Examining the role of females in the video game industry
Your name is Commander Sheppard; you’re the protagonist of our story, and valiant leader of a military space vessel: the SSV Normandy. You and your crew live, eat, work and die aboard the Normandy. She is your home, your sanctuary as you travel across the local galactic neighbourhood fighting against an enemy that has yours and other alien races united in a struggle to save what remains of your worlds.
Throughout your adventures you will have many a colourful exchange with your crew members, your friends, and your enemies, all of whom you will have opportunities to kill, sleep with, reprimand, praise, save, and sacrifice.
And you will do all of this, without ever really having a gender assigned. For the purposes of the story, you are Commander Shepard: The Androgynous. Sure, you can pick your gender, but whether you pick male or female has absolutely no impact on the story, with the exception of one character calling you “ma’am” instead of “sir”. Sleep with that woman, sleep with that man, punch that reporter, play tag with that small alien child; the game doesn’t care, and it’s telling you that you shouldn’t either. In an industry that has typically been quite slow to move from male-dominated and gender-skewed storytelling, that’s quite a powerful message.
Recently, game critic and outspoken gaming-gender-equality champion Anita Sarkeesian, was preparing for a public speaking engagement in Utah when she received a very disturbing death threat from someone claiming to be planning an action inspired by the massacre that took place at an engineering school in 1989. One lesser known fact about Guelph Engineers is that, every year, we celebrate the lives of the female engineers lost that day, and hold it dear to our hearts as a painful reminder of the truly unspeakable things people are capable of. This is not a threat to be taken lightly, and Anita did the strong, sensible thing, and cancelled her arrangements.
Anita is a steadfast advocate for the fair representation of women in the video game industry. You could consider the representation of females both as physical and real in the form of game developers, modding-communities, and actual consumers of the media, but you can also consider it to mean the representation of women in the fictional universes of the video games themselves.
And in those aspects, we still do lag behind. And it’s a real shame. The science fiction community has already begun figuring out the important of accurate female representation, with movie makers embracing the untapped storytelling potential of strong female characters by fantastic authors like Ursula K. Le Guin. “World Building,” as it’s called, offers up a fantastic opportunity: the ability to craft and create a universe where gender equality is no longer a topic that’s up for debate. If you’ve never read any books by Ms. Le Guin, I would urge you to do so. She’s a fantastic author who writes thought-provoking literature that is science fiction at it’s core, but a statement on gender equality at it’s heart.
And the development of video games offers the same opportunities! Most, if not all, of the universes built in the development of video games are fictional, and can be molded to convey whatever message the developer wishes. They can tell fantastic stories of heroism, adventure, tragedy, horror, success, and failure. With all that potential, why are some storytellers in the industry still so bent on creating characters that are driven not by their ability to tell a story, but by the gender role traditionally applied to them? Far too often, male characters are brimming with machismo and sarcastic dry wit, swaggering into rooms with arrogant energy ready to smash anything in their way, while female characters sit off to the side lines and, in their need for rescue, give the developers convenient reason to force an ever-dreaded “escort mission”.
The answer lies with the community itself. Gamers (male and female) are, by and large, conditioned not to care. There are many examples of video games with fantastic character writing, but they’re outweighed tenfold by the games that have absolutely shallow characters, with little–to-no thought put into them. We’ve learned, as a community, to ignore it. We’ve dealt with it. And so have critics, often focusing so heavily on the mechanics of the gameplay that they sometimes ignore the most intriguing and unique experience offered by video games; a story which the player can immerse themselves within.
So please, give a nod to Anita’s fearless actions, and put some thought into your next game purchase. Or better yet, bring a new person into the world of video games, and show them the value of good story writing by lining their first experience in our world with games like the Mass Effect series, Gone Home, The Bioshock Series and others that show how truly bottomless and encapsulating a well-written video game world can be.