Pixelhunter – One For The Ladies

As gaming has grown as an industry and sought to appeal to an ever widening demographic, it has attempted to move away from its somewhat adolescent roots. The way the medium depicts women is a key factor of this development. The transition of Lara Croft’s character over the years is a prime example; fluctuating from adolescent pin up to girl power icon. Next year’s reboot promises yet another transformation towards realism, (ahem) stripping Lara of her superhuman qualities and making her more human, and hopefully more believable. Bayonetta, one of the sassiest protagonists of recent years, takes a different approach by ramping up the sexuality of the character to exploitative levels; revealing the absurdity of most adolescent visions of femininity in games by taking it to an extreme, and then smashing it over your head.

A story and character driven medium, point and click adventures have been at the forefront of crafting three dimensional characters, male or female, right from the beginning, so it’s hardly surprising that you’ll find some of the most rounded (and I don’t just mean curvaceous) female characters. Let’s start with Nico Collard. In the first Broken Sword game Nico was little more than a helper to George. She generally sat about in her apartment looking pretty, fed him information and waited for him to do all the heavy lifting. In the director’s cut of the same game Nico’s character was fleshed out drastically and many scenes were added in which you played her whilst she did some hard investigating of her own. As the series moved forward her role became more and more important, and the kickstarter video for the forthcoming Broken Sword 5 sees her and George as equal partners.

Of course it helped that Point and click adventures had their very own female auteur very early on. Jane Jensen, creator of the excellent Gabriel Knight series, crafted her eponymous protagonist as an insufferable boor and gently mocked him for it, whilst his long suffering love interest Grace Nakamura was the real key to his success (behind every great man is a great woman, as the adage goes). The scene in the second game where Grace is left to manage Knight’s book store and sell his novelisation of the events of the first game, which recasts him as the flawless hero and Grace as the damsel in distress, is a priceless piece of irony. Jensen’s latest game, Gray Matter, featured a fully rounded female protagonist in the form of troubled teenager and aspiring stage magician Samantha Everett, who finds herself involved in a supernatural saga that hinges on a very poignant and dark love story.

One of the best female protagonist in the genre has to come in the form of April Ryan in The Longest Journey (2000), a game that elevates character to a whole new level. Ryan is a young girl who has run away to art school following a strained relationship with her parents, whose new reality is smashed when she discovers not only the existence of a parallel dimension of magic, but that she is destined to be its guardian. Her reluctant acceptance of her fate wouldn’t be nearly so compelling or tragic if her character wasn’t as strongly drawn as it is, and the way she hammers home her modern day view of sexual equality to the simple folk of Arcadia is wonderful to behold.

Kate Walker, the protagonist of Benoît Sokal’s masterpiece Syberia,  seems to have been built on the foundations of April Ryan’s character. As in The Longest Journey, the foundations of the protagonist’s world come crashing down when she discovers a mystical otherworld, this time in the form of a small European town in which incredibly human automatons are commonplace. Her many phone calls home (to husband, boss and mother) see her shedding her old life as a high powered lawyer, as she begins to open herself to the new experiences around her.

So there you have it, a small selection of some of the most memorable female characters to have graced the genre. Expect further thoughts on The Longest Journey in a future piece.