The Madonna/Whore Complex

Samus Aran is an orphan, raised by a mysterious alien race called the Chozo. Infused with their DNA and wearing a bulky power suit, she travels the galaxy as a bounty hunter. She hunts down the Space Pirates and fights alien parasites called Metroid with her cunning, her suit upgrades, and her gunship.

Isabella "Ivy" Valentine is the adopted daughter of an English noble (but truly the spawn of the wielder of Soul Edge, Cervantes, a dread pirate from the Spanish Armanda). Her parents were consumed by Soul Edge, working themselves to death over trying to find out more information of the fabled sword. She inherited their riches and in the process of vowing to avenge their deaths, ended up entangled in the schemes of various villains.

Both characters are rooted in worlds of fantasy and adventure. Both characters have backgrounds that drive them to pursue some fantastic goal with many perils.

So what's the difference?

I've picked these two characters because they perfectly fit how the madonna/whore archetype fits into gaming. Samus is the Madonna. Fans are annoyed when she only wears her Zero Suit, or even by her character design in the upcoming The Other M game. Samus is a real female protaganist, her fans argue. She's strong and determined. IGN says her theme song should be "Dude {Looks Like A Lady}" as after all - she runs around in a power suit and blasts monsters! That's masculine and so crazy a woman could do it. She's placed on hot lists and her sexuality is argued over, but there's a pretty firm consensus that Samus is the ideal that women should live up to.

On the other hand, Ivy has a dominatrix style, down to her weapon. Her legs are more elongated in every gap, her hips and shoulders narrow, her breasts are enlarged. She has a husky, sexy voice that she chuckles and taunts her opponents in. She is utterly unrealistic in every way, from anatomy to character. Ivy is the Whore of the Madonna/Whore relationship.

Of course, just as in life, neither woman gets a fair shake from the Madonna/Whore complex. Ivy's background, which initially attracted her to me, is shattered. It is hard to take her seriously at all as a character. When you complain, people tell you that it is too much to take women in fighting games (or fantasy worlds, or MMOs, or science fiction, or comic books...) seriously, as after all it is just a fantasy. Samus is treated as a novelty sometimes. In her first appearance, she poses in a pink bikini for the viewer, and many people were shocked that she was a woman. Every depiction where she is not in her suit is criticized. When gamers complain about her breasts being too large or her depiction unrealistic, you wonder where these guys were when every other game was released. It seems only protagonists like Samus deserve their defense.

It's refreshing to see games where women are rounded, complex beings. Of course, even then, these characters are not exempt from criticism. Even Commander Shepard isn't exempt from criticism, as she can be a 'whore' for having such flirty dialogue with Jacob. (Male Shepard is never called a whore, even though you can have sex with Jack then go and romance Miranda)

Ideally, women would be... well, people, and it wouldn't be a big deal if they fought monsters. They could have character designs that suited their backgrounds (as opposed to just wank material). Maybe we'd have more characters with the respect and integrity of Samus, without the impossible standards.

Sigh.

This bothers me.

It bothers me a lot, basically.

First of all, CAD is a big believer in the myth of the Gamer Girlfriend. Lilah plays video games - in fact, she's better at them than Ethan! She plays them for a living! So Ethan buys her a video game even though he knows she's going to disappear into it.

Up until now I'm like "Oh okay that's not so bad" because hell, it's realistic. My boyfriend gave me a copy of The Wrath of the Lich King with tears in his eyes because he knew it was like standing at a train station watching your girlfriend travel off to an exciting new land without you. (He didn't see me for a few days, and I may have hung up on him once or twice with "QUIET I NEED TO LEVEL")

In CAD though, Ethan is the centering force in the entire comic, so he can go work for Bioware under Lucas's name or join the Mac Panthers or set a house on fire or whatever the hell wacky shit he does and that's okay. But Lilah getting tied up in a video game means he needs a boob contract.

And they say feminists hate men. I can't imagine anything more condescending then being told I couldn't let my partner do her own thing for a few hours because I needed to look at her body too much.

Another reason why the myth of the Perfect Gamer Girlfriend is poop.

Oh man.

I think a great benchmark of personal success at writing online is my very first hatemail, regarding my piece up on Left Mouse Button "The Myth of Meritocracy in Online Gaming".

It calls me a feminazi and the basic gist of it is "STFU", but it's fantastic. I love it.

Things are pretty great overall lately. I'm pulling out of a hard depression, almost finished my first year of university with a pretty decent average, approaching a four year anniversary with The Boy, and the reaction to the Myth of Meritocracy has really been the icing on the cake.

I think I'm going to print this hate mail out and tuck it in a little folder that says "You're doing something right."

Identity, Choice and Gaming

http://www.leftmousebutton.net/gaming/identity-and-gaming

Another new post for Left Mouse Button.

Why Dead Space 2 Is Scaring Me

I have another piece up on Left Mouse Button, check it out!

http://www.leftmousebutton.net/gaming/why-dead-space-2-is-scaring-me

The Myth of Meritocracy in Online Gaming Response

For those who didn't read it, I'm going to post up the post I did for Left Mouse Button last week. It is a doozy.

http://www.leftmousebutton.net/gaming/article-the-myth-of-meritocracy

Read all that? Good.

Well, it was linked on Rock Paper Shotgun as well.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/02/05/girls-just-want-to-have-dungeon-runs/

I delved into the maw of madness, and I found an interesting pattern. Mainly, there's three big categories of responses I want to think about.

The first: I/my guild isn't like that!

This argument is probably the most valid. My own guild is pretty good on the sexism front (it's not exactly feminist-friendly, but for WoW-standards it's fucking fantastic.) And I'm sure not a small number of guilds that are similar to this exist. Not everyone who plays WoW is a Jake, obviously. However, anecdotal evidence is useless for World of Warcraft. I'm sure it's possible to find a feminist-friendly guild. I'm sure it's also genuinely possible to find an Evangelical Christian guild, or a Tea Party Republican guild, or a guild of pro-wrestling fans, or a grandparents only guild, or whatever. This does not make it the norm. There are eleven million people playing World of Warcraft. I feel comfortable with saying that the majority of players aren't actively and loudly sexist - but they don't seem to have a problem letting the real sexists run rampant.

This argument also ignores a very important point: What YOU think is sexism may not be what Molly Sue, your guild's paladin healer thinks is sexism. Someone might say, "Molly Sue get your ass in the kitchen" and Molly Sue might go "lol" in chat. You don't know if she's just trying to avoid making a fuss or whatever - text has no emotion. You don't know if people whisper Molly Sue, or use Vent binds. You don't know if Molly Sue secretly hates everyone in your guild for their woman - in - the kitchen jokes or whatever. World of Warcraft's chat thrives off some measure of privacy.

Plus, there are No Girls Allowed guilds who are pretty comfortably high in world progression. The aptly named No Girls Allowed is actually 38th in world progression with that policy. I'm sure they have their pick of recruits.

Secondly, there's the 'well, girls DO cause drama and the 'good players' who get distracted by girls outweigh the girls in value so it just makes sense to have a no girls allowed policy!!'



First of all, perhaps one or two ladies caused drama - of course it's not true that all women will (but of course, that's how it works, hattip to xkcd). Secondly, I find it disturbing that people claim women bring harassment on themselves and men just can't help it.

This is obviously in different leagues, but at its core? That's the same logic rape apologists use. So when it crops up in discussions on WoW, that only cements my belief that geek culture mirrors some really disturbing parts of mainstream culture.

Then of course, there's the third argument: You're crazy, stop whining, stop being a drama queen. There's no logical response to this, as it's not a logical argument, so let me get on their level for a moment and say "Fuck no, I'm here to stay."

Long live the Feminist Geek, and it feels good to stir up the beehive. Hopefully some of the people who wrote these comments have a seed of knowledge planted, and if not, I won't let them silence me.

Good news, everyone!

I have a piece up on Leftmousebutton.net about the Myth of Meritocracy in online gaming.

Thoughts on Wii Fit and Feminine Gaming

The Wii Fit has recently helped a woman shed over one hundred pounds, according to Kotaku. (http://kotaku.com/5460810/woman-loses-112-lbs-thanks-wii-fit). She now parades around in sexy lingerie and feels free to have sex with her husband. Good for her, I suppose, but this got me started on a chain of thought.

The Wii has been marketed in a very unisex way - the Wii want to play campaign was aimed towards families, children, and new gamers. This has led to the Wii heavily skewing female in 'gamer' perception - when it was big and new and you had to wait for six hours at a Walmart to get one, dudebros were annoyed and vocally so about having to compete with soccer moms for a Wii. The Wii is seen as "Kidtendo", "watered down", "not for 'real' gamers" - and a large part of this likely comes from the fact that the Wii is trash talked on gaming blogs and forums. Hardcore, mature games like Dead Space: Extraction or House of the Dead aren't selling.

That's okay though - because casual games are selling like hotcakes. Wii Fit is an especially popular one. Of course, casual games are seen as 'less than', and casual games aimed at women (women disproportionally play casual games) are even less well regarded.

So the fact that Wii Fit is aimed towards women is a real thumb in the eye to hardcore gamers from Nintendo - which I have to admit, I appreciate a little out of schnaudenfreud, and I appreciate that Nintendo is continuing to cater to a female audience.

I just wish that there were more interesting results then women getting thin and wearing lingerie.

Quick Hit: Geek Comedy Interview

I'm working on a book, in school, and working, so I'm busy.

Here's an interview from the book I'm working on, a little snippet while I work on some beefier projects. It's with one of the columnists from Cracked, Bobby "Fatboy" Roberts on geek comedy, women, and success.

Q: Cracked.com is a popular site, seen as being reliably hilarious. How would you describe the spirit of Cracked? What sort of reader are you appealing to?

A: This is probably a better question for the editor-in-chief, Jack O'Brien, but if I had to answer, more as a reader than a contributor, I'd say the spirit is educational smartassery. The emphasis is on the comedy, but you don't get to do the jokes if you don't know your shit. And you can't just have a knowledge of the subject you're shining a spotlight on (or skewering) you gotta know how to write succinctly and effectively. A large amount of the most-seen articles on Cracked read like textbook entries, if the guy writing the textbook was raised on a diet of George Carlin and Bill Hicks.


Q: Cracked has gone through many lives – as a MAD Magazine imitator, and later a boys magazine a la Maxim. It finally succeeded as a website. While most print media is struggling in the current economy, do you think other factors contributed to Cracked's success on the Internet?

A: From what I understand, Cracked's success on the internet came from stepping back and looking at what was already working as far as original comedy on the internet goes, and then gathering up as many of those writers and content creators as possible. Again, I'm not so sure about how it happened, I wasn't there at the time, you'd probably wanna talk to the editor on that note.

Q: Much of the content on Cracked has a similar 'feel' in terms of tone and style. Are there guidelines that writers have to follow?

A: There's not really a set of guidelines or bullet-points, so far as I know. But there is an editorial influence that does help to shape the tone of the articles, be it through suggestions or rewrites and line-edits by the editors themselves. Never so much as to erase the individual voice of the author, but just enough so that there exists a cohesive tonal whole that carries over from piece to piece throughout the site.


Q: What sort of guidelines do you follow as a writer? Are there restrictions to your style or content? Are there lines you won't cross regarding offensive content, words, or imagery?

A: Me, personally, I don't restrict myself too much. I'd like to say "I don't give a fuck about offensiveness," but the truth is, if you're writing something and you haven't done the work in the set-up to make a punchline about, say for example, the mentally handicapped, sound *right* then either that joke needs to be rewritten or jettisoned completely and an entirely different angle needs to be taken. It's a kind of a nebulous area, especially since humor is so subjective. There's a line, and it's a thin one, between being edgy and just being a jackass. I guess the first rule on that note is that if you're consciously TRYING to find that line, you're doing it wrong. There's a way to make even the most offensive topic funny, but you gotta set up that punchline pretty carefully.

Q: Cracked covers a lot of 'geek' topics, like video games, Star Wars or kids cartoons. Do you feel like there's a good way to define 'geek' humor?

A: I think the definition of Geek underwent a sort of shifting about a decade back, and has been gradually evolving as it goes. At this point a "Geek" is simply someone who is immersed in pop culture. Maybe in some instances it's more specialized than that, broken down to a more specific subset of pop culture, but really, that's it. Geek has come to mean "Enthusiast" more than anything. Sports Geek, Movie Geek, Knitting Geek, whatever, at it's core its the same sort of community-building/community-based shared interest in an aspect of pop culture at the root of it. And considering how largely pop culture plays a part in most people's daily lives, the stigma of being a "geek," is rapidly waning, save for the fact "geeks" are self-identifying with the word almost as if they're trying to reclaim it from its previously negative connotations, and in the process, prolonging those connotations as the geeks engage in this heirarchal "real geek" structure wherein they use their "geek cred" to beat up on other, lesser nerds online for not being as real.

Jesus Christ that was a long ass sentence. And geeky as fuck, too.

Basically, Geek Humor is humor that has anything to do with pop culture, period. It gets more obviously geek the more specific your pop culture reference gets.

Q: What characteristics would you apply to geek humor? Do you feel that geek humor has any negative slants, such as a strong misogynist streak or a tendency for racism?

A: I'd say the most negative slant Geek Humor has is this sort of forced, feigned sense of superiority. That slight twinge of Comic-Book Guy that a lot of essayists and bloggers and recappers glaze their paragraphs with. Snark is the easy default when it comes to these things, and a lot of authors (myself included, more than a few times) will fall back on the authoritative voice, casting themselves as the armchair know-it-all who has the easy solution at their fingertips if ONLY the world would just listen to them (and give them a couple thousand extra hits so the google ads will funnel a nickel into their paypal accounts)

Sometimes misogyny and racism sorta sneak their way into the subtext, but a lot of that seems to be done accidentally, by people who don't quite realize what it is they're saying. I don't think it's necessarily a racism/sexism thing in a lot of cases, it's just that these people aren't familiar with these other viewpoints because, yunno, they DON'T GO OUTSIDE, period. Seriously though, if you're dealing with geeky writers, writers who obviously have a bit more tunnel-visioned focus on their subjects, it makes sense that things falling outside of that tunnel vision aren't going to be as easy a grasp for that writer, at least until whatever they ARE staring at does an episode or writes an issue that covers that particular social ill.


Q: While women are using the Internet in droves, there aren't many strong female comedy presences on the web. Do you think this will change in the future? What are steps to making this a reality?

A: It'll change in the future, sure, much in the same way there's more female stand-ups than there were in the 80's. Barely, but there is more. However, the troubling part of using that analogy is that there's STILL a perception that women on the club circuit simply just aren't as funny as the guys. People have written veritable tomes on why this could be, citing delivery, inability for large parts of the stand-up audience to relate, so on and so on. I don't have the answer myself. I do know that it seems to be a little easier for that gulf to be bridged online, when the element of sound is removed and all you have left are the words. That equalizes things a little. The only way the numbers will even up is if more women put themselves out there.

Q: Overall, do you feel like geek humor a positive step forward for comedy or a negative step back?

A: I'm not so sure it's a forward/back sort of thing, really. I think it's just a decent component of the whole. I think it helps that people can get the ha-ha's they need to make their day go a bit smoother, and those ha-ha's can be a little better tailored towards their specific geeky focus. On the flip, I think it's healthy for people to step out of that geek comfort zone every now and again and experience other people's geeky interests, too.

On Risks and Writing

The WGA Nominees for Best Video Game Writing are out. They are:

* Assassin's Creed II, Story by Corey May, Script Writers Corey May, Joshua Rubin, Jeffrey Yohalem; Ubisoft Entertainment
* Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Written by Jesse Stern, Additional Writing Steve Fukuda, Story by Todd Alderman, Steve Fukuda, Mackey McCandlish, Zied Rieke, Jesse Stern, Jason West, Battlechatter Dialogue, Sean Slayback; Activision
* Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Written by Amy Hennig; Sony Computer Entertainment
* Wet, Written by Duppy Demetrius; Bethesda Softworks
* X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Script Writer Marc Guggenheim; Activision


Now, I may disagree with some of them just by glancing at them - the fact that Wolverine is on there when that's not a proper video game franchise makes me scowl - but I haven't played all of them so I can't judge.

Let's talk about video game writing. Video game writing is different from a novel or a script or a screen play, obviously. I feel like video games have proven that they can do some things more effectively than a book - for instance, when guiding Gordon through City 17, my heart was racing, I was sweating, I was straight out terrified. There's a moment in the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare where you play as a politician being led to his execution, and I honestly found it more uncomfortable than the "No Russian" level.

In other ways, video game writing is weak. It's immature. Characters sometimes don't talk like human beings. There are bugs. Sometimes you have to cycle through menus. ("What can I do for you?" "I want to know about the forest." "It's huge and leafy." "I want to know more. "What can I do for you?"...)

And sometimes the story in a game can be fleeting and insubstantial, not even a story at all. I remember when the writing in Left 4 Dead won awards. I was bewildered. The plot in L4D was nonexistant. You watched the cutscene, picked a survivor, and played. Of course, when panicking for the first time over witch cries and boomer bile, I missed little things. I missed the quips and relationships the characters shared with each other. I missed bodies covered with a blanket, a hasty goodbye by other survivors who had to leave their buddies behind and move on. I didn't read the graffiti at first. There is a world to L4D, and it's so very human and natural. In some ways the story is stronger for not stopping you.

But what makes the story of a game succeed? Being static and stagnant is no way to answer that question: designers had to take risks.

A lot of people are asking where Dragon Age is on the list of nominees. Dragon Age was a fantastic game. I loved it. I thought the characters were fantastic. I'll replay it a million times. It didn't take risks. The story was pure fantasy that borrowed from Warhammer and Tolkien and Blizzard and D&D and it was fantastic but it was interchangeable with other games. The characters were well-written, but in some ways they felt like a step back from your crew in Mass Effect.

(Plus, Dragon Age may have been straight out disqualified. You need a script to be nominated, it's possible that Dragon Age's sprawling RPG layout had no script that met the qualifications.)

Modern Warfare 2 took risks. I felt like it didn't succeed. I felt like No Russian was a bit of a failure. But the game tried. Infinity Ward were playing with the medium and went to a new place.

Is a game that relies on old tropes more 'successful' writing than a game that tries new tricks but fails 'better'?

That's a question that'll be answered once the winner is announced, I suppose.