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...