Video games tell us interesting things about damaged and bizarre societies – but most seem to come to the same conclusion: it's all about men and violence
Through a set of mysterious circumstances, a violent damaged man is forced to undertake the protection of a young girl, with whom he eventually realises a paternal bond. Much bloodshed ensues.
Which game am I describing here: Naughty Dog's astonishingly well-realised 'zombie' horror game, The Last of Us, or Irrational's atmospheric science fiction adventure, Bioshock Infinite? The truth is, it could be either. The two most critically acclaimed titles of 2013 so far are about men protecting women amid the insanity of a dystopian society where violence has become the only valid currency. In Bioshock, enemies are driven by the madness of religious fervour, in The Last of Us, it is a parasitic contagion – both rob humanity of sense and perspective; both supply fodder to our questing hero.
The fact that these two titles have emerged almost contemporaneously, alongside other highly masculinised post-apocalyptic fantasies such as The Walking Dead and State of Decay say some interesting things about where games are right now. And how, although narrative themes have progressed, the games industry is still heavily reliant on the old themes of power, authority and physical force.
First of all, there's no coincidence in the sudden onslaught of dystopian fiction, which has affected movies and literature as well as games. We've seen these spikes before and they usually reflect and explore wider sociopolitical fears. The rush of '50s sci-fi flicks about mutated insects and invading aliens came out of post-war fears about the atom bomb and communist revolution; and the slasher films of the seventies processed the global economic downturn, the collapse of the patriarchal nuclear family and the rise of feminism's second wave. Our current obsession with zombies and failed utopias is arguably driven by the gristly meat of 24-hour news coverage: fears of pan-global diseases like avian flu, the over-population of the Earth, the financial collapse of 2008 and mass uprisings like the Arab Spring. Our sense of certainty has been decimated over the last five years – the world is once again a weird, unpredictable and violent place. Video games are reflecting this. But they are reflecting it through a very particular prism.
It's no secret that game development is dominated by men, and that the demographic courted by the marketers of Triple A titles is young males. Surveys suggest that women make up around 10% of the workforce in most studios, and a report by research company EEDAR in 2012 found that out of the 669 action and role-playing games studied, only 24 had exclusively female protagonists. The developers of Remember Me, a sci-fi adventure featuring a mixed-race female lead character, have claimed that the game was rejected by several publishers because the companies wanted a male lead.
But then, Bioshock Infinite, The Last of Us and Telltale's Walking Dead all represent an interesting evolution of that standard, much-desired masculine protagonist. In the past, these characters tended to be assured action heroes; men fighting for a just cause against irredeemably evil enemies. But in current titles that is all getting muddied. Lee, Booker and Joel are damaged men, victims of the violence they have perpetrated on others. Lee has killed his wife's lover and ruined his own life in the process; Booker has been destroyed by his involvement in murderous military campaigns, Joel has had to become a sociopath to survive 20 years in a devastated America. These guys aren't heroes like Master Chief or Marcus Fenix; they're scarred, vulnerable fuck-ups, barely functioning as reasoning adults anymore.
The characters can also be defined through their relationships. Some analysts have pointed out how the father/daughter bonds at the centre of these three games have revealed a maturing industry – once it was all about saving the hot love interest, now it's about being a good dad. A lot of studio heads are now in their forties, they have kids, and they want to explore this dynamic in their work. Neil Druckmann, the writer of The Last of Us has spoken about how his own daughter inspired the central relationship in the game. That's beautiful and it really shines through in the scripting – that testy, edgy relationship between the two generations.
But here's the problem - if that is the right word: it's all about men. In her landmark essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, posited that mainstream cinema almost always adopts the viewpoint of a male protagonist – and through this phallocentric lens, female characters are invariably objectified and exploited. Mulvey's recourse to Freudian and Lacanian theory has been critiqued and questioned in the intervening 35 years, but we can certainly see her central thesis at play in video games – where often the spectator/gamer quite literally takes the viewpoint of the male lead through a first-person camera. And though we're given fleeting control over characters like Ellie and Clementine, they are mostly facilitators, reflecting the experiences and needs of the male lead. People who argue that The Last of Us is as much Ellie's story as Joel's might be correct in a pure narrative context, but in terms of identification and raw experience, we're with Joel all the way.
This sense of female supporting characters being subsumed into male stories is of course, widespread. Last week, Laurie Penny wrote a great article about the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope in independent movies and TV sitcoms, and how these characters are fantasy constructs to help the male lead progress. Ellie and Elizabeth are effectively the Manic Pixie Dream Girls of dystopian gaming; they exist as testing boards for their male counterparts – strong yet vulnerable, belligerent yet loyal – they're there to provide the beats in the hero's journey from sociopath to rounded adult male. Or you can read it another way and see The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite as weird allegories on parenthood; the father/daughter relationship exaggerated into psychosis. The monsters at the door are the feral boyfriends coming to take daddy's little girl away; it is female puberty as the apocalypse of the happy family unit.
But of course, in games, the hero never makes it, the girl can never help him escape violence, because in games, violence is often the core feedback loop, the defining mechanism,. Everything gets swallowed up into this dysfunctional vortex. This is all fine; violent games are fun. And naturally, you don't have to think about any of these titles in this way.
But what you do have to think about, if you want a more diverse selection of games in the next generation, is how all of these titles represent highly masculinised visions of the dystopian concept. Everything is about society crumbling into tribal warfare, anarchy and slaughter – only the most powerful can survive. Of course, the argument is that violence is authentic; that post-apocalyptic existence is likely to be nightmarishly predicated on thuggery. But then, well, how do we know that? And anyway, video games do not need to be bound by our sense of reality; game designers have the freedom to present entirely different natural, cultural and social laws.
Let's go back to the seventies and eighties for a second. While the makers of slasher movies seemed to view the second wave of feminism with fear and revulsion, there were was also a great surge in female authors embracing science fiction as a means of exploring and embracing feminist theories. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower and Jean Hegland's Into the Forest, all present futures in which female characters transcend the chaos of the apocalypse, and in which the dystopian vision is more about rampant gender inequality and technological over-reliance rather than marauding zombies or cannibalistic hunter groups.
Game designers could also look to the weird, transcendent Armageddons envisaged by JG Ballard. In books like The Crystal World or the short story collection Vermillion Sands he envisages surreal new societies and surreal, beautiful threats to human life. It's not the right-wing fantasy of armed militia groups protecting their wagon circles. When I interviewed Jen Zee the lead artist on Supergiant Games' brilliant RPG game, Bastion two years ago, she told me, "When I joined the team, Greg [Kasavin, creative director] told me that the story is post-apocalyptic, but that they also wanted to emphasise the fact that, in the face of destruction, there's often beauty as well. That resounded with me, because I've had my share of grey and brown apocalyptic games. I wanted to introduce rainbows into the post-apocalypse! The rich and colourful style was informed by that."
The Last of Us, Bioshock: Infinite and The Walking Dead are all fascinating, brilliant games that do interesting things with the possibilities of interactive narrative storytelling – they present rich and detailed visions of wildly dystopian futures. But they all tell the same story of men coming to terms with violence and the responsibilities of fatherhood – and they all do it in such a way as to confirm the masculine status quo. Self-sacrifice in combat, ruthless violence, the sanguine acceptance that there is no other way.
Naughty Dog's vision is the bravest, I feel, for reasons I can't outline without ruining the game – it certainly comments on the meaning of violence in a very daring way. But there is little challenge to the video game archetype of the apocalypse, the one we all learned from comics and horror movies and pulp sci-fi novels and half-remembered magazine scare stories: that the future will be ruled by men of violence or fervour or both, and that we have to become them in order to survive.
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Keith Stuart
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