Ms. Pac-Man may have kicked things off
with her audaciously gender-specific bow and sassy single honorific,
but ever since Lara Croft's debut (trudging up a snowy monutain in
short shorts if I recall), Tomb Raider has been the central
talking point for how women are portrayed in videogames. And although
this has tended to overshadow other discussions of the series and has
undoubtedly influenced successive videogame heroines, it's never been
settled whether the portrayal has been a positive or a negative one.
On the one hand, Lara Croft is a strong, independent woman who can
kick ass with the best of them, which set her strongly apart from the
gaggle of damsels in distress dominating the medium prior. On the
other hand, her wardrobe and proportions (and marketing) present her
as a sex object right from the start. So is Lara a feminist
vanguard, or a demeaning symbol of the old guard? (or not a type of
guard at all?)
I think an important thing to keep in
mind in all this is that “sexism” does not exist in a vacuum.
Lara's cold femme fatale attitude undoubtedly had more clout back
before it became the go-to method for ensuring that female characters
be regarded as more than just eye candy while not having to actually
give them much character (because making your female character a real
person is also dangerous, as we will see). In the same vein, there's
(in my male opinion) nothing wrong with creating a female character
intended to titillate; the problems come when all female
characters in a medium seem to be designed to be most ergonomically
ogled. It's all about context, is what I'm saying.
So now we come to the gritty
reboot/prequel ambiguously titled Tomb Raider in which we find
a very different Lara. Rather than an idealized sex toy, we find an
attractive but realistically proportioned human. And rather than a
hard-edged femme fatale(/cold-blooded killer) we find a realistically
scared young woman in over her head. And yet her thorough
transformation has done anything but allow her to escape the realm of
gender politics. The controversy kicked off when an early trailer
showed a scene in which Lara is threatened by a group of ruffians
with what could without too much imagination be construed as rape.
This, combined with a statement by the developers that the game would
make players want to “protect” Lara, unsurprisingly provoked a
Himiko-level storm of internet backlash.
So is the new Tomb Raider sexist?
Having played through the story, I can say that the “rape” scene
barely registers as a thing, though rumor has it that it was toned
down in response to the fan outrage. Admittedly I have never
personally been in a situation in which I feared being raped, so
perhaps some might find the sequence more disturbing (though were I
marooned on an island with a gang of murderous cutthroats, I imagine
I would be more worried by all the shooting and knifing directed at
me that by a little suggestive pawing). Failing the associated Quick
Time Event actually results in Lara being choked to death rather than
being raped, so that's better(?) As for Lara's characterization, I
can unequivocally say that Lara is a more engaging and fleshed-out
character, and certainly more well-rounded despite the smaller cup
size (*badum tush*). But depth alone does not determine whether a
characterization is sexist. Again I would say it's largely a matter
of context. I do not see anything wrong with casting Lara as scared
and inexperienced, and tasking the player with protecting her. If the
concept took off and henceforth every heroine in gaming (and
only heroines) became scared and inexperienced and in need of
protection, that might start to become troublesome.
As it is, the dynamic feels fresh. The
most obvious comparison is with the Uncharted series (which as
others have noted is an ironic comparison, seeing as the Uncharted
series clearly took inspiration from the Tomb Raider series to
begin with, and yet improved upon the formula in enough areas that
the flow of inspiration has seemingly reversed, at least for the time
being), but in Uncharted the player is never “protecting”
Nathan Drake. Here, through an impressively realized combination of
scripted and emergent narrative, voice and visual cues, and yes
probably cultural issues surrounding violence against women, the game
does an impressive job of making you feel bad about allowing this
poor girl to come to harm, and cheering her on in the occasion that
she doesn't. The experience elicited an impressive number of
squeamish “egad” moments from me after a slip of the controls
would doom Lara in some brutal fashion, often impaled through the
neck by something metal and sharp (with enough consistency that an armored
scarf would be an extremely useful wardrobe upgrade). Even the
regenerating health, of which I'm often not a fan, serves this
aesthetic purpose. Whereas it always felt a little jarring for Gears'
Marcus Phoenix, hardened convict/soldier, to find himself huddled in
a corner sucking his thumb and waiting for his health to regenerate,
Lara hiding scared in a corner with gunfire all around fits the
characterization and doesn't feel like an interruption of the action.
Yet despite this “protection”
dynamic, Lara is anything but a delicate little flower. In fact she
goes through more punishment than probably any videogame character
I've seen, to the point where it starts to become kind of silly. Tomb
Raider's gameplay mechanics are commensurable to those in
Uncharted, but I feel that the cinematic style works less well
here. Where Uncharted's tone purposefully evokes an escapist
Hollywood blockbuster through and through, Tomb Raider's tone has
strong leanings towards gritty realism, and it starts to be a problem
of wanting to have one's cake and drop it off a waterfall too. The
game desperately wants us to feel like Lara's a real person in real
danger, yet it also heaps on so much spectacle that Lara would most
likely be a quadriplegic within the first 20 minutes of gameplay. I'm
not saying videogame characters can't do unrealistic things in a game
with a realistic tone, but I'm not sure the unrealistic things should also be emphasized with frequent “look how crazy and over-the-top
this all is” cutscenes.
The frequent mini-cutscenes bring forth
another issue that I feel plagues a lot of recent games. When the old
Tomb Raider games would introduce something new, it would just
sort of be there and consequently would be much more surprising. Tomb
Raider II introduced spiders of unusual size (S.O.U.S.s) as an
enemy near the end, but rather than heralding their arrival with an
introductory cutscenes, you just sort of ran into them while
exploring a dark cave, making them extremely unnerving and memorable
despite their being animated with about four polygons. Conversely,
modern games throw all sorts of well-rendered and novel threats at
the player, but their consistent introduction by flashy cutscenes
completely undermines their impact. Not only am I expecting something
“craaazy” to happen whenever a cutscene starts, but because
videogames are an interactive medium, I know that for as long as my
control is taken away Lara is in no danger, so for the entire
three-second sequence in which the roof starts to collapse or the
wolves first appear, I jarringly feel less tension than when I had
control and was doing something mundane. If Tomb Raider II
were remade today, there would be a little cutscene introducing the
spiders with a horde of them crawling out of something in all their
many-polygoned glory, and I would be sitting back calmly waiting
to play again. At least in a movie there is some miniscule chance
that the character might get eaten by the spiders while you are
passively watching, but with a game you know you're safe until the
cutscene ends, or at least until a quick time event icon pops up.
Indeed one of the few moments in the reboot that gave me genuine
anxiety was the one time a new enemy was introduced without a
cutscene. I'm not against cutscenes in principal, but too many games
nowadays are using them to try and amp up tension in a way that does
the exact opposite. Stop it!
Aside from that, I found a lot to like
in the new Tomb Raider. Combat feels tight and transitions from stealth in an organic way, and enemies behave in a believable fashion. The bow is really fun to use whether
you're picking off confused enemies from the bushes, shooting ropes to traverse the
environment, exploding/igniting things, or murdering various animals
(which feels more justified with Lara as a hungry castaway rather
than merely an eccentric tourist). The “survival instincts”
ability works nicely. It functions much like Arkham Asylum/City's
“detection vision” to highlight important features, but because
you can only use it while stationary, you aren't incentivised to ruin
the pretty graphics by simply keeping it on at all times. The
leveling system doubles as a sort of built-in tutorial as you learn
various skills, and it doesn't feel shoehorned in
*coughangelofdarkness*. And I like the way that tombs are integrated
as optional side-puzzles since it makes you feel clever for finding
and completing them.
Overall my impression is mixed, but I
feel this is an impressive first go at reinvigorating a waning icon.
(Certainly I'm more optimistic of Lara's future than Sonic's.) I'm excited to see where this reborn franchise goes, and I'm pleased
that it contains a reasonably fleshed-out protagonist regardless of
gender. Really I'm happy they didn't just make her a female
Nathan Drake.
"Wakka wakka."
