Men Creating Women

Over the past few years, surveys conducted by IGDA have revealed a rising number of female game developers. Since 2009, the number of female developers has doubled, but women still only represent approximately 22% of game designers, woefully low numbers compared to data that indicates women make up half the players, and despite a rising number of female characters, games are still, by and large, dominated by men. Just look at any list of best characters in games, for instance; you’ll find lists of the most badass women, or favorite female characters, but look for similar lists dedicated to only men, and instead you’ll find only best characters, best heroes, best villains. Men remain the default, women are extras, and there aren’t many lists of queer or trans characters, because, well, there just aren’t always enough to populate a list.

But this is old stuff; if you’re here, you know it. If you play games at all, you know it. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking a step beyond, not only about those women who populate the best female character lists, but also about who made those characters. Most of gaming’s best female characters have been designed not by women, but by men. Teams of men, in fact, from lead designers to artists to writers and on and on. Men are responsible for some of the strongest women in gaming. We know that, too. The question is: does it make a difference? And if so, what kind of difference?

More obvious information: video games are fast becoming a major pillar of entertainment, and thanks to the popularity of streamers and game-based entertainment, games are become foundations of culture in all new ways. Instead of cartoons, kids are tuning in to see Stampy Cat or DanTDM, and as they grow, other streamers, playing more than just Minecraft and similar games. The cultural impact, then, of game worlds and game characters, cannot be ignored. But what might it mean when most of those games — and more specifically, most of the women in those games — are made by men?

I want to skip the obvious here; I’m not talking about Quiet, the women in fighting games, or gratuitous examples like Dragon’s Crown or DoA: Extreme Beach Volleyball. I’m not even thinking specifically about the women in the Resident Evil franchise, many of whom are quite improperly dressed for apocalyptic conditions. Instead, what about the women who aren’t overtly sexualized? Further, the women, like Jade in Beyond Good and Evil, who were supposed to have been all about subverting the norm in games? Any number of strong, pseudo-realistic, or otherwise interesting female character in games were designed primarily, even solely, by men. What does that mean for the characters? What does that mean for us, the players?
I’ve been thinking a lot about these kinds female characters. The young women, like Clementine in The Walking Dead, and Ellie in The Last of Us. Jade, as above, and Jodie, in Beyond: Two Souls. Classics like Samus. The Scythian, from Sword & Sorcery, plucked out as a good example by Anita Sarkeesian. Anya Stroud in Gears of War. The main character in Her Story. Alyx Vance from Half-Life. Max and Chloe in Life Is Strange (and, for that matter, Nilin in Remember Me). The women of State of Decay. Samus, and other Japanese characters, are different, though, because not only are we looking at women created by men, but when we consider female characters like Lightning, Yuna, Samus, Quiet, and Bayonetta, we’re also considering cultural and regional differences and more, not just the gender of the creators (something also to consider when we think about French versus American or Canadian developers, as I’ll get into below). But with the others, as a member of the presumed audience (there’s something to enjoy in all those games), I’m free, I think, to take the characters as presented, to consider what it might mean to have largely male design teams behind the creation of these characters.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not trying to diminish the other factors that go into creation, like audience targeting, marketing concerns, story, world creation, etc. But I do think we need to take a moment to consider the women created by men, and how many of them are either our staple heroines of gaming, like Jade, like Samus. Others, like the women of Life Is Strange, like Hannah in Her Story, are seen as examples of women-centric storytelling… and they are stories told by men.

There’s nothing wrong with men writing stories about women; there’s a long literary and cinematic tradition of wonderful female characters created by men. But while we can (and should) compare games to other forms of storytelling in many ways, we must also recognize the ways in which those forms are very different. Characters in games are visually rendered, unlike in novels, and are embodied and experienced differently than in film, particularly when considering playable game characters. Thus, there are some different standards when considering games, but also, much of what I’m going to say here may be a consideration for these other forms as well.

A number of studies have demonstrated that men see women differently than they do men (and vice versa), and men also have particular mental images of ideal women. This is where regional differences really come in; perceptions of the ideal female form differ the world over. Since media creators aren’t usually in the business of creating ugly, or even average characters, particularly when it comes to women, these factors should be evaluated against constructed fictional female bodies. Perhaps more telling, though, are the studies that reveal the ease with which the brain, particularly the socialized male brain, can reduce women to objects. Images of women’s bodies – as with, say, a video game, that frequently focuses on women’s bodies even when not setting out to overtly sexualize them (see: Remember Me) – “evokes less activity in areas of the brain responsible for mental state attribution—that is, the area of the brain that becomes active when we think we are looking at an entity capable of thought and planned action” (Mina Cikara’s work, referenced here). That is, we are trained to separate a woman’s body from her humanity, or at least not to see her humanity when considering her body. Building on that research, others have suggested that it isn’t necessarily that we reduce women to objects upon sight of bodies, but instead that we might stop thinking of them as rational, thinking beings and instead as beings capable of only feeling. Images of bodies, that is, can change the way we perceive women.

This is particularly important in that notion of the constructed body, because not only does the body, once constructed, evoke a particular response, but those tendencies may already be part of the mind that is performing the construction. It’s a loop; here is a body divorced from personality — a concept created by a designer, brought to life in stages by artists, writers, actors, more — and put onto a screen to evoke certain feelings, and then once those bodies are in the world, we can observe player and observer comments about the bodies of the female characters in ways that are rarely replicated for male characters. For example, prior to and right after the release of Dragon’s Crown, discussions about which of the female characters might be both more effective and which were more attractive, with frank chat about breasts and bodies, were common (example 1, 2, 3, 4), whereas discussions of the male characters tended to stick to abilities more than looks. Is this due to a primarily male audience for the game, or due to the kinds of responses detailed in the studies above? Certainly that isn’t unique to games, either; conversations about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton also often turn to her hair, her clothes, as conversations about male politicians do not, and that’s in keeping with the first study. Men see women differently. In much of the world, they are socialized to do so.

This often comes out in games scholarship and criticism in regard to hypersexualized characters, or characters that fit easily into tropes. We give the other characters a pass. But is the blank slate of the Scythian really a positive representation? We think of Her Story as a woman-centered narrative, but much of the dramatic tension of the story told is/was driven by interactions with men. What’s more is that the character actions are driven so frequently by emotion. Are we supposed to read part of that game’s presentation of character as cold and calculating — particularly at the “end” — or do we see instead women driven to extremes of emotional action?

I want to say again that I like these games. Her Story, in fact, is one of my favorites from the past couple of years. Alyx Vance makes other AI companions look terrible. Beyond: Two Souls is criminally underrated in my opinion, and I love Jodie’s development. Life Is Strange includes some stunning twists and makes great use of choice-based narrative possibilities. But a small part of me still wonders what we would see if there were more women involved in creation at all levels. How these women would have been shaped. Would they, and their stories, have been the same?

The games here with female leads, too, are often simpler in execution. Combat may be simplified, or completely absent, or hinge mainly on hiding and avoidance, but not in the same vein as found in stealth action games. Moments that rely on more active gameplay — I’m thinking here about some specific moments in Life Is Strange, and in Beyond — may just not be as responsive as in other games. I mention this because these are also criticisms often leveled at “girl” games (licensed games, games based on domestic tasks, etc.), which often suffer from a distinct lack of polish. Too, games led by female characters don’t often bring in the highest review scores. Bayonetta and its sequel are exceptions. Portal 2 as well. But on the Xbox One and PS4, you won’t find games led specifically by female protagonists until 85-86%. And as much as I love Portal, and the dynamic between Chell and GLaDOS, the former is something of a blank slate and the latter is not human. Bayonetta is her own rabbit hole; is she empowered, or sexualized? Can a constructed figure of a woman, designed to be highly sexual, be empowered?

In the end, there are a number of factors at play here. So it always is with games; we must consider player experience, mechanics, visuals, code, teams, audience, etc., all factors converging to create an experience that, in the end, may not be the same from player to player. But as games gain even more cultural cachet, I think we must be cognizant not only of what is being created, but by whom, and when, and where, and how, and consider how those things intersect to create what we see an embody onscreen.