Tomb Raider Revisited

While I am sure that there are people out there who would spit feathers at the idea of a genuine Christian encouraging BDSM and condemning anti-pornography legislation, I regard my Tomb Raider article as the most controversial one I've put out to date. The inclusion of an attempted rape scene has drawn a lot of negative criticism and it would have been easy and safe to pitch in on that. Instead, I wrote one which was broadly defensive of the decision.

Accordingly, I was surprised when it received basically no response at all. The interface here at Blogspot can certainly take a share of the blame (I've yet to successfully post a comment on an article) but no-one really said anything on the sites where I promote my new posts either. Fortunately after bringing the subject up with a couple of people (yes, I'm that needy for feedback) I was able to get some comment. The basic summary of what was said came down to “I enjoyed it, but I didn't really agree with it”.

This is of course totally awesome. If my writing can entertain people even when they don't agree with what I'm saying, I must be getting fairly good. In a fashion it's the best compliment I've had on my work to date.

Just as importantly, I don't actually seem to have upset any of my friends. Although they might be offended by the game, defending it doesn't seem to have left them offended at me. Perhaps I'm pushing my luck returning to the subject a second time, but the lengthy discussion I had with a certain friend left me with a lot of interesting ideas to write down. Rest assured, I'm not trying to cause offence when I write this.

It seems appropriate to start by listing the comments made in brief. As I recall, they came down to the following:

Rape is very common, and sexual assault practically universal. Primarily the victims are female - rape statistics for men in prison are same as for a women in the western world overall. Ergo the matter is an uncomfortable topic for EVERY woman.

Female characters being dis-empowered in this way because they're female is offensive.

Rape is a cliché, used as rite of passage for too many female characters.

The scene is intended to provoke protective instincts in men, not engage with female gamers.

The first point was the one which got me thinking enough to decide that I should write a second article on the subject. That rape is common is sadly something that I know very well. I've known at least six rape victims (and prior to his unexpected arrest, one rapist) and can easily figure out that this is potentially the tip of a larger iceberg even among my own social circle. This certainly does upset me, but it doesn't make me personally unable to watch fiction that deals with it. It makes me appreciate the seriousness of the issue, but I'd hope that everyone outside of XBox Live can do that without a specific example.

As my friend pointed out, for women it is somewhat different. Only one of the victims I've known of was male, and he was a child at the time. These horrible tales didn't leave me thinking that it could have happened to me – only that it must never happen to anyone else I know. We'll be coming back to that one later, but for women there is certainly a reasonable fear that it could have happened to them. This means that every woman in the world ends up factoring the need to avoid something that happened to a friend into the way they live.

The problem is compounded by the fact that since groping and unwanted embraces can easily classify as sexual assault, pretty much every woman has experienced that crime personally. Social acceptance of that fact has come under increasing fire in recent years, being labelled as 'rape culture'. Whilst the extreme nature of that term has caused a lot of people to argue back, 'sexual assault culture' definitely has a degree of perceptible reality. Since this assault is essentially a lesser form of a horror that women are already conscious of the need to avoid, it obviously brings the risk home that much more. Thus Lara's experience becomes something that reminds every woman of a bad experience in their own life, rather than a bad experience in somebody else's. This is an important point that I hadn't fully realised before, making the scene an issue for more of the potential audience for the game than I'd have expected.

However, what really got me thinking was my friend's conclusion to these facts. Not unreasonably, she felt that (male) authors should be less cavalier about including rape scenes - and that if they understood the above they would reach for that development less often. This is likely a common feeling amongst female audiences.

So exactly why is the media being so slow to respond to such feelings? Well, here is the opinion of female audiences in a nutshell:

'Female audiences want (male) authors to display increasing awareness of the horrible pervasiveness of rape in the modern world. They want them to display this awareness by depicting rape LESS pervasively.'

This just isn't the way that the media normally works. I'm sure there are plenty of (male) authors out there who are increasingly aware of how common rape is and how much long-term damage it does. In response to that, they write a story about rape. Partly this is out of concern – raising awareness of the problem can help change happen and increase concern for victims. Partly it is out of an increasing understanding of reality – a desire to portray the world as it really is. If every woman has to deal with this to some degree, wouldn't a realistic Lara have to as well? Partly, of course, it is out of a desire to sell more copies by being 'topical'. The concept that an author should refrain from writing about this topic because it is both widespread and important is one that will need to be shoved explicitly in their faces for a long time before we see any results – and some will refuse the notion on general principles anyway.

Of course, interactive gaming ought to be leading the way in this field. As an experienced role-playing GM, I'm conscious of the need to avoid entering territory that is personally uncomfortable for the players I've got. Whilst you can't expect mass media producers to avoid creating any products that will be uncomfortable for someone somewhere, they really should avoid creating something that is unpleasant for an entire gender (unless the work is intended exclusively for men, which we'll come back to). Absorbing the above ideas is probably something that they should do a quickly as possible.

Another point that stuck in my head was her insistence that this would only be considered for a female character. As my friend put it, “they'd never think of doing this to Dante or Kratos”.

My initial reaction was that this was a false comparison. Lara Croft is in theory a normal woman, whilst Kratos is a magic superman whose adventures consist mostly of punching gods in half. One would expect that Lara's troubles would be closer to our own and that she'd have a more arduous time of it.

On deeper reflection, the implications of this comparison were quite important. From a geek categorization standpoint, Lara is not a superhero. From a functional standpoint, she is. Lara is a power fantasy and women who play her seek the same experience that a player of God Of War, Devil May Cry or Arkham City does.

I've stated before that I don't consider the female superhero to be fully developed as a concept. Although a long history of gender-based exclusions have left women hungry for characters who 'can do anything a man can do', it seems unlikely that the sum total of female dreams is to replicate traditional male dreams. An emphasis on agility notwithstanding, Lara is basically just a gender-swapped Indiana Jones. This limitation aside, Lara has certainly been embraced by female fans and effectively offers the superhero experience.

There are certainly some folks out there who don't want their power fantasies to have any trace of vulnerability, but they are a minority. Spider-man is one of the most iconic superheroes of all time because Peter Parker has all the same problems we do, not in spite of it. Arguably the most over-powered superhero of them all, Superman still has to crawl like a dog once per film when someone dis-empowers him. So why is this scene such a problem for women?

The issue here is that Lara's moments of power come from assuming a role that has traditionally been associated with male characters. Her moment of vulnerability, however, is related to being a woman. It's as though she can stand in the pantheon of Earth's mightiest heroes only until someone remembers her gender, making her place there (and the place of all female heroes) more precarious. Instead of Kryptonite or the colour yellow, Tomb Raider's weakness is that however many powers she gets she will always have a vagina.

This isn't really something that the authors can be accused of doing on purpose. Although there are probably ignoble exceptions out there, it's extremely unlikely that male authors are writing these scenes to 'put the woman back in her place'. But if that's the message female audience members are getting from them... well, I can certainly see the scale of the problem.

Rape and sexual assault are often regarded as clichés where female characters are concerned in much the same way that unexpected pregnancy is. Because these are issues that specifically relate to women, there is sometimes the feeling that male authors reach for them out of laziness. They don't have the understanding of how to portray women required to actively engage with the character's gender in a more nuanced way, so they go for the obvious.

In fact, the situation is not unique to female characters. Cliché is used for most demographics. A black Lara would almost certainly be exposed to racism at some point. A gay Lara would encounter homophobia. A Muslim Lara would regarded by someone as either a terrorist fanatic or a scandalous harlot, depending on the prevailing NPC cast. Clichés are clichés because they work – in this case engaging with the specific major problems that come with being a character of that type. The rape risk for men in prison may be equal to that faced by women in the general western world, but the threat is actually far more of an omnipresent cliché for imprisoned male characters. It's likely that female audiences would be more forgiving of the use of such staples if it were clearer that straight white male characters also invariably suffer the conflicts specifically associated with themselves. The problem is... there aren't any.

This isn't strictly accurate, of course. As a man, I can say that there are indeed specific problems associated with being male. It's just that most of them are an awful lot more subtle than those described above, or affect only a certain subsection of the male community (such as prisoners or fathers in custody battles). As John Scalzi explained in a recent article, if life was a video game 'straight white male' would be the lowest difficulty setting: "This means that the default behaviours for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise... The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get."

Traditionally, there has been one massive exception to this rosy picture – that of compulsory participation in warfare. For most of human history, the possibility of being abducted by your own government and thrown into an unimaginably horrible meat grinder has been the exclusive terror of the young male. Perhaps perversely, most gender-conscious work on the subject has focused upon how unfair this was for women – who were forcibly prevented from choosing to share the fate inflicted upon their male peers. Since most of the time we watch/read/play combat-based fiction for excitement, power fantasies and the vicarious venting of aggression, the male hegemony upon combatant characters has been seen as another way that women lose out. In any case the problem has now been 'fixed' – when the spectre of conscription returns, a variety of positive social changes mean that the slaughter of the innocent will be more equitably distributed.

I've started to wonder if this lack of specific issues is why 'ordinary' males are seen as the default character type in a lot of fiction. There is a definite impression that 'female' is a character trait, but male is just the basic assumption. The blurb for the comedy series Darkplace spoofs this brilliantly - describing the main character as being joined by “best buddy Dr. Lucien Sanchez, fiery hospital boss Thornton Reed and woman Liz Asher”.

The fact is that while most stories are on some level about 'the human heart in conflict with itself', many tales don't directly concern the social issues a particular type of human has to deal with. Deliberately giving the character those issues brings the assumption that you are going to digress for long enough to deal with them – which you don't necessarily want to do. No author is likely to cast a Pakistani lesbian Scientologist as the lead without making some exploration of how these traits complicate her life in London. On the other hand, a white agnostic/atheist straight man can get through an entire tale without any of these facets being consciously acknowledged as character traits at all. ('Christian' is no longer the path of least resistance and 'devout Christian' never was). This means that white males are over-represented and the clichés used when depicting every other demographic stand out even worse.

I'm not immune to this myself. I recently decided to try and catalogue all of the original characters that I've created and used as a player in a role-playing game. Out of almost 80 characters, only 10 were female. Only 5 were defined as bisexual or homosexual and just 1 of those was a man. Most remarkably of all, only 8 had a recognisable non-white ethnicity. Obviously role-playing is a special case – your character is your avatar in the game and thus is usually like yourself except where otherwise stated. However, this is clearly something I need to bear in mind if I'm creating characters for any other purpose.

There is legitimate concern that opting for a rape storyline is inappropriate in a story where the protagonist becomes stronger as a result of the tale. The notion that going through this is a rite of passage that leaves one stronger is obviously offensive. I'm not sure that this applies to survival horror plot-lines, but the point can be fairly levelled at many works.

Yet even here, the conceptual errors of many authors are wider than a lack of understanding of the female mind. This can be seen in what is arguably the male equivalent – the torture scene. Whilst my preferences might bias me, I believe it's pretty much a fact that these events can leave violation trauma that is in many ways comparable to rape.

Male characters are somewhat more likely to be tortured during their obligatory capture than females and their indignities are vastly more likely to be shown on screen. However, the victim is almost never 'broken'. This gives the impression that the attempt failed even if escape is not immediate. When the hero gets their gory revenge, we are obviously supposed to regard the emotional issues as closed and the test passed. For that matter, male heroes who avert murder attempts by slaying the attacker are rarely supposed to feel upset that someone tried to kill them.

I strongly suspect that the female protagonist who escapes the attempt is also considered by many authors to have escaped emotional trauma – with any lingering discomfort fixed by the invariable revenge she inflicts upon the assailant's face and/or abdomen. When a female character responds to being groped by smashing the guy's head through the bar (which is an extremely common way to introduce tough women) there is never any sense that she would still feel violated. There may even be an impression that this is just a fact of being in that kind of an environment (see 'rape culture' above). This is all part of the wider emotional short-hand used in escapist action stories. From what I've seen, Tomb Raider might actually be better than most in this department.

The last issue – that the game is designed to provoke feelings in male players – has a specific source. When interviewed about the new game, executive producer Ron Rosenberg stated that "When people play Lara, they don't really project themselves into the character" and that players would want to protect her. Since my feelings on the matter of women getting raped are a mixture of extreme protectiveness and potentially homicidal rage, this makes sense to me as a man. Whilst I have little problem projecting onto a female character, many men do. But neither of these notions make any sense for a female player – which suggests that Rosenberg doesn't think there are any.

I was aware of the quote when I wrote my first article, but gave it little attention – noting only that 'official responses to these comments haven't been as reassuring as they might have been'. The reason for this short shrift is that one man's misunderstanding of the game's audience shouldn't affect the actual experience of playing it. Tomb Raider will unquestionably be narrated from Lara's perspective. It is unlikely that she will ever appeal for aid to her patron deity beyond the fourth wall. Whether you truly project onto Lara or see her as an external character that you are guiding through the game should depend upon yourself as a player. I've taken the latter option with many unappealing male characters in the past, but hope to take the former path with the new Lara. Rosenberg might not expect women to buy the game, but that won't actually prevent them from doing so.

Unfortunately, I must admit that we are talking about the executive producer here. His comments should be representative of the team. Can it be that the entire creative team for this project have been labouring under the delusion that they are making a game for an exclusively male market?

I'd certainly hope not. I've known how important Tomb Raider is to the large number of female gamers out there since I read an article about it in 1999 – the people actually making this stuff really should have caught up by now. My friend suspects that the very inclusion of a scene like this shows that the female audience was never considered by the people making this game. I hope she's wrong – but if not the game will probably alienate female players for a whole list of reasons when it actually gets played. If that happens, it will fail – probably without spawning a single sequel. Still, someone else should reboot it in 3 to 5 years time...

Politics - British Law and BDSM

During a recent random discussion with my wife, it was revealed that she didn't know any of the things I'm going to explain in the following blog post. On reflection, that wasn't as surprising as it appeared – I'd never got around to specifically talking to her about them and general public awareness is probably almost nil. So whilst those who have a personal interest in the matter may or may not know all of this already, I decided I might as well put it out here.

To be clear, none of this qualifies as actual legal advice. I don't even have a good level of amateur understanding. This simply reflects what I've absorbed over the years about what most people think the law is. I believe it to be correct, but that doesn't mean you should rely on it. I should also mention that this article is naturally going to be a discussion of adult themes.

For the truly uninitiated I should begin by defining a couple of terms. BDSM is a compound acronym referring to the practices of Bondage and Discipline, Domination and Submission and Sadism and Masochism. Those interested in any one of these three groups often have some interest in the other two. Most - but not all - of those interested in these things regard them as sexual. Whilst childhood play often reflects such an interest early it is universally considered an adult matter.

Estimates on the proportion of the population that are into BDSM vary from 2% to over 40%, but the most reliable figures seem to place it at around 5% for major interest. For my purposes the term 'BDSM community' simply refers to this slice of the population, a fair amount of whom socialise or communicate in some way based on mutual interest in the matter. It is not a centrally organised group – nor is it one united by a specific ideological position, although certain very basic standards are required for any kind of social acceptance.

Whilst there should be plenty of people out there old enough to remember, it is very hard to get any real picture of the state of things prior to the so-called 'Spanner Case' (properly known as R v Brown). This event began in the late 1980's and had a lasting affect on the BDSM community that continues today.

The case began when a video tape of a BDSM orgy between several homosexual men was obtained by the Manchester police. Erroneously believing it to be a record of the torture and murder of multiple individuals, a massive manhunt (code-named Operation Spanner) was launched to find those depicted. All of the participants were located – including those who were supposed to be dead – and all testified that they had been engaging in consensual sexual activity.

For reasons that are not clear – but probably related to the massive financial outlay of the investigation and the need to show results – the CPS pressed charges anyway. During the trial it was pointed out that by default a person cannot consent to be assaulted (pistols at dawn is still murder despite the informed consent of the duelists). There are specific exceptions to the law such as surgical procedures and contact sports, but sex play is not one of them.

As a result the sadists were all convicted of criminal assault. The masochists – who had enabled and encouraged the acts – were likewise convicted of having aided and abetted the assaults on themselves. An appeal to the House of Lords failed, with one of the ruling judges saying that he was 'not prepared to invent a defence of consent for sadomasochistic encounters' because the behaviours they represented were 'evil' and 'uncivilised'. An appeal to the European Court of Human Rights was rejected on the grounds that the question of when assault was permissible fell within the sovereignty of individual nations.

This legal precedent is still valid today (and was foreshadowed by the R v Donovan case of 1934, though the defendant there sucessfully overturned the prosecution). As a result, any BDSM act that could class as assault (and certainly anything that causes injury equivalent to ABH) is technically illegal and can result in conviction over the objections of the 'injured' party.

To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been convicted on the basis of this since the Spanner Case itself. I believe that very small number of cases have been brought to trial, but all of the heterosexual couples so charged were acquitted. This has led some to suspect that the Spanner Case actually represents a case of homophobia more than anything else. Some partners in BDSM couples have gone on to charge their partners with assault, but generally these appear to have been cases of actual domestic abuse that just happened to take place within a sadomasochistic relationship.

What the Spanner Case has done is to embolden the media in producing negative stories about kinky people. There is a long history of newspapers publishing articles exposing the BDSM activities even of private citizens, often without any discernible reason beyond mockery. A particularly objectionable example can be found here. Whilst such articles would normally be regarded as a gross breach of privacy, the papers will assert that they are running a 'crime' story and dare their victims to bring the whole thing in front of the courts.

It should be noted that the crime defence did not prevent Max Mosley from successfully suing the News Of The World – nor did it result in anyone facing assault charges. Mosley has actually become a hero to some sections of the BDSM community for pushing this victory through – a supremely unlikely hero, given that he basically sued the paper for telling his wife that he'd held an orgy with hookers. How much his win has actually changed the reporting habits of newspapers is less clear.

Something that most people probably do not realise is that BDSM practitioners are not legally protected from discrimination on account of their activities. British law does not simply forbid discrimination in any form – technically favouring one candidate over another is always going to be a discriminatory process. Instead, the law defines certain groups as 'protected minorities' who cannot legally be discriminated against if the discrimination is on account of their membership of this group. Whilst members of a given sexual orientation are generally protected, 'kinky' is not normally considered to be a specific orientation. It should also be noted that some employers (especially those in the public sector) require their employees to behave in a 'becoming' manner even outside the workplace to avoid negative associations upon themselves.

What this means is that if the press do decide to splash your sex life all over the newspaper (or a work colleague decides to forward your online presence to your boss for some personal reason) you can also get fired for attracting negative publicity with your deviant ways. Unlike convictions based upon the Spanner precedent, this does happen. BDSM practitioners regularly lose jobs, suffer disciplinary proceedings or are denied advancement in their careers because others have intruded upon their sex lives.

One thing that slightly complicates the above picture is the existence of professional dominants and submissives. Those who advertise themselves as such within the social community do not engage in sex with their clients, thus their actions do not constitute prostitution. Such services are as legal as any other BDSM activity and may not even be considered specifically erotic by their practitioners. BDSM-related campaign groups naturally defend the causes of both professionals and non-professionals without distinction. That said, there is a difference between a personal sex life and a publicly advertised small business. The level of threat posed to truly private individuals is accordingly hard to gauge, but it is certainly more than none.

The most prevalent issue regarding British law and BDSM at the moment however is the ban upon 'Extreme Pornography'. The road to this legislation began with the murder by strangulation of a woman named Jane Longhurst in 2003. When it was revealed that killer Graham Coutts had been a user of pornography featuring partial asphyxiation (an S&M practice known as 'breath-play') the bereaved mother and sister began a campaign to ban such material.

The actual evidence that the pornography was a motivating factor was shaky at best – Coutts had been physically practising breath-play for five years before he had looked at porn of it and had also complained to psychiatrists about murderous thoughts long before he had viewed such material. In any event, judging the large-scale impact of such material on the basis of one case is wildly unrepresentative (one might as well judge The Dark Knight by the recent 'Batman shootings'). Of course, the outcome was inevitable and the result was section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.

The Act prohibits possession of images featuring necrophilia or bestiality, but the more severe penalties relate to possession of 'violent pornography'. In theory, the definitions are quite dramatic -

illegal images are ones that depict “an act threatening a person’s life” or “an act which results (or is likely to result) in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals”. Examples given within the Act include “depictions of hanging, suffocation, or sexual assault involving a threat with a weapon; the insertion of sharp objects into (or the mutilation of) breasts or genitals”.

In practice, this outlaws via the examples all depictions of breath-play and possibly images of practices like edge-play and needle-play. The question of what constitutes 'sexual assault' or 'a weapon' is pretty open in the context of the Spanner Case (which was cited as a precedent in the new law).

It should also be noted that an officer assessing whether an image contravenes the law will probably have little actual knowledge of BDSM's practicalities and therefore his 'risk assessment' might be far beyond the realities of the scene. Certainly, regular practitioners obviously avoid circumstances that are 'likely to result in serious injury' or they'd all be seriously injured.

Police do not normally obtain search warrants for the purposes of searching for Extreme Pornography, but the number of unrelated reasons that they might go through your private files is high and rising. When such materials are turned up in these searches prosecution often follows, as shown by over 1300 prosecutions in 2011 alone. Whilst some of those charged over BDSM-related material are acquitted, standing accused of a sexual offence for a lengthy period of time can still have a devastating effect upon professional and family life.

If you are one of the (possible outright minority of) adults who don't use pornography, you might well not care if people are arrested for using something you find offensive. If you have a moral problem with porn, you might regard banning some of it as social progress compared to banning none. You may even be of the view – common in the wider debate about violence in entertainment media – that if censoring such material can prevent even one death at the hands of a psycho, the benefits far outweigh the loss to our leisure time.

Unfortunately, this isn't strictly a leisure issue. The bare fact is that if someone has a sexual preference for consensual adult breath-play, they can be imprisoned for three years and placed upon the sex offenders register for exploring their sexuality in a manner that is entirely legal for everyone else. How graphic the porn is does not matter to the Act – only which sex acts are depicted. If the government were to ban gay porn whilst leaving heterosexual smut unregulated, there would be no question that they were attempting to criminalise people for being gay. This Act is exactly the same for a large number of sadomasochists, except that the overt reasoning behind the law is that these people are a danger to the public and must be hunted down before they kill. This is not a reasonable position to take towards hundreds of fetishists per year, it is not based upon any kind of wide-scale research and it is not okay.

There have been organisations working to change these legal disabilities since they became extent. Given the size of the BDSM community and the large degree of unity it shows in condemning these laws, it might be regarded as surprising that protest has not been more high profile.

Unfortunately, many individuals simply feel that they have too much to lose. When most of you are getting away with something because it is within your private life, making a public declaration on the matter becomes a daunting prospect. Many fear that if they make to much noise the publicity they get will cost them their jobs or potentially even their freedom and families.

Additionally, becoming aware of one's BDSM sexuality is not always a painless process. Essentially similar to the 'coming out' of a homosexual person, individuals can take years to become comfortable talking about it or remain closeted for decades. Not everyone who is affected by these laws is by any means ready to march down the street protesting that they are being affected – a situation that the current media and legal attitude seldom aids.

When viewing Britain on a day to day basis, it might be hard to reconcile the bleak picture I've just painted with actual experience. We live in a nation where the fastest selling novel of all time is a piece of BDSM erotica, sex shops cover half a wall with devices intended for bondage and sadomasochism and a fairly mainstream pop star can sing how 'chains and whips excite me' without being slammed too badly by parents and press. Most members of the BDSM community live their entire lives without ever being personally harmed by the problems I have just described and most police officers are entirely happy with this. Whilst most people probably regard BDSM as 'not their cup of tea', laughter and bemusement are a more common reaction than anger or hate.

However, we also live in a nation where 5% of the population are legally vilified by the state for their consensual adult sexual preferences – a small but recurrent number of whom see their entire lives torpedoed for no better reason. If a lot of people are angry and upset about that, it's because they have very good reason to be.

The group most directly dedicated to altering and raising awareness of the issues I've described in called The Spanner Trust. You can find them here

Unfortunately they aren't always the most tech-savvy people. If you want answers to e-mails, you'll have more luck with CAAN or Backlash

For a blow-by-blow commentary on BDSM rights and media coverage as it happens, the Activism Board on InformedConsent used to be the place to go. Unfortunately, it has largely shut down - although it still maintains some news feeds that you can find via the site. The major social network of the UK BDSM community now is probably the slightly different Facebook-like site Fetlife

Gaming - The Tomb Raider Controversy

If I like a franchise, I'm rarely a fan of re-boots.

To me, a re-boot usually signifies one or both of two things. Firstly, it can signify that a profitable ongoing story has run its course. However, the brand name is worth too much to give up so the owners attempt to sell it again by starting over. Secondly, it can mean that someone has been inspired to tell a similar story – but rather than compete with their muse (or be original enough not to get sued) they buy the existing name and ditch or change whatever they want.

I can't claim to be an unbiased source on this subject. I'm a historian by training and inclination. Linking individual stories into an overarching narrative is what I do and it gives me five times as much pleasure as an average audience member. But I don't think it's unfair to say that years of back-story and the motivations it provides strengthens future story-telling. A character stripped of all their preceding tales is not the same character – it is a blank-minded clone with the same face and name.

I'm not blind to the advantages that reboots bring. They are a chance to re-tell the good bits from the old story whilst discarding the awful mistakes someone put into canon fifteen years ago. They also allow you to change the tone and tweak the concepts – potentially coming up with a view of the characters and setting that many people prefer. Batman has definitely benefited from this treatment in the cinema. Ultimately though, I feel that re-boots are a chance to create something that people who weren't really into the original will find attractive. They rarely service people who are already having fun – in fact they tell the current fan base that they are insufficient in number to guide future production. Worse, their continued support is taken for granted because it's the only new material they'll get.

I think that the new Tomb Raider looks fascinating and I like the new direction this re-imagining is taking. Unsurprisingly, I was never much taken with the old one.

To be sure, I did play Tomb Raider II when it fairly new. When you're a teenage boy, taking control of the actions of a half-naked bombshell who expresses herself in grunts and gasps is rather fun. Yet even at that testosterone-tyrannised age, such shallow pleasures could only sustain my interest for a couple of levels. I hate jump puzzles and the combat system annoyed me, so I went back to the Half-Life series. I'd be unlikely to buy a new game for the same reason I bought Tomb Raider II, so I guess I feel like I've grown out of it.

There are always more horny teenagers, but Lara Croft's unique selling point of 'being a woman' is no longer unique. There are now a vast number of titles out there which allow you to make a scantily-clad pixel woman bend down on command. Look at the shelves right now and you'll see Lollipop Chainsaw, a game featuring a chainsaw-wielding cheerleader that actually leads its blurb with the sentence “grab a chainsaw and prepare to grind one out”. This isn't really a good thing, but the bad news for Lara is that she's no longer got the market cornered.

On the other side of the gender divide, female gamers who want a same-gender avatar no longer have to put up with Lara's absurd anatomy and fan-serving dialogue. There are a great many female characters to choose from - and a substantial minority of them can even dress themselves for a fight. The growing popularity of custom character creation means that they can choose their appearance and even select their gender from a choice of two – reducing the amount of gender stereotyping in the script. With the multiple endings concept evolving into multiple game paths, characterisation is increasing in the player's hands too.

As a result, the once iconic figure of Lara Croft is becoming less and less relevant to the diverse needs of the modern gaming community. If sales figures reflect that, it is no surprise that the reset button has been pressed and a fresh attempt is being made to make me buy Tomb Raider.

When they came to re-imagine the character of Lara Croft, I can imagine the first thing the developers thought might have been 'what character?' Aside from the obvious joke, Lara is a bit two-dimensional and unconvincing. She lives alone (except for servants) in a mansion, experiencing a wealth-to-responsibility balance most similar to Paris Hilton. She fills her copious free time with fantastically dangerous grave-robbing quests, seeking such prize McGuffins as a dagger that allegedly turns you into a dragon upon piercing your heart. Her motivations presumably constitute a mix of boredom, greed for more riches and a profound misunderstanding of how to practice archaeology. She has always had the agility of the Prince of Persia and packed more invisible pistol ammo than Milla Jovovich in Ultraviolet, but her emotional range tends to rival that of Twilight's Bella Swan.

The developers seem to have decided that this time around, they are going to make her into a more believable person. They've also decided to broach the question of where a civilian woman gets the ability to take down vast numbers of professional soldiers. Unless you're going to come right out and admit that you're copying Indiana Jones, that is a question that needs answering.

There are two main ways to justify such expertise. Firstly, you say that Lara is psychotic enough to channel all of her free time and resources into intensive battle training (see Batman). Secondly, you say that Lara was placed in an isolated situation where she had to master all of these skills first time or die. The second option has more potential for a game and is the basis on which the first instalment of the re-boot is founded.

I was hooked by the first promotional image I saw. The picture shows a grimy Lara tightening a bloody bandage on her arm with her teeth. There is a bow on her back instead of pistols on her waist and a shipwreck behind her on the island shore. She also has much smaller breasts, but I didn't really notice because her expression and the composition of the image drew my attention to her circumstances rather than her curves.

Here was a Lara Croft who owed more to John Rambo than Duke Nukem – just as unkillable, but likely to bleed and sweat rather than quipping suggestively all the way. Here was a Lara Croft whose feelings might feature as a plot point. It was only a piece of promotional art, but it was enough to make me decide that I'd probably buy the game when it came out.

Spot the strong female character

Since then I've seen a couple of trailers for the game (the release date for which appears to have been pushed back). They pretty much showed what I expected – a novice Lara barely surviving a series of painful ordeals. The tone is much grittier, a change that is pretty much obligatory when you down-power an action hero. At one point during the second trailer, we see Lara get almost raped by a man she eventually manages to shoot with his own gun, before staggering off covered in his blood.

This has caused some comment.

Given the franchise's history of exploitatively displaying the heroine, questioning the decision to include a scene like this is only reasonable. Marketing under the Tomb Raider banner carries kind of statement of intent, so there will always be concern that this is being done to gratify the male audience. However, most sources seem to accept that the event is not included as an excuse for an arousing sexual scene.

Other charges are harder to deny. Critics have argued that presenting an attempted rape within a game about the character becoming more powerful implies that the event itself was an ultimately strengthening experience. They point out that this trauma is often used as the basis of female character development by male authors, typically in a tired and inaccurate manner. Official responses to these comments haven't been as reassuring as they might have been.

Surprisingly enough, I think that the scene can validly be used as a character development event within the story. If you think about it, a second event occurs in the scene which is arguably just as important. This will almost certainly be the first time that the new Lara deliberately takes a human life.

If the new Tomb Raider game is to have any resemblance to the old ones, this is a milestone we were always going to have to pass. Yet if we are to continue to sympathise with the character the act needs to be very clear cut on a moral level. Broadly speaking, this means that she needs to be defending the life and body of herself or of an innocent third party. Given the lone survivor theme self-defence is more appropriate than swinging in to save the day. Going for sexual violence over a straight-up murder attempt was always going to be a dodgy choice, but it is hardly indefensible if the game is striving for a more grounded feel. In the real world, 'violent sex attacker' is a far more common foe than 'indiscriminate axe murderer' or 'lost world tribal cannibal'.

In a more highbrow story, the rape attempt could act a symbolic reinforcement for the truth of being forced to kill – a savage, horrific event that leaves the survivor with lasting emotional scars. As it is, shooting a guy with his own gun while he's attacking you is simply so understandable that we continue to identify with the character even as she becomes something most of us will never be - a killer. In a nutshell, that is the purpose of the game.

A more questionable use of the scene lies in its skill-building element. If there's one thing we need to take away from this, it is the fact that Lara can kill a man twice her weight whilst being wrestled with her hands tied. Once this is ticked off on her action heroine resume, she can do it any time she likes. This is how the 'school of hard knocks' storyline works – put a character in a situation where they have to pull off a difficult task, then use their success as a precedent to defend future successes. But why would an author consider attempted rape as an optimum method to boost Lara's close combat skills? Well, that gets complicated.

One of the interesting things about this in a game-based context is that it is probably impossible for the rape attempt to succeed. If and when I play the game, my ineptitude with the controller will probably see this lovely young woman drowned in the dirty waters of a flooding chamber, impaled through the gut by an ancient death-trap, shot in the face at point-blank range and eaten alive by large carnivorous predators. But however badly I miss-time the quick-time event, I'm almost certain that I'll never have to watch as Lara has her pants ripped off before someone forces themselves upon her. As a consequence of failure, that will be taboo – whilst a hundred agonising, lonely and undeserved deaths are just fine.

Tomb Raider isn't unique here, but rather exists upon a universal sliding scale. In almost every piece of fiction which deals with peril, some subjects are just too nasty to depict. The new game exists in a space where depicting rape threat is appropriate, but depicting an actual on-camera rape would not be. It should also be considered that we are asked to project ourselves onto Lara by playing the game, which would make such an event far more traumatising for the audience even if it were implied rather than shown.

Note that what can happen and what can be threatened are not the same thing here. Again, this is normal. When you think back to the action cartoons of your childhood, you'll probably notice that death was a very rare event. On the other hand, you'd probably be hard-pressed to recall an episode where the protagonist wasn't either subjected to murder attempts with military hardware or almost killed by environmental hazards.

Some have argued that such depiction gives kids a false view of the danger that these things represent. If kids grow up seeing gunfire every day without ever seeing anyone die, they won't treat firearms with sufficient respect if they come to own one later. On the other hand, activists who work for actual change are unlikely to be impressed if censorship won't even permit acknowledgement of the things they want to affect – especially in works designed for a mature audience.

The most important argument, however, is that stories without peril are just too boring. Escapism is a valuable thing and we need a certain degree of insulation from realism for our entertainment to actually be entertaining. Conflict is the essence of drama, but most works aren't equipped to show how mush hurt real conflict leaves behind. Realistically depicting the mental state of a woman who is tortured by fascists before watching them kill all her loved ones would have been the wrong direction for Star Wars – but editing out the Death Star and all the explicit Imperial brutality would also have killed the classic.

As an audience, we have some sense of where we want these boundaries to be. When the threat is made, we require the story to get the protagonist out of it by any means necessary. Many older visual media works – and some modern ones – resort to outright continuity violations between the two halves of a cliff-hanger to avert the unthinkable. Whilst these are usually mocked, we are far more forgiving under these circumstances than we would be at other times in the narrative.

Because of this, the rape attempt represents the optimum time to have Lara display improbable skill. We require her to escape, so we are willing to extend our suspension of disbelief that little bit further to get her out of it. It's a cheap trick and one could argue that it panders to our desire to subtly censor the subject. But it only works because we want to it to, so it's hard to condemn the story-tellers without also condemning ourselves.

The thing that will really make or break this story is how Lara views her 'education' with hindsight – possibly as late as the ending sequence. Remember, this isn't a tale of how Lara saves the world, finds God or even meets the love of her life. Most significantly, it shouldn't be seen as the tale of how she becomes a stronger person – rather it portrays how the strength she already had allows her to survive.

Lara will transform from an apparently normal girl into a computer game action hero over the course of the story. That's who we want her to be, but it isn't who she wants to be. For Lara the game is simply about deflecting negative forces so that she can emerge almost intact. The only reason she could possibly have for being grateful for the experience is that it arms her to survive the next, deadlier instalment of the franchise.

It they do it right, the result will be to turn a normal person into an action game star without decreasing our empathy. Whilst she will have all the skills we expect, she'll also be a fully developed character whose personality is familiar and complex. If this happens, the new Lara will be an iconic character rather than an iconic character design and might take the medium forward as a story-telling tool. Nothing I've seen yet proves to me that that won't happen.

However, there's no margin for error when messing with this kind of material. If they put even one foot wrong – most especially if they imply that overcoming rape trauma leaves someone internally stronger rather than almost as functional – The whole thing will fall down. The game will be held up as an example of how poorly females are characterised by games, a sign of how little things have progressed since merely making the protagonist female grabbed media attention across the western world. No pressure, Square...

Comics - Sexism and Superheroes

I'll be returning to my series on role-playing games soon, but this blog is intended to hold a variety of articles. This time, I'm going to look at an issue I've been hearing a lot about in the past few days – the portrayal of women within comic books.

I'm not an expert on comic history, but I'm pretty sure that the original super-heroes of western comics were basically all men. They were also aimed at a young male audience – teaching them important values such as contempt for the civil rights of criminals, a robust sense of patriotism and a willingness to beat up funny-looking trouble-makers. What made the stories such a hit was the concept of seemingly normal people wielding superhuman powers. It was a fantasy everyone could relate to and project themselves onto – while the limited number of abilities possessed by each differing character allowed for spirited debate about which favourite hero was 'best'.

At some point the question seems to have been asked “if these people can do things because of powers no-one really has, why can't women do the same things with the same powers?” Female super-heroes therefore emerged to battle super-powered foes at a time when women were not even used as front-line fighters in the publishing country's military. Eventually, the comic publishers figured out that they had female readers as well and the number and roles of these characters began to improve.

Today, there are a very large number of famous female super-heroes (the exact gender ratio is academic when only a handful of people in the world can name every last canonical character). They are also capable of handling themselves and driving the plot – many males have been crushed by females and one female character recently re-sculpted the entire Marvel world to suit her wishes. Yet female comic fans still complain that their gender is subjected to institutional and offensive levels of sexism – an opinion that some male commentators readily share. Why is this?

The first and most obvious issue that gets pointed out is the costume design. While men typically wear fully covering if not exactly 'concealing' outfits, women are almost invariably portrayed with a large amount of skin on show. Some people even demonstrate this by mocking up equivalent male costumes.

More important than the costume, though, is the anatomy beneath it. Both male and female characters are portrayed in a highly idealised fashion – which is often used as a counter-argument. However, for men this takes the form of a highly muscular athlete/ body-builder physique whilst for women the emphasis lies on supermodel builds with remarkably large chests.

The thing about the male build is that it can be approached with training. Super-heroics are dangerous physical things and it makes sense that the best of them would be in terrific shape. Obviously if you plan on making Captain America (whose only super-power is that a serum gave him the perfect human physique) a major character, handing out perfect bodies like confetti is bad story-telling. Even so, it is forgivable.

The women frequently boast very large thighs, but seldom carry any corded muscles around on their own forms. More importantly you cannot 'train' your boobs bigger, so they must all naturally lie at the extreme end of the curve (although I'd love to see a story revealing the dark secret that they'd ALL had implants). Having been blessed with such a body, they naturally prepare for battle by selecting something that both lifts and separates – clearly the sports bra is a totally misguided design.

As a result female characters look like they've been idealised by the MALE mind. Although the male characters are probably good-looking, they also represent a male ideal. Remember how I said that super-heroes were popular because people project onto them? The male characters are designed for men to do just that. Female characters are designed differently because they fulfil an inherently different role – allowing male readers to project INTO them.

This is reinforced when combat actually starts. Although both sexes are effectively posing for the camera, female characters tend to contort themselves with all the naturalism and dignity of a porn star in mid-shoot. This isn't universally true (and DC appear to be bigger offenders than Marvel) but there are many, many examples of heroines who look as if they've been snapped in half in order to get their breasts and butts pointed at the fourth wall simultaneously.

Defenders of the status quo tend to argue that these woman are liberated and in control of their sexuality, seeing no need to hide their femininity away and even using it as weapon. This may be true for some of the provocative costumes, but it seems like convenient characterisation to say that every super-heroine wants to make opponents (and co-incidentally readers) stare at her breasts. Where anatomy and positioning are concerned, however, these women are not sexualized because they choose to be. They are sexualized because the universe they inhabit is forcing them to be that way.

Is it any wonder that female readers have little desire to project into these 'empowered role models'? The women are clearly being presented for the male reader, leaving female readers feeling as though they don't belong here. Yet when they complain they are argued against and ignored.

Some might claim that women should not be presented in this manner at all. I don't entirely have a problem with it as an expression of male fantasy – what you like and what someone else deems politically correct aren't always the same. It could be argued that selling such a skewed view of the world to young people is irresponsible – but if you take all of your ideas from comics you won't grow up well-adjusted anyway. What publishers shouldn't do is sell the result as being a balanced view of the world for both genders – and what they definitely shouldn't do is to tell any woman who feels alienated by their work that there is something wrong with them.

It might seem unsurprising that publishers are wary of changing their winning format by reducing the amount of guy-pleasing eye-candy. After all, males probably make up the majority of the readership (especially with the content regularly offending the women). This raises an interesting question – if female characters are sexualized and the audience is male, why haven't female characters taken over the comic universe?

There is no doubt that a superhero's true power comes from his sales figures. The only reason Batman constantly gets called in to help Superman or Green Lantern is that his title rivals theirs and Spiderman takes out more foes than most of the X-men for the same reason. Now, Catwoman and Harley Quinn are both iconic sexual fantasies throughout the entirety of geek culture and both have had their own titles. Given how much less interested nine out of ten male readers would be in staring at a picture of Batman, why haven't they taken off enough to reduce him to a background figure in his own setting?

The answer is simple. Remember how I said the success of super-heroes was down to the ability to project yourself onto the hero? Well, apparently readers don't do that across the gender divide. (I actually spent my childhood successfully projecting onto giant shape-shifting alien robots, but I might have an unusually fertile imagination). Presenting a character in a sexual fashion also drastically reduces the viewer's ability to do this, as female comic readers and men forced to watch Twilight will readily attest. As much as most men can enjoy the fantasy of being savagely conquered by Catwoman or going for ride on the Harley* they are actually more entertained by the fantasy of BEING THE FREAKING BAT. Sex sells, but when comic readers buy their dreams other things sell better.

As a result, I believe that comic publishers would have far more readers to win by making genuinely aspirational female characters than they would lose in the process. Anyone who is just looking for soft porn isn't going to stick around anyway – mainstream comics have yet to match the flesh displays of several daily newspapers and cost far more.

I'm actually quite interested in what a genuinely aspirational female superhero would look like. Back when speculation was rife about who the new Bond would be, there was a repeated suggestion of the possibility that the new Bond would be a woman. I didn't think this could work and I still don't. The reason is not that it would be any more absurd for a woman to do all those things than for James himself to pull them off, but because 007 is such a very male ideal. Bond does what almost every bloke would on some level like to do and we all want to be him for it. I think he's a jerk and his life is obviously horrible on many levels, yet his man card will always be more impressive than mine.

It seems unlikely that Bond is as irresistible to women in the real world as he is on screen, but I bet a great many have fantasised about him at some point. But do most women fantasise about BEING a vodka-swigging bedpost-notcher who crushes all that oppose them with sweet guns, fast cars and high-end electrical goods? I'd venture not. Accordingly, Jane Bond would never be embraced as an icon of her sex the way James has been.

Comics emerged from male fantasy and it's obvious that in many ways they haven't emerged very far. Although raising female superheroes to the point where they are just the same as the men would be an improvement, will transplanting female protagonists into male life-paths produce the same resonance with the female audience? Or do the very primal assumptions behind the super-hero mythos have to be re-examined with a feminine eye? I don't claim to have the answer to that one – but it would be nice to know that somewhere within the big publishing companies someone was asking that question.

*Arkham City reference. Stop throwing things at me.