I really enjoyed Joe Queenan's piece in G2 today in which the exasperated film critic attacks Hollywood's new culture of insidiously misogynistic comedies. He tracks the trend back to Something About Mary (which, I have to admit, made me laugh til I cried in places), a daft movie in which Cameron Diaz somehow conspires to fall in love with Ben Stiller's stalking, manipulative loser. The most recent example is Judd Apatow's Knocked up in which every supporting female cast member is depicted as a joyless, dead-eyed bitch - you know, to contrast with the lovable knockabout male heroes.
It made me think about the depiction of women in current videogames. How does it compare? The mainstream games industry usually takes its cue from movie trends, but here the two media have diverged. Games had their dark period ten years ago when the success of Lara Croft gave rise to a sudden plethora of female leads with breasts like beachballs and waists so tiny a baby could wrap its fingers round them. Apart from Tecmo's bizarre enclave of libidinous Dead or Alive games, that time seems to have passed. At least as far as mainstream retail releases are concerned.
If anything women are conspicuous by their absence. The big shooters like GRAW, Gears of War, COD, Halo and Medal of Honor have little room for them, pushing females into non-playable support roles. Story-sequence fodder. Bioshock makes an intriguing use of girls as part of a moral decision each player must make. Like the Final Girl in slasher flicks, gender is employed to trap the viewer into an emotive, protecting position. Perhaps this is why the female lead character of Heavenly Sword is dying. Games developers, in the vacuum caused by Lara-mania, are no longer confident or comfortable creating straightforward female leads.
Okay so Resident Evil has produced some excellent female characters, but Resi 4 was a mostly male experience and it looks like Resi 5 will be too. Elsewhere, the gender of Metroid Prime's Samus Aran is largely irrelevant. The big RPGs are perhaps the only titles consistently finding full-bodied interactive roles for female characters.
Games use gender differently to films. Films are largely about relationships, games are largely about action. In films, women are often defined negatively in contrast to, and through their relationships with, the affable male characters, but these dynamics don't exist in most games.
I just wonder which is better - objectification or ostracism?
