Highly Questionable – Blurred Lines

Like most committed gamers, my life of hammering on buttons and shouting at screens is spent in the constant shadow of an ever growing pile of games I’ve happily purchased then embarrassingly ignored. In fact, my stack of shame is now so vast it’s become something of a local tourist attraction. I even had a call the other day from a group of digital age druids, asking if they could come and worship as the sun rose over it on the winter solstice (or Sega Saturnalia as they call it).

Pulling anything out from this teetering high-rise of unappreciated titles has become like a Russian roulette version of Jenga. And I’m not sure a copy of Fuse hurtling towards me at terminal velocity is the last thing I want to see before I head off to start my infinite credits on the great Super Nintendo in the sky. So, despite the lure of new consoles, over the last few weeks I took a break from next gen-uflecting in front of my PS4 and Xbox One and made a semi-concerted effort to catch up on a few games I’d previously passed over. Most notably, Crystal Dynamics’s Tomb Raider and Dontnod Entertainment’s Remember Me, both of which feature female protagonists.

Too many games still resemble little more than lap dancer relocation programs

It’s over a century since the first female Nobel laureate, 30 plus years since our first female Prime Minister and more than a decade since Destiny’s Child’s female empowerment anthem Independent Women. A song which attempted to shatter the gender inequality glass ceiling through sheer booty-shaking alone. After that much progress, you would think that videogames, supposedly the most modern of pastimes, would represent the loudest voices shouting down the antiquated grunts of male chauvinism. So why do so many of them still look like they’ve been made by designers fresh off a computer programming course run by Peter Stringfellow?

Actually, that’s a stupid question. As we all know, sex sells. And if, like videogames, your target demographic has traditionally been young males, the merest allusion to titillation can shift products irrespective of their quality. Something I’m hoping to capitalise on with my own upcoming game, Donkey Kong’s Big Banana Party.

We live in a society whose entire business model is based on setting unrealistic expectations. So, rather than being hopelessly outmoded, when it comes to unhealthy objectification and exaggeration of the female body for cynical commercial gain, the games industry was way ahead of the curves. Custer’s Revenge was #THICKE back when twerking was still just something the Seven Dwarfs use to Heigh-Ho about doing. And, in the original Lara Croft, Core Design gave the world its first porn star archaeologist. An idea the History Channel circa 2014 would almost certainly commission for TV, sight unseen.

All of which brings us back to the new Tomb Raider and Remember Me. Two titles which showcase the positive side of video games’ acute reaction times for indulging their audience by reaffirming gaming as a progressive medium. While too many games still resemble little more than lap dancer relocation programs, Tomb Raider’s reimagined Lara and Remember Me’s Nilin, along with the likes of Beyond’s Jodie and The Last of Us’s Ellie, are a direct response to, and conduit for, the increasing maturity and diversity of gamers. Together, they represent some of the first attempts at gaming’s Woman: Version 2.0.

Seemingly created from Nathan Drake’s spare rib, Lara is no longer some sort of Babestation reboot of Lady Hester Stanhope. Instead, Crystal Dynamics have transformed her into the interactive offspring of Katniss Everdeen and Indiana Jones with her chest size appropriately reduced to ‘ample’ from its previous ‘requires aerial photography’. Nilin, in turn, is intelligent and agile, her elongated limbs giving her an Amazonian athleticism. You could easily see her winning Olympic gold in the heptathlon. She’s an enigmatic new character, fronting an ambitious new IP, and neither she nor Lara look like they’ve been caught en route from a Lord of the Rings lingerie shoot to the Hugh Hefner Beach Volleyball Invitational.

Playing both games, however, I must confess, I did have my issues. I wished Remember Me had done more developing its combo creation and memory manipulations ideas into something truly unique and thought-provoking. In Tomb Raider, I wished the emphasis was more on cracking ingenious ancient puzzles than rinse and repeat combat, and that Lara’s transformation from Pollyanna into the Predator had taken longer than an episode of Loose Women. In short, the most disappointing thing about both experiences was that neither was significantly different to the patriarchy of games we already have.

It wasn’t until I’d stepped away from both games, however, that I suddenly realised that the problem wasn’t so much with them, more with me. In order to achieve what is misleadingly dubbed equality, women frequently need to strive harder and reach higher. So in that regard, both Lara and Nilin are fantastic ambassadors for their sistren. The ludicrous sales figures expected of Tomb Raider by its publisher, Square Enix, have been well documented, while Dontnod have spoken of their struggles securing funding for Remember Me purely because of the gender of its protagonist.

All this is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Between them, Lara and Nilin have more character than an entire old boys’ network of their male counterparts. They died just as valiantly, and frequently more horrifically, at the hands of my male ineptitude for multitasking, and by the closing credits, they’d left more broken men in their wake than a tag team of Elisabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

I’m not sure that’s going to have Germaine Greer firing an AK-47 into the air in celebration, but it reminded me of that Frank and Ernest cartoon about Ginger Rogers. The one that wonderfully observed that she did everything Fred Astaire did only backwards and in high heels. Neither Tomb Raider nor Remember Me may be revolutionary in the accepted video game sense, but the way both blur the lines between genders is arguably an equally impressive feat.