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...