Eccentric Flower:201001/Bayonetta

A topic which I don't generally go anywhere near is gender as it relates to computer games. This may surprise some, since in general I have rushed in where angels fear to tread on just about any other gender-related matter. This is mostly because I find that nearly all commentary on gender and gaming is eighty-seven percent bullshit. However, I'm going to make an exception today and add to the steaming pile.

This entry will contain a number of generalizations which I support only weakly. I offer them as tentative hypotheses, without warranty. (I'd say "without fear and without research," but the fact is, I've done a minor amount of research. Still, not enough to attach too much strength to any of this.)

More boys play computer games than girls.* Some game makers would like to change that, but the bulk of the game makers are (choose any or all you like) 1) cowards who don't want to endanger their boy base by changing their games so that girls will play them 2) clueless about how to actually make games girls want to play 3) are largely boys themselves and so tend to make only games they themselves would want to play.

We will put aside the issue of whether computer games rot your brain and whether it is therefore even desirable to encourage girls to play computer games if it does not facilitate the goal of Girls Taking Over the World. For every study that shows computer games encourage brain rot there is another that shows the opposite. I retire from that debate, except for the Girls Taking Over the World part, which I am foursquare in favor of.

Some computer game people have looked at the fairly decent success rate of females playing certain multiplayer online games and said, "Hey, look, we don't actually have to change anything or expend any effort, because the girls are coming to World of Warcraft without our lifting a finger." This is wishful thinking. Those games appeal to females despite their design, because of the social aspects that are built into the way they are played.

Here's your first generalization: Girls play cooperatively better than boys. This is not to say there aren't strong inter-group and inter-personal rivalries between females, nor that girls can't do well at one-on-one combat. But, as a generalization, I would say that boys team up solely as a means to an end - to defeat a common enemy; girls team up not just as a means to that same end but for additional social and community aspects as well. Girls are intrinsically better at social and support networks than boys. When boys form packs it is to hunt, and there is usually an alpha wolf.

Where game makers go astray is in thinking that this means females are uninterested in fighting games. This myth is passing, but only just, which means there's approximately a thirty-year setback in how game writers approach a female audience. They have a lot of catching up to do.

I know a lot of females who do love a good bout of virtual combat once in a while, and I know a lot of them who are good at it. (In fact, I know many who are a hell of a lot better at it than I am; my reflexes are poor.) What I will posit (second generalization) is that girls are more likely to get bored/disenchanted with a game consisting solely of combat than boys are. Boys will play a Street Fighter-like game where you incapacitate an enemy and then move on to the next round, like an endless series of boxing matches. Girls, less so. On the other hand, as a generalization, boys are likely to notice and get bored with the repetitive nature of "crafting" tasks or other ancillaries; they're less likely to enjoy spending three hours cultivating a virtual field to get one's Farming skill up.

Given that all games do have a certain amount of repetitive tasks (why, I don't know, but that's an essay for another day), ideally a game would allow someone to choose which kinds of repetitive tasks they care for - ideally there would be a track that's mostly questing/crafting with only combat as necessary; and another which is kill, kill, kill with very little farming ... this seems doable in the current state of the art, but it requires extra writing and scripting and game makers are, I think, being lazy about it.

The point is, games for girls do not have to be Barbie's Fashion Adventure all the time, yet it seems like most makers of games can't see beyond that. Or they push females off onto the casual-gaming sites to play Match Three games all day long. It's true that the Match Three and Hidden Object games and most of the other stuff of the kind Big Fish makes a stock-in-trade do have a bigger female audience than a male one (judging from its forums). But that doesn't mean you shouldn't give girls the option to have a warrior or a face-melting mage or an assassin. As a female friend of mine remarked the other day, "Mostly I like hitting things."

This same friend (who is trying out World of Warcraft for the first time) also said that she didn't try a warlock character because, and I quote, "the dress was just too skanky." And thus we come to the third generalization and the reason for the title of this entry. Gradually.

This is Bayonetta. She is the brainchild of a well-regarded Japanese game designer. She has two guns and two more fastened to her high-heeled boots that she can use to shoot and kick things at the same time. She has a cone-shaped bouffant with a long red ribbon woven through it, sexy-librarian glasses, and a skintight outfit which somehow sprouts wings when she jumps. And the question is: Is she awesome, ridiculous, sexy, sexist, or any or all of the above?

I play female characters exclusively in games if I can. I would do this even if I wasn't gender dysphoric and computer games weren't my only chance to be female. I would do it because, in general, the female models used in the game are more aesthetically pleasing than the male ones (even a lot of my female friends think the boy models just look stupid).

But - despite actually being male, and being a male who likes a fair bit of visual pulchritude - I think many of these female models used are just plain ridiculous. They bother me. And if they bother me, I know they bother some girl gamers even more. It's not that the girl gamers don't want to have ridiculously slim, perfectly proportioned bodies with generous mammaries. (Some do, some don't.) It's that these models are so obviously designed for the delectation of male players. They are built to be idealized, to be lusted after. This is a problem if you're actually playing the character and trying to be taken seriously.

Some games are worse than others. World of Warcraft is actually a major offender in that its cartoonish style allows it to get away with ridiculously proportioned female models with heroically impossible breasts. (Other online games do somewhat better. Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars both have more reasonably-shaped, if still too-perfect, females; it's their men who look like Ken dolls. And if you play a hobbit or dwarf in LOTRO you can even play a character who's not an ectomorph, for once!)

Then we have the clothing. Again, GW and LOTRO tend to make their characters pretty reasonably dressed (there are two classes in GW who tended to break that rule, but both of them were meant to be somewhat exhibitionist - the elementalist doesn't seem to like much clothing at all, and mesmers are outright flashy, like stage performers, and dress like a Mardi Gras parade). In LOTRO armor looks like armor and is reasonably bulky, and melee classes look like they're dressing for defense, not attractiveness. LOTRO also has a "costume" system so you can, if you like, change to wearing something more social when you're not out in the field. This is regarded as a "girly" feature by many male players, about which more anon.

But most of the games in the universe seem to think that if you have a female model, dressing them like a refugee from a Frederick's of Hollywood Meets Tolkien (or Sorayama, if it's an SF milieu) catalog is not only acceptable, but de rigeur. And people do get annoyed by this. Mostly girl people - and that's where the last generalization comes in. Boys, in general, will play in ridiculous clothing and not care. If they play female characters, eh, more tit, no problem, big deal ... but they're consistent about it and don't mind if their male char is clad in nothing but the classic Conan loincloth and wristbands either. It's simply not much on their radar. For female players, it often is. A female player is more likely to ask skeptically, "Now, I'm doing what in high-heeled boots and a straight skirt? Did no one notice this is not exactly combat garb?" A male player will likely be oblivious.

Now, Bayonetta is, I think, meant to be ridiculously excessive. But were I personally to play it (which I wouldn't, because I'm lousy at games requiring that kind of coordination and it isn't on a platform I own), I think it would bother me a little. What I mean is, if I want fetish porn I will go find fetish porn. I don't necessarily need it to overlap with my games, unless that's supposed to be the entire point of the game ... and I don't think it is here.

While most reviews of Bayonetta seem to be positive-with-occasional-eyerolling, I can't resist linking this one because it is so completely at right angles to my thinking, and because it's indicative. While I wouldn't play the game partly because it's all non-stop combat with only a token attempt at a story, this guy decries any story at all as getting in the way of the action. He thinks the protagonist's outfit is ridiculous, but for entirely different reasons, referring to her as "dressing like a nerd-woman recently fallen out of the Matrix" - apparently she is a nerd-woman because she has glasses? I dunno.

Most tellingly, he describes the game as the "ultimate would-be geek fan service for an 'ass-kicking grrrl,'" and he doesn't mean that in a good way. This is someone who self-describes as a Thug, you understand. The problem is, this guy is the base. They don't write reviews very often, because they hate putting that many words in a row, but they're all over the forums, grunting and snorting and pissing in other people's soup. If you ever managed to get a completely candid response out of him, he'd probably say he doesn't want girls anywhere near his games (after all, he might get cooties, and he doesn't think girls can play worth a damn anyway). The irony is that this game, which does seem to be trying for fanservice pretty hard, might well be just as offensive to the female players as it is to him, for entirely different reasons. Fail on all counts!

And as long as game designers feel they have to respect his wishes and his purchasing power, any real approaches to an ass-kicking girl character who isn't also offensively wrong in some way to the female players will be much hampered, just the way they are now. Ass-kicking females, yes. More Lara Crofts, no. But I'm not sure what would need to happen to change this.

Finally, since you probably need some comic relief after all that, here's Aaron Williams' take on the matter.

* I am using "boys" and "girls" throughout because it fits my tone better and amuses me, but do not assume that by not saying "men" and "women" I'm just talking about adolescents. The "boys" and "girls" ages 20 to 40 who play computer games are a much larger segment of the market than you might think.