I am a huge fan of the Saints Row series.
When I discovered this it came as a huge surprise. I can't stand the Grand Theft Auto series, or most any other game that sends you into a city with the intent being to wreak havoc and generally menace the civilian population all while murdering cops and committing felonies, yet I find myself oddly in awe of the Saints Row games.
There are a few reasons I feel more positive about them than others, but most all of those reasons can be summed up in two broader ones: firstly, that the games aren't afraid to embrace the fact that they're games, and second, the almost unerringly even hand with which the game treats equality of gender.
How can a game where you rescue hookers from boats and watch women parade around town in lingerie show gender equality? It's very simple: it treats men and women almost universally equal. Sure, the women in lingerie are more common, but a close look will also reveal plenty of men walking around in speedos and gimp masks, and of the major characters among both the villains and the antiheroes the women make up some of the strongest in terms of personality and impact. Like most women in video games they have their over-sexualized elements, but in a game where you spend a rather lengthy mission running around with a nude giant and another with one of your major male allies in pony gear pulling a cart, women in tight turtlenecks or who are blatant about their sexuality are almost tame in comparison. They are business owners, or public figures of power, or even staunch allies in combat, but one thing they most certainly never are is weak.
What's just as impressive as this treatment with the non-player characters is the game's treatment of your avatar. The game takes an AFGNCAAP approach to NPC dialogue throughout, with multiple voice tracks for male, female, and even zombie characters all changing subtleties of the dialogue and blending wonderfully with every other spoken line in the game. Your character can be as fat, thin, ugly, pretty, or even well endowed (male OR female) as you care to make them, and regardless of your choices your character's grand-scheme sexuality and personality are kept ambiguous enough to fit with any style of role-play a player could want within the restrictions of a game about criminal fantasy. The game actually rewards you for changing your character's sex in-game and devoting play time to both sexes throughout your in-game career.
Most of all, permeating every fiber of every element of this, the game has a sense of humor about what it does. When it's being sexist -- in either direction -- the game is not afraid to fully embrace that and play its sexism for all it's worth, the same as it does for casual violence, crime, and even the world itself, a setting where mass murder and misdemeanors are marketing ploys and publicity stunts. It's a game that WANTS you to see how over the top everything it does is, and in that way it negates the very problems it seems to promote.
It's satire in its purest form, and is one of the best treatments of gender as a whole I can remember experiencing in any game ever.
The issues concerning the representation of women in games has long been an issue within the industry. Many are the arguments one will hear either justifying it or condemning it, and there are well-reasoned arguments on both sides of the divide. Because of this, I am resolutely not going to get into the greater issues concerning whether games are targeted toward men or women as a whole. Instead, what I am going to touch on is a smaller and in my personal opinion more important issue entirely and that is the ethics of the treatment of gender in games on an individual level.
I should probably start with defining what I mean by "the ethics of the treatment of gender," or to shorten it let's just call it "gender ethics" from here on out. What I mean by this is how a game handles gender regardless of any perceived target audience by treating players, whether they are perceived to be men or women, boys or girls, with an equal amount of respect concerning mental capacity, gameplay skill, or even tastes in content.
Using this as our guide for what "gender ethics" means, it is easy to see how many games fail to take this into account to any great degree, worst of all games that are supposedly targeted toward improving equality in the gaming market.
The Rules of Gender Ethics
Rule 1: Gameplay Content Does Not Dictate Player Gender
This is one of my first, and most major, peeves with gender ethics in games, and that is the mistaken notion that the way a game is intended to be played or the way the content in it is presented somehow makes certain games more, shall we say, gender-savvy than others. Many are the times I've seen arguments promoting games like The Sims, or Peggle, or even the Imagine series on DS as examples of female-oriented games, and to me this is a terrible tact to take. By insisting that certain games are more appropriate or better exemplify the types of content most often sought by one gender or the other people on both sides of the gender equality arguments are missing the mark.
Is it a fact that male and female brains function differently in some ways? Yes; but that is no justification for applying some false gender emphasis on what the content or gameplay style of a game should be.
Ironically enough I consider games that are supposedly oriented toward girls or female players to often be the worst offenders in this way. I used the Imagine series as an example above for good reason: they are intriguing ideas for games that lose a lot of their value through misguided gender emphasis in their marketing and design. By emphasizing their target activities as exclusively feminine -- subjects such as fashion design, veterinary work and even teaching being in the series' repertoire -- they are dealing a double whammy to gender equality in games. Not only does their insistence on the femininity of these activities actively discourage male gamers interested in the subject matter (and, let's face it, given the popularity of clothing mods in PC games there are more than a few male gamers who would have a blast with a fashion game,) but it also works as a subliminal hint to girls that these are the kinds of games they should look at instead of the next shooter or the next adventure game. Their very pride in the supposed gender they appeal to is their biggest problem.
The games that most often exemplify the most positive gender ethics more often fall into the adventure, puzzle, or simulator genres, because in many of these games gender serves primarily as an aesthetic choice and only in a secondary or even tertiary capacity to influence story or interaction options. Games like The Elder Scrolls series or Bioware's epic RPGs where a character's personality and, often, love interests, can be steered in any of a variety of ways without making what they are more important than who they are. Meanwhile many puzzle games benefit from the concept of removing gender as a factor entirely. While Peggle and other Popcap or "casual" games often appear on the lists advocates use to provide proof of female gamers, their greatest achievement is from removing gender from the gameplay equation at all.
The key here is that equating a game's genre or goal with the gender most appropriate for it is detrimental to the industry as a whole. Girls play shooters, guys play The Sims, and I know plenty of young men who would enjoy games about training horses or managing a small business oriented toward personal hygiene if the covers weren't saturated in pink and sparkles in a mistaken goal to target girls. Why gender concepts and content that don't need it?
Rule 2: Men And Women Are Not Two Extremes
I absolutely adore character creation in games. I love having the flexibility to choose how I appear in the game world and to see what options the game gives me to customize my avatar to fit who I want them to be. And yet, I often find myself underwhelmed or even annoyed by the options presented to me in games because of their reliance on definitive sex templates to define who a character is. If you build a woman she is going to be curvy and feminine: if you build a man he is going to be broad and strong. You have some flexibility within this, and more and more games are allowing the option to alter sexual attributes within certain limitations, but those limitations are often set on the outsides of biological norms, and are far from all-inclusive.
By creating a hard separation between men and women in the way characters are designed, games do little to promote an open understanding of sex, sexuality, and gender within their game worlds. Often times this will even extend to garments and objects one finds within a game. Many have been the times I've picked up a pair of pants in Oblivion only to be dismayed to find them transform into a skirt on my character because I had chosen to tick the F rather than the M during character creation. Likewise when playing Fable I've found outfits or even hair styles I would want to use for my character only to be faced with the problem of earning points in a "crossdressing" score that would often negatively impact my character's interactions with others. By applying these gender stereotypes games fail to embrace inclusive ideals and instead perpetuate needless double standards in regards to both males and females.
Once, just once, I would like to see a game where I can create a flat-chested thick-waisted female avatar, or a pretty male avatar with slight curves, just to be able to experiment with the variety that truly exists in nature concerning gender and presentation. The same goes toward personality traits as well. Let the player create a male character who is soft-spoken or gentle without tying aspects of abnormality or strangeness into their person, or let them create a broody, dark and terrible female figure who nobody would every accuse of using her sexuality to get her way. Not only does embracing such variance vastly increase the options available for characters in games both for the players and developers, but it makes the world feel more real than spending every day among the supposed ideals of society, and therefore more inclusive.
Rule 3: Your Main Character Does Not Define Your Audience
While character customization has become much more common in games than in the past, especially in regards to one's sex, many games still rely on a predefined and definitive character or characters for gameplay.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Games, like movies or books, are often a storytelling medium to at least some capacity, and as such will often necessitate a specific character archetype to carry the events of the story toward the predefined conclusion. Where this falls down is in the way that many game developers will use their main character to define a target audience for their game.
The examples of this kind of targeting are numerous, as are the examples that subvert the trend. Many early games especially manage to avoid this issue by presenting their characters in such a way that the character itself is less important than the actions they perform. With modern games, though. . . .
As a youth I always enjoyed first person shooters. I grew up playing games like Doom and Dark Forces on my grandmother's computer before later graduating to Half Life, Quake 3, and even a little Halo. More recently, however, I have found these games harder and harder to get into or appreciate because of the portrayals of not only the main characters, but the reactions of the NPCs around them. Many third person games have this same problem, and it's an issue we as an industry inherit from the film industry: the main character is treated AS the audience, with little regard for differing opinions or feelings. The issue arises due to the difference in mediums. While a movie is a predefined series of events from an outside perspective, games are most often treated as an active continuity, with the player intended to either empathize with or at the very least maintain interest in the welfare and actions of main character.
Put more simply, it is easier to watch a movie with a character you don't identify with than it is to play a game with the same issue.
Unlike the other "rules" -- and I use that term lightly -- this one falls into much more of a gray area, partially because it extends to more than gender and sexuality: it covers a character's entire attitude. As such, there are plenty of cases where a character's attitudes defining the game's target audience make perfect sense!
Yes, that's right, there are times -- many of them -- when this rule can be ignored. If so, why bring it up?
Because there are also times -- again, many of them -- when ignoring this rule is detrimental to a game, and these situations almost always involve blatant sexism in the attitudes of either the game's characters, or the developers.
I mentioned at the very beginning of this article that I can't stand the Grand Theft Auto games, and this rule here is one of the major reasons why. Beyond being a criminal, the character you are expected to play in these games always seem to embody the worst elements of masculine attitudes. Several of the characters in the series are womanizers, and worse than that their interactions with women are almost always in a manner that objectifies them or sexualizes them far more than is needed for the narrative to be effective.
The GTA games are incredibly popular, but most girl gamers I know who like the series are hesitant to admit it, in no small part because of the sexism shown throughout the games.
Even games with female protagonists are far from immune from this attitude, though often times they take on the visage of femme fatales who use their sexuality to overcome obstacles in a way that is neither empowering nor positive for female gamers, ending up as nothing more than sexual fantasies for the male audiences they're targeted at.
Again, games like these will always exist so long as games exist as entertainment, but developers could very much benefit from taking into account whether targeting the audiences who seek this type of thing is of benefit to their game, and if not, should seek ways to correct it.
Tomb Raider is a great example of a series that has reinvented itself at least twice in this regard. While early games placed a great deal of emphasis on Laura Croft's sexuality, many of the newer titles have moved away from this toward a character-driven focus. While overall the games have always served as some of the more female-positive games around, these changes over the years to refine the main character's image have helped to prove just how much the company cares about its protagonist and the impact she has on those who play her games. As such, Laura Croft has more than managed to remain relevant: she has managed to excel as an example of what gender-positive marketing can do for a series. It still has its problems, but as the company devotes time to correcting those they improve the series greatly.
Games that target a mutually gender-positive or sex-positive outlook will almost universally have greater appeal than those that choose to express more limited, negative viewpoints.
So What Did Saints Row Get Right?
Saints Row serves as a unique example of positive gender ethics by insulting and satirizing both sides of the gender divide equally. By taking the same approach to sex and gender that it takes to violence, crime, and everything else, the game manages to rise on a pile of be-thonged prostitutes and male sex slaves to take its place near the top of my personal list of impressively gender-positive games. By providing a strong cast of characters of different genders, nationalities, and attitudes the game comes out ahead of many much more consciously inclusive games in terms of open mindedness, embracing subcultures in a way most games can only dream of.
It's a pity more games don't live up to that dream.
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