Feminist Frequency

Excerpt of Full Interview Q&A with IGN

A few months ago I was interviewed by Paul Dean for an article at IGN entitled “Tropes vs Women in Video Games: Why it Matters”.

Most of our conversation didn’t make it into the final article. The interview touched on a wide array of topics, including my experiences with games growing up, heroic women of the 1800s, and how I’ve responded to the organized harassment campaigns against me, among other things. Below is one of my ten answers and we’ve published the full Q&A on the Feminist Frequency website.

PD: Can I ask what you’ve been playing recently and what your responses to the depiction of women in these games has been? I noticed you recently tweeted about the female characters in Dishonored, which you felt disappointed by.

AS: I’ve been playing a ridiculous number of games over the past several months looking for either examples or counterexamples for each of the tropes in my series. I’ve also been revisiting a good amount of games I haven’t played since my childhood, which has been a little bittersweet to be honest. Mostly because along with all the fun nostalgia there’s also a number of seriously problematic gender representations, many of which I didn’t really notice back when I was a kid. So I’m playing (or replaying) everything from Zelda and Metroid to Secret of Monkey Island and Braid to the God of War and Bioshock series.

As you mentioned I recently played and enjoyed Arkane Studios’ Dishonored (especially the stealth options and the mystical listening heart!). The female characters in the game however were disappointing to put it mildly and I think they represent a failure of imagination. It’s a much longer conversation then we probably have time for here but let’s briefly examine the women in the game. First we have The Empress who might have been cool, except she is fridged within the first five minutes ending up in a pool of blood to provide a revenge motivation for the male hero (it’s also telling that there are zero other women in any positions of power or authority anywhere else in all of Dunwall). Next we have Emily who fulfills the damsel in distress role (twice). The rest of the female cast end up either in stereotyped roles or as set decoration (or both). We have cowering maids, suicidal prostitutes, the kindly caregiver, the evil mistress, the evil madam and the evil witch. It’s pretty standard stuff in game narratives unfortunately. Again, I say this as a fan of the game who’s hoping for a sequel.

The predictable defensive response to this observation I hear most often, from fellow gamers, is what I like to call the “historical accuracy” fallacy. I just have to facepalm at that kind of reaction for a number of reasons. First the game is not a historical document, it’s a fantastical alternative reality with steampunk style technology and supernatural powers derived from whale bones. Developers are perfectly willing to bend, twist or entirely throw out the laws of physics and no one bats an eye, but somehow it’s impossible to imagine even an alternative reality in which most women aren’t horribly oppressed, stereotyped or merely decorative. I’m certainly not saying all female characters need to be heroes but the “historically accurate” mantra is really just a flimsy excuse used to justify the continued exclusion of strong women from central or starring roles.

Second, even if a game was trying to be as historically accurate as possible, there were countless incredible women doing all kinds of extraordinary things in the 1800s to draw inspiration from. Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852) is widely regarded as the first to conceive of computer programing. Sarah Emma Edmonds (1841 – 1898) disguised herself as a man and fought in the American Civil War. Harriet Tubman (1820 – 1913) was a union spy running rescue missions into confederate territory and was the first woman in American history to lead a military expedition. Annie Londonderry (1870–1947) was an international sports star for bicycling around the world. Ching Shih (1775–1844) was a pirate commanding a fleet of 1,500 ships that controlled the waters of the South China Sea. Mary Somerville (1780 – 1872) was one of many female mathematicians writing about math and astronomy in a time when women were formally barred from science fields. This is just a small handful of examples off the top of my head but there are countless extraordinary women from every era in history. Unfortunately, there is an enormous amount of ignorance out there about women’s historical contributions because their heroism (or sometime villainy) has been systematically downplayed, dismissed or written out of the history books altogether. So the truth is that inspirational women are, in fact, very “historically accurate” and as such there is just no excuse for the failure to include heroic female characters in modern games, regardless of the time-period or setting.

Check out all 10 questions on Feminist Frequency.

SIDENOTE: After I did this interview I started playing The Knife of Dunwall and so far there are a few more women in a wider variety of roles. Though the DLC does start with the murder of the Empress from first-person perspective which is unsettling to say the least.