That video games have been built by men and for men for the majority of the medium's existence is virtually a given. Space War, Tennis for Two, Odyssey: virtually all of the first video games that this world has known were programmed by men within communities of men and for audiences composed nearly entirely of men. This boys club of lab coats and science fiction merged with the equally male and equally powerful society of suits that ran the technology business in the seventies and eighties. The programs that defined these early, first generations of gaming look like a feminist paradise of distilled male behavioral caricatures: everything is a battle, a quest, a monster. The titles themselves are monolithic. Think back to your Atari collection; how many games did you have with a title containing more than one or two words? Indeed, in this early stage, language seems to function in gaming as a semi-necessary accessory to the premise of whichever game it has been attached to.
Of course, it isn't quite fair to video game creators to fault them for design choices that have merely been borrowed from existing leisure cultures. Our board games, in that they function primarily as arenas for competitive elimination, are generally centered on the either/or binary which always provides a clear winner and a clear loser. Look to chess, look to Monopoly, look to battleship. Where a game isn't a metaphor for combat it's a metaphor for economic contention or political power. The games of twentieth century America have always come out of male concern, have always sought to replicate the competitive worlds from which women are excluded or discouraged. I can think of all the times my own mom and sisters have refused to play monopoly simply on the grounds that my dad and I are insufferable to be around as we stake out our pretend properties and rob our competitors blind. And who can blame them?
Think too of how leisure has been gendered so heavily in our society. This gendering may seem less obvious now, but consider the hobbies we encounter the most as either males or females. Think of craft nights, sewing societies, knitting groups, cooking and book clubs, and realize that you are imagining groups of women. Now think of golf, bowling alleys, hunting parties, smoking parlors, pub scenes, and realize that you are imagining men.
Of course, I'm generalizing. No one person conforms to gender expectations perfectly, and the suggestion that there are codified expectations of gender at all is a tenuous one at best. But we know they exist, these expectations, in some shape in every culture. They shape our fairy tales just as surely as they shape our workplace. Thus, it stands to reason that our gamespace would contain the same expectations.
Unlike their more strictly competitive table top cousins, video games don't absolutely require the either/or binary of winning and losing in order to function. Or at the very least, this binary can be displaced onto digitally rendered stand-ins for actual human competitors, and the binary can thus be rendered somewhat more complex, more ambiguous. Sure, monopoly has a narrative premise rooted in the early corporate capitalism of Depression-era America, but in this case the narrative is mere parameter, not propulsion. The video game combines the ludic (play-like) nature of binary driven board games with the empathic potential of actual honest-to-goodness story. In the video game, story can become our reason for playing, we join in solidarity with a character's concerns, we contribute to the authorial process by playing within the branching narrative the developers have opened up to us.
This combination of ludic and narrative has been recognized as critical to the identity of video games for years now. We've come a long way since the days of Centipede. Games that exist primarily to tell stories have been with us even before the first Final Fantasy game. What has yet to be fully appreciated or even explored as an attractive possibility is the potential of this particular medium for generating cross-gender empathy. Game stories require the participation of a player, just as literature requires the participation of a reader. The nature of sympathy generated for a given set of video game characters is also analogous to the identification which takes place between a reader and his book's protagonist. The difference lies (at least in part) in the gamer's physical and virtual performance of the protagonist's actions. The bonds of sympathy are enacted through both imagination and physical force. That the video game can create a visual environment full of interesting characters and scenarios to explore is really cool, but in the end not terribly important. What makes the game special is its ability to incentivize performative action within situations that the gamer would ordinarily never have the opportunity to enact or experience.
Feminists have long pointed to the lack of empathy from one gender for the other as a primary barrier to gender equality. This is what we really mean when we say that someone has "objectified" someone else. That "objectified" person has been rendered an inadequate target for sympathy. We don't empathize with tables, volcanoes, or bullets specifically because of their object-ness. The first project in any agenda of violence or oppression is to render the enemy, the insurgent, or the other into an object unworthy of empathy. When a culture understands women primarily in terms of their breasts, or their domestic skill, or their status as princesses, it objectifies them in this very sense. It's not that men suddenly stop believing women are people. It just becomes really difficult for the male mind to imaginatively occupy the social space which has been left for women. Of course this dynamic works the same in any oppressive context. Being unable to imaginatively occupy the space of illegal immigrants, or Muslims, or discontented suburban men inevitably results in the degradation of cross class empathy, a necessary component for the commission of interpersonal or institutional violence. But in our "post-feminist" climate, it's easy to forget that the empathy barrier exists as strong as ever between the genders.
And here is exactly where I believe that video games have the societal potential to function not only as innocuous purveyors of entertainment, but as loci of cross-gender empathy. The performative nature of character identification in video games allow gamers to experience the kinds of gendered experiences which construct our ideas of what it means to be a woman or a man. In fact, games already do this, but most do so unconsciously, defaulting to the old "boy's club" of late sixties technoculture. Why else would the majority of game heroes consist of nothing more complex than a collection of fantastic male amplifications in the form of the gun, the team, or the super power? Sure these are fun, and i love games with these features just as much as the next guy. In the end, gamespace is certainly a place to experience fantasies of self-efficacy that we would otherwise never get to experience. But perhaps the dependency on amplifying traditionally male forms of social expression explains why video games (at least those played by the "hardcore" crowd) have such difficulty creating appeal across the genders. They specifically appeal to a cultural narrative which was crafted by and for only half the population. What's worse, many games, due to their propensity for amplifying fantasy, appear to uncritically offer men and women alike the ability to occupy the most unseemly corners of the male psyche, thus generating disgust rather than empathy in those who do wish to play games critically.
The current situation is by no means inherent to the medium. Just as games can generate barriers to sympathy by way of performative identification, so they can break them down. Let me give you an example. Several months ago I finally got around to picking up a copy of Dragon Age: Origins. One of its most marketed features was the six completely different beginnings that were available to the gamer. These beginnings depended on the player's selection of race, class, and gender for their protagonist. Wanting to explore the experience of a race which in the world of Dragon Age was routinely discriminated against, I chose to play as a female elf living in the ghetto of a human city. The elves were basically treated as second rate citizens having only recently been liberated from enforced servitude to humans by royal edict. I therefore expected a game experience that would allow me to play the role of an unlikely hero who had to first triumph over a racist environment in order to lead Ferelden's armies to victory over the Orc-like Darkspawn. In most games of is sort, gender plays very little role in the gamer's experience except in terms of which non-player characters are available for romantic interludes. However, very early in my time with Dragon Age I realized that my character's identity as a woman would prove more formative than even her elfish-ness. While all the elves in the ghetto were oppressed economically and abused physically by the humans of the city, the women were threatened with rape. As a female elf, the son of the city's prince actually tried to force himself on "me." The prince was big, scary, smelly, and brutal. When he turned toward my character he had just finished brutalizing her (my!) best friend since childhood.
In that moment, I realized I was playing a game unlike any I had played before.
To be placed in a social position where the threat of sexual violence is real and palpable is extremely unusual for me, a middle class white male. I've really never even conceived the idea of being a rape victim, in large part because our culture (through the news, movie tropes, and Disney films) refuses to ever allow the male to be the passive victim in an important narrative. Thus, my shock and unease at being sexually threatened as an elf-woman in Dragon Age. The threat from the prince wasn't anything i hadn't heard before from a variety of encounters in movies, books, or news stories. The language wasn't particularly vulgar or brutal in a way that was in and of itself shocking. It was the fact that I, through the performative identification provided by the video game, was being threatened as a woman.
Is it unfortunate that Dragon Age perhaps too easily relied on the sexual violence trope for its narrative propulsion? Sure. Was the experience a shallow approximation of the possibility and reality of sexual of violence for millions of women all over the world? Probably so. Is Dragon Age as a whole such a collection of gaming and fantasy clichés that transformative empathy for the other gender is a bit of a tall order for it to accomplish? Absolutely. Even so, this moment in my experience with Dragon Age seems to at least point toward the power of video games as a locus of cross gendered sympathy. In the world of gaming, a world which has never really stopped building upon the boy's club model from the sixties and seventies, moments like that might be the key to making games that don't rely on rom-com, Disney princess conceptions of gender for their characterization. Moments like that might be the key to making games that refuse to simply reflect the gendered conditions of our world. We might begin to make games that extend past their own algorithmic gamespace and generate actual empathy between real individuals.
We might begin to make games that matter.
