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United States15536 Posts
Hey again TL. Here's another post from my blog at n3rddimension.com. This one is about the Tomb Raider controversy a few months back.
We’re all aware of Tomb Raider, right? That’s the series that first introduced prepubescent PS1-players to the miracles of pixellated boobies. It also featured fighting T-Rexes with pistols, which was cool, I guess, though Turok did it better. The non-gaming mainstream audience even got two works of cinematic greatness out of the series. For a time, Tomb Raider was a signature series for the PlayStation. Its golden age was in the PS1 era, during which five games were published (several were multiplatform, but for declining platforms like the Genesis). By the PS2 era, the quality and popularity of the Tomb Raider games had declined, causing the original developer, Core Design, to abandon the franchise. The Tomb Raider series then took a three year hiatus, at which point it was picked up by its current developer, Crystal Dynamics. Tomb Raider’s next trilogy was not especially popular, but managed to keep the franchise from disappearing completely. By clinging to relevance in this way, the stage was set for Crystal Dynamics’ next plan for the series: a thematic reboot.
Crystal Dynamics stated that they intended to take Lara Croft and her series away from their over-the-top roots and take her in a dark and gritty direction. Recently, the role of the “Indiana Jones-y” character of the gaming world has been relocated to Nathan Drake of the Uncharted series, and Crystal Dynamics wants Lara to reclaim it. As such, Crystal Dynamics is grounding the games in a realistic world and trying to redefine Lara in the eyes of a more adult, less breast-infatuated audience (well, maybe). On the whole, reboots are the debilitating syphilis of the current media landscape, but if one can judge from developer commentary and gameplay videos, the new Tomb Raider might work out pretty well.
However, one of these events that came with this new setting caught people a bit off-guard (read: made them go rage crazy). In an interview with Kotaku, executive producer Ron Rosenberg described the new Lara as one who is more human, more vulnerable. He asserts, “She’s definitely the hero but- you’re kind of like her helper.” She’ll be trapped in terrifying situations and forced to survive, and, as the player, you are the one to guide her. In fact, he states that, in one harrowing scene, Lara will be threatened with rape.
Wait… what?
And then the internet exploded.
Read on in the N3rd Dimension.
 
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Dammit, NAVGTR! You got to them!
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That's kind of amusing to me. Good blog, you're right. Somehow murder is perfectly fine but rape cannot even be implied. Like you said, there are fucking movies where rape is showed graphically and people go crazy over this bullshit.
I just might buy this game... me, buying a single player game. x_x
I guess people would love this uni-dimensional badass Lara Croft that started off in life shooting down people and wild animals feeling no remorse, all of this for no reason.
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100% on point.
The disturbing thing is the '“She’s definitely the hero but- you’re kind of like her helper.” She’ll be trapped in terrifying situations and forced to survive, and, as the player, you are the one to guide her.'
What kind of sexist bullshit is this? Since when have we been the "protector" or the "guide" of the character we are playing in a video game?
Never. Except apparently a newly vulnerable-ized woman character.
We always just are that character.
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I just really don't get the whole idea behind this. Nathan Drake is an amazingly crafted character with a great storyline, along with countless other pluses on his side. Laura Croft is also that except less lines more cleavage. Tomb Raider is a classic, no one can dispute that, but taking her away from being a kind of anti-heroin/heroin with badass action is not the right direction. They need to make a very strong copy of the first game, not change a thing, make a copy of it with great graphics, serious cleavage (its tomb raider, lets be honest here, its gonna have that) and badassery. It makes me sad when something declines from greatness and devs try to save it by giving it another life, but really the other life is just some kind of bullshit marketing scheme to make it profitable to buy them time to actually make a proper game TT. Thats mostly why I've stopped with single player games  .
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United States15536 Posts
Hey all! Thanks for reading the blog! I'm glad you're interested and even more glad to hear your opinions. I hope you keep reading and keep talking about stuff! =)
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Here's my other side argument, not necessarily about the direct circumstances of this game cause I don't really know them, but about the uneasiness of having rape in a game. Having it as an implied threat that mostly only the more mature players would identify does seem like it's part of elevating the artistry of the video game, making it harder hitting, more real, scarier, which is an interesting turn.
Having it as outright, plain, unmistakable in something very marketed for teenagers (even M rated games are) doesn't seem right though, even more than it would be in movies that teens would go to see, which it also doesn't really show up in. Why? Well for one, the uncanny valley, the very apparent non-reality will diminish it and then it just doesn't work and it becomes irresponsible to have it. For another, a main theme across video games is player control, making your own story. Well rape is about control and power itself, so having as a player some feeling of control over the direction of a scene or story involving rape, well it unintentionally puts you at least somewhat psychologically in the rapist shoes, unless it's all just a cutscene that you watch and have no interaction with whatsoever. The combination of this, with not very mature teenagers playing it, just seems wrong.
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Did you think, at any point when you were writing that post, about the fact that there's also murder involved? Or at least the killing of a most likely large number of people in that game?
You say that by being in control, through a video game, of a virtual woman who fends off rape, you "put yourself in the rapist shoes". Not only is that backward, it has severe implications about every other game that could be considered violent.
GTA: Mass murderer, drug lord,
SC2: Dictator mode "no quarter".
CS: Terrorists
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I don't get it, I really don't. There are so many games in which you can commit murders with a huge amount of gore and somehow avoiding rape is "wrong".
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Enjoyed reading your blog. I pretty much agree 100%, but it would be difficult to introduce sexual violence into a video game as opposed to other forms of media simply because, well, the player has control of the character. This can work both positively and negatively; on the one hand, having people feel that they are responsible for what happens in the game can reinforce RAPE IS BADBADBAD, IF YOU SEE IT HAPPENING, PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, DO NOT RAPE PEOPLE, but it also runs the risk of treading into far too sexist territory (as was the case with the comment you quoted) where women end up being badly-written female characters who are vulnerable and in dire need of protection by virtue of being female.
(I will also throw in the point those video game developers(?) -- those who write the stories -- are also male and tend to lack perspective unless they really sit down and do a lot of reading about sexism and feminism. A lot of male authors in general cannot write women well, period.)
Incidentally, I do think Silent Hill has perhaps had a potential rape scene depicted, but it was between Pyramid Head and one of those grotesque monsters, so obviously there would be less "impact" on the audience.
Instead, why aren’t more people asking why a female character needs trauma, and specifically sexual trauma, in her backstory to A) become a developed and complex character or B) justify a tendency towards violence? We certainly don’t require such an explanation from our male characters, though I would really like things to turn in that direction. Either way, for female characters to experience some kind of trauma to initiate heavy character development is FAR too common in the current media culture. This is indicative of, at best, character writers’ extreme lack or creativity, or, at worst, an actual belief that the only development opportunities available to female characters is through rape. Both are bad (one is way worse), and likely it’s some combination of the two. Gross.
As a side-note, TGWTDT has actually received criticism for its subject matter for this very point. It's an odd sort of story, written by an author who stood by and watched a girl being gang-raped, then wrote the book to exorcise himself, so to speak, because it was so traumatic ... for him (lol). Then again, Larsson was nuts and didn't mean for his book to be a feminist book; it was less "women are empowered" and more "men are horrible," and tbh the women in his book are also pretty damn badly written.
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On September 20 2012 02:29 Djzapz wrote:
You say that by being in control, through a video game, of a virtual woman who fends off rape, you "put yourself in the rapist shoes". Not only is that backward, it has severe implications about every other game that could be considered violent.
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People don't play games within the "how they are meant to be played" though is what I'm talking about. People die to see what different death scenes look like. They have that control. Now have that where you are fighting off sexual violence. It feels wrong and sick compared having your character die, which is so entrenched in video games and part of games it's almost never carrying the impact of something like death or murder in real life.
On September 20 2012 02:29 Djzapz wrote:
Did you think, at any point when you were writing that post, about the fact that there's also murder involved? Or at least the killing of a most likely large number of people in that game?
GTA: Mass murderer, drug lord,
SC2: Dictator mode "no quarter".
CS: Terrorists
...
I don't get it, I really don't. There are so many games in which you can commit murders with a huge amount of gore and somehow avoiding rape is "wrong".
The difference though is pretty much all those things are done pragmatically. Killing in games is almost always to eliminate someone for some necessary mission purpose, or political ends, to win a game, etc.. Not saying it's great to be conditioned to be OK with that, but in the gaming world, that's how it is. Setting bombs, all that, for a story or mission end.
Now in other cases, like GTA, where murder for murder's sake is encouraged, yeah. GTA is a problematic game, and on purpose, it's dripping with satire and dark commentary on our society and games, and comes from an intelligent place. If I have kids, I'll have strong reservations about them playing GTA without having a discussion with me about it because all that is mostly going over their heads and it's just like, yeah free murder!
Basically killing and deadly violence is an institution in games though, even unnecessary gore and graphic things are mainly reactions to and different stylistic takes on the ubiquitous killing that's been in video games basically since the beginning.
Sexual violence has really no legacy like that in games so introducing it means you are necessarily drawing attention to it and basically making a statement regarding it, and the fact that it's all coming from a male-dominated institution with a very problematic history with sexism makes it seem like it's a case of "you better know wtf you are doing here and do it well."
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EPT
