuhan, edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank
Zingron, New York, NY : BasicBooks, 1995.
- Foucault, Michel.
1976. The History of Sexuality. New York:
Random House, p. 106.
- Turkle, Sherry 1995.
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of
the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster,
p. 10. Stone, Sandy.
- Clover, Carol. 1992.
Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the
Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, p. 61.
- Tolman, Deborah and
Higgins, Tracy "How Being a Good Girl Can Be
Bad for Girls" in Good Girls/Bad Girls ed. by
Nan Bauer Maglin and Donna Perry. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
- Herz, J. C., Joystick
nation : how videogames ate our quarters, won
our hearts, and rewired our minds, J.C. Herz,
Boston : Little, Brown, and Co., 1997.
- Halberstam, Judith,
Skin shows: gothic horror and the technology
of monsters, Durham: Duke University Press,
1995.
- Stalbaum, Brett,
Interview in Rhizome, May 1, 1998.
- A game "patch" is
sometimes merely a bit of code that fixes a
bug; patches do not always radically alter a
game.
- Some exceptions are
cultural hackers from "the fine art' rather
than popular art arena including the
Australian women's artist group VNS Matrix
and my own Marathon Hack, Madame Polly. (see
Switch gallery) Also, as it is sometimes
difficult to identify gender on the Internet,
there may be women game hacker artists,
although until now my leads have turned out
to be men with feminine names.
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