Introduction (obvious premises)
All our lives take place, as subjects of contemporary societies, more or less daily connected to a circuit (a matrix?) such as the Internet, the satellite aerial network, the telephone cables, or transportation systems. This connectedness is equally influencing and intermixing our moments of leisure and work.. So, in general, play and work, playing and learning, take place at the same time and (cyber)space. One example is the spread of software designed for entertainment such as games, a leading software and hardware industry. Videogames have become very popular also because they are made to use in simple, cheap equipment, most often to plug a machine into the TV set (Nintendo© of Playstation©, or SegaDreamcast©) or computers.
Domesticated Virtual
Spaces
An article in the online magazine Game Zero, reported that Playstation© alone has sold more than 60 millions units at October 1999. This technology then cannot be seen as innocent: a videogame invades domestic spaces, probably producing isolation and individualizing the space of play and “ entertainment”. This paper will focus on women’s bodies in such videogames.
First of all, I would like to clarify my view of videogames. They interest me as a form of entertainment that involves particularly complex interactions. I will use the definition of interaction developed by Andy Lippman and used by Rosanne Stone in The War Of Desire And Technology At The Close Of The Mechanical Age. Interaction is a mutual and simultaneous activity by more than one participant, usually working toward some goal (Stone, 1996,10-11); this implies a few corollaries: mutual interruptability, limited look –ahead (the level of anticipation by either participant is limited by the possibility of interrupting the interaction), no-default (the games do not have to appear to follow a pre-planned path), and the impression of an infinite database which the immersive interaction must give.
Besides, playing with a videogame means to enter into a technological system, which involves the body (eyes, ears and hands especially), a monitor, a CD, a game interface (often called joystick!), and a machine, which runs the CD and send the information to the monitor. All these elements constitute a system of vision, of action, and a simultaneous self-vision in the moment of action.
Playing: interacting and inner-acting
In general, all games,
mediated by technology or not, are developed on the premise that playing
involves interactions, or performing actions while knowing that the context of
such action is not real or serious. In the case of videogames the response can
be given by another player or by the game players/character, and all the
interactions are mediated by the interface.
The fact of knowing that a
game is a fiction implies imagination, and a swift process of developing
familiarity with the character you play the part of,[1]which
I argue, can effect self-perception and our responses in real life. In this
sense I think that the high level of involvement in interactive videogames
create a new way in which we can perceive our bodies and identities: this is
what I call inner-actions.
I will use the definition of
inner-action after Elvira Torril Mortensen, as the mental activity activated by
the game, in which the player creates an understanding of an action, and,
consequently, an understanding of his/her identity. I argue that these
imaginative experiences, aided by sensorial stimulation, have an effect on how
we imagine our bodies and gendered identity, allowing space for different roles
from the ones determined by our specific cultural local contexts. In this
sense, the imagining and acting that go on simultaneously, translate into a
rupture of the cultural and power barrier that limits our gender real life.
Perhaps it would be also appropriate to consider playing with videogames,
impersonating various characters, as a process of staging different sides of
our identity similar to theater performance[2].
The concept of inner-acting refers to interactions and imagination taking place
outside of the gendered definitions of our bodies and outside of our material
context. This inner-action is possible in videogames, because they are a complex technological system of vision
and performance which take place in a “mediated” space; these elements in my
view, establish a new mind-body
relation, which is not easy to define yet, but which leaves room for multiple
interactions and identifications.
As women, or, more broadly, as
gendered subjects, the option of having a virtual body to play with is a
liberating appropriation of spaces, actions and narrations not designed for us.
Videogames as final fantasies (obvious critiques)
Narration in videogames is taken
freely from a range of old and new
popular mythology sources across media fictions. This obviously involves a
large presence of women’s bodies, often constructed in stereotypical ways to
increase the marketability of such products. Nevertheless, the interactivity,
or the fact that in the games you can choose to be a character of a different
gender or even a different species offers interesting possibilities.
In particular, I found interesting the fact that the player acts
though a chosen character’s body, which involves internalizing to different
degrees the subjective vision, the shape, the
weight, the speed of movements,
the physical strengths and weaknesses of a virtual body. This process has in itself a potential for
developing not only an “oppositional gaze”, but also subversive inner-action, -by which I mean imagining a different
body and internalizing its practices-
that effects the real person’s way acting outside of the virtual space. This
aspect can leave space for subversive practices beyond commercial aims of the
game’s developers.
e-/V/No/bodies/:breasts bouncing
options and Lara Croft
The possibilities I
described above, do not deny the existence of oppressive ways of experiencing
the virtual bodies: the fact that a female body -and its representation as a
virtual model- is reducible to a mathematical series of polygons, out of time,
does not help in relating to our real
bodies, which involve continuos transformations.
One example is the game Dead or Alive©. When the game
starts the player can choose between different characters, all fighters
(mainly martial artists, wrestlers, or boxers). These characters are all
differentiated so the player can quickly identify their features and their
names(short and scary-sounding). They all present elements of the grotesque and
the exotic in their bodies, names, sounds and accents. They are all
super-humans, some trans-species, and
some cross-dressers. As regards race,
they are mostly Asian women or super-masculine non-white men, not
surprisingly. The level of control of the player on their bodies is
sophisticated to the same extent for all characters, except for one feature of
the female characters: the breasts–bouncing option.
At the beginning of the
game, the player can choose his/her? favorite “way of breasts-bouncing” in the
women characters; this way, that part of body is given a feature of different
material, weight and gravity than the rest of the body. This feature requires a sophisticated programming
and its not easy to deactivate, but, in my view, the most interesting aspect is
that it gives to the player a specific control part of the body traditionally
symbolizing femininity. Such control involves deciding the material of which
the breasts is made of, which means creating an ideal “frankenwoman” made of different non-organic matters, to control and perform with.
On the same
subject of virtual female characters and breasts size, another example is the
popular videogame Tomb Raider©, one of the top selling games in which the main character is a woman. In
the years, this character has spread popularity to the point of entering
debates in all mainstream media, about gender issues in videogames.
From the first version, in which
technology did not allow for accurate definitions of the body (few polygonal
meshes) the character of Lara was quite feminine, but in a rather oddly looking
way, almost a caricature of simplified female body characteristics. In the
later versions Lara was designed more accurately, and simultaneously developed
more a pin-up body: in the last release of the game she has long hair, bigger
lips, and bigger breasts. Her virtual
"evolution" went in such a direction that last year the company which
produces the game (Eidos Interactive) organized a contest to find the real
model that would match the character closely.
This example struck me as
an interesting inversion of properties between real bodies, still unable to
enter cyberspace completely, and cyber-virtual bodies, able to enter and
translate in our real life, as well as shaping the perception of women.
From now on, there will be generations
of teenagers wanting to be as similar as possible to a mass
of triangulated polygonal meshes, originally developed to
reproduce stereotyped “ideal” women bodies.[3]
Enlarge the bandwidth:
sensorial hyperrealism and grotesque fantasies
This relationship between
real bodies and cyber-bodies interests me for the many levels of contradictory
ideas they bring about. On one hand, the masses of data allow representation to
be sensorially more realistic than in the past. This fact started a challenge
to create more exotic, complex plots and characters, since games could contain
more information. Obviously, much of
the women’s bodies imagery was borrowed
and redesigned from gender biased, sexist popular culture. Nevertheless, because these are games, with
a certain level of internal freedom, in
the variability of the association of elements, that can have strange effects.
Videogames characters are
developed to create involvement in the games, they are given visceral features (they scream if hit, they
bleed, they pant when running and, most importantly, they die). They have to appeal emotionally to the
player. Therefore they are designed to include all the possible variety of
fantasies (which is why I think of them
as final fantasies). They cover a large variety of other media fictional
characters, combining exotic, grotesque, miscegeny elements. All these elements create virtual bodies
that both in the past and in today’s real world would be "perverted",
marginalized and censored. Instead they are acceptable because of their
belonging to the realm of "games"[4].
Quite differently, in many other ICT technologies, the non-human, the machine
is given higher moral value than humans are on the bases of its infallibility,
of its neutrality[5].
This fictive acceptability leaves open
the chance of acting and internalizing virtual, unnatural bodies, which can
have positive implications for marginalized races, genders and sexualities. Our
imagination about the body may be widened by the conceptions of including
radical-others: non-human, multi-racial and non-feminine elements.
I argue here that this option enlarges the spectrum of images of women, as warriors, monsters, zombies, mermaids, etcetera. The implications of this process is a widening of the diversity of our concept of women’s body. A variety of non-human, non- gendered identities can multiply our possible enactment of radically other identities in the games. For example, as a player, I enjoy the fights, and I realize I can finally enact a desire I cannot express in my daily life: the desire to be a monster, a dinosaur, a wrestler, or a tank. I enjoy having to try to move as if I was an heavy monster, play with the possibility of smashing buildings, stomping my feet, scratching with my claws and threatening the other player with my paws and sounds.
This
interactions allows me to experience non-stereotyped roles and images of my body; it widens the horizon of
gender and feminist concept of the body, because it crosses genders, species,
and human/machine distinctions. I see a potential enlargement of imagined and
enacted female bodies expanded as animals, machines, monsters, or even warriors. The complexity and the
emotional and sensorial involvement of some games changes already our
perception of a materially and time grounded body and life.
Temporality and Materiality: Games,
generations, integrated circuits of media productions
The videogame industry is
heavily directed to marketing such products to teenagers and children.
Videogames interest me much more than other software because they
are relatively cheap, compared to other software, and are bought and used by
masses of people (Lara Croft' s game Tomb Raider sold 17 millions of copies).
Although there are not many sources of studies done on the demographic aspects
of videogame players[6],
the generational time/space gap is profound.
There are global knowledges about videogames that can not
related in any way to the local level of life of the users. Another important
factor is the speed and the logic
behind games are often neither performable nor understandable to people older
than thirty or forty. The amount of time required to play in complex games is
long. For example, if two children can talk for hours about a certain game
strategy, across race, gender, class, geographical distances, they may be unable
to relate to their local contexts. The boundary between who is out and who is
inside the “technoworld of videogames” is
big and difficult to transcend.
One example of this can be
seen in the new product Pokemon: these are collectable monsters simultaneously
marketed as a cartoon, toys, various videogames, trading card games, two
movies, and an infinite number of gadgets.
These animal-trans-species mutants are friends of the children and must
be collected and treated well in order to become mature, powerful and able to
morph into cyborgs. Their are apparently ungendered, but they are a mix of feminine and masculine features and
in their evolution they represent a
highly complex world.
In a way they offer a
potential challenge to patriarchical ideas of masculine power, but they do not
challenge the fundamental capitalist idea of power defined by private property
(in this case collecting and possessing inferior beings).The values underlying
the narration are packed in situations and science-fiction complex interfaces
designed to appeal to the youth. Most
of the side industry of gadgets and publications are aimed to teenagers males,
mainly.
Invisible post-human
male others/consumers
This social group is internalizing the computer as the space
of learning, of developing socially
recognized skills, and emotional and sexual life. This is beyond the end of
distinction between work and leisure time and space: it is a
self-referenciality which does not distinguish real women from virtual bodies [7].
The level of
closedness and self-referentiality of
these production/consumption-lifeworld/virtual life-systems is such that, not only companies involve the
young game players in special discussion groups in order to develop the next
version of the game they will produce, but the users themselves would become
workers of the company that produces the games, from their homes, and the same
machines that they use to be players/consumers.
This identification with games, is derived by the Japanese term otaku. The definition of the term otaku is: an obsessive fan of something. The term has a somewhat derogatory
meaning as it describes people who put
their interest above all else, to the
point of being a-social and unable to
relate to the external world, not related
to their interest. Today, an otaku, in
global youth popular culture, is
someone who is a dedicated fan of anime and/or manga (Japanese comics, whose
content is often related to sex and teenage girls), and lives connected to
websites or videogames most of his (less often her ) life[8].
Otaku’s patriarchal self-domination?
In my view, Otaku are absolutely
invisible yet emblematic; they have
internalized their knowledge and pleasure objects to the point where the
international capitalist firms can extract surplus value from them, since they
are underpaid experts, highly skilled
workers, as well as devoted consumers at the same time. They do not
perceive the process of exploitation.
Their life is caught in the integrated circuit (in the capitalist world-wide-web
matrix). The alienation of the otaku is exacerbated by the fact that most of
the software available in videogames is
designed only for one player. In this case the technological choices of the
games producers have a tremendous impact on the user’s social life. All
users play the same game but they
interact only with the machine, despite their need to be a community and to socialize the desire/pleasure
deriving from playing such games. The
technological system of many games does
not allow for a multi-player option, therefore shaping a vision and self-imagination in a very individualistic way.
This is a case in which the so-called
participatory design in software does not challenge neither the dominant
sexist- narration nor changes capitalist
labor relations.
Another example of the
contradiction between a material level
and imaginary levels of videogames, is the fact that the producers of Dead or
Alive (the above mentioned game in which the player can set breasts bouncing
options), are the same company that produces Tomb Raider, which has been
appropriated by feminists and lesbians as a role model for women in videogames.
This is not the position endorsed by
Eidos Interactive, which develop femininity of the characters, mostly according
to the point of view of the young men users of the game.[9]
In other words, women can participate but their view would be only
used as a hint to market the same product to a larger variety of consumers/users, rather than to abolish sexist
representations, as an editorial by
Tricia Gray (P.R. Manager of Eidos interactive), shows:
“ The Lara Croft image that was supposed to come
across to people was: here you have a woman with a nice body, but she
likes getting dirty, climbing mountains, killing predators, finding
treasure. It was like guys were
infatuated with Indiana Jones, so they made a female version of him to
suffice their manly needs.
This was supposed to be the all around perfect
woman for the creators. A beautiful , wealthy[10],
tomboyish woman you can control, make her move, jump, run ,kill.”
In conclusion, as this quote proves, if it is true that all the character in videogames are highly stereotyped gender representations, the process interaction in the games requires also imagination, which can change as the player changes: the game user acts through another body, which he or she controls. This involves a degree of internalizing the virtual character and its body.
Besides, since videogames are a new media, all spectacular elements can be freely mixed; this create possibilities of breaking established hierarchies and barriers in female/male roles, human/animal, normal/monster, human/machine, races, colonizers and colonized definitions. This allows for the possibility not only for a resistant oppositional vision, but also for subversive uses and practices beyond the commercial aims of the games designers. Virtual interactions effect our gendered subjects self-perception and imagination, widening possible definitions of our identity in empowering ways.