The following essay was written by Mark Starmach 2010 as part of an undergraduate degree with the School of English, Media and the Performing Arts with the University of New South Wales.
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Gender play: Reading gazes and games
Reading sexuality in video games is not as easy as we may think. As a largely male orientated industry, the female form as it is commonly depicted in games, creates complex and discursive gaps between the representations of contemporary femininity and its reality. From Lara Croft to Duke Nukem, Princess Peach to Mona Sax, the heroines, matriarchs and actresses of video games are engendered with seemingly repressive, eroticising and objectifying stereotypes of female sexuality. When located in the broader history of visual representation, and more specifically the visual artistic representation of the female form, it is hard to quantify whether video games are any more or less empowering than portrayals and depictions of femininity in art prior. In essence, women have historically always been the canvas for male gaze and desire, for it is men who draw, paint, sculpt, photograph, film, animate, design and write about women. Men control and construct the representations of women which permeate Western culture and society, and therefore render the female form and mind as constituents of male subjectivity (Berger 1972).
However, whilst an important part of the picture, it’s not wholly a matter of bust size, waistline and muscularity, and if we only limit our discussion to these surface features of representation, then we miss out on something just as, if not more, overarching and important. It is less about what we see, and more a matter of how we see it. This essay will attempt to discern whether, in appropriating these representations of women in art into the flesh of video games, the mythologies surrounding the perceptions of femininity today are either enhanced or weakened, by focusing on how games deconstruct spectatorship and subjectivity, narrative and sexuality. It is not so much what we ogle at, but how we interact with these busty and muscular archetypes of sexuality which games present us with and embody us within which is important.
What distinguishes depictions of women in video games from all previous depictions of women in art is the manner in which games augment and subvert traditional artistic understandings of subjectivity and spectatorship. On a fundamental level, games change the way we see and consume images. Instead, where previous art forms have relatively clear and passive separations between the artwork, the performer and the audience, like most new media, games blur these boundaries. The spectator takes on the role of the performer, and so a complex interaction between the player as simultaneously subject and object unfolds. This abstract semiotic algorithm of interaction is complicated even more when we consider female spectatorship – the ways women see and are seen by the world. Art critic, John Berger puts it concisely in his documentary Ways of Seeing, “It is men who dream of women, women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at” (1972).
Over the years, film theorists have developed a similarly refined and neatly packaged way of theorising female spectatorship, accounting for the way women watch cinema as it differs from men. From lingering shots on the voluptuous curves of the silhouetted female form to the soft focused face of Marilyn Monroe, the history and tradition of cinema has always cast women in more symbolic, passive and representative roles, instead of the active, instigative and aggressive roles of men. Akin to Eisenstein’s montage of attractions, in which the semiotic conflict created between juxtaposing images endows these images with symbolic and abstract meanings, Guy Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ expresses a deep concern for the extent to which contemporary society is bogged in the realm of the representative. For Debord, the montage of mass produced and distributed images in popular culture – albeit through film, print, television, photography or art (and in today’s case, the Internet and video games) – can be “detached from every aspect of life [and] fused in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be re-established” (1967: ch 1, pt 2). Barthes develops this further by proposing that the audiovisual image, an image coupled with text and music, creates a ‘narrative image’ which shapes and structures the meaning we pull out of it in ever increasingly persuasive manners (1977). The narrative image has in and of itself, an internal “denoted meaning”, it is not subjective or polysemic but instead iconic and symbolic (1977: 45). For Debord, the deluge of audiovisual images we are flooded with in this modern world, abstracts reality and representation in such a drastic way that we no longer accommodate reality, but rather live through these images, through mere assemblages, montages, narratives and representations. We live through ‘spectacle’. Under the spell of the spectacle, Debord argues that we, the masses, are brought into a singular sense of consciousness, and so the spectacle works as an “instrument of unification” (1967: ch 1, pt 3). Whilst Debord theorised this on the level of economies and nations, the cinema can be understood as a microcosm of this system, where the audience is brought together into the same symbolic space through the gaze of the screen, and so share a collective perceptive experience.
The concern for feminist film theory however is based around the development of this gaze as a fundamentally male gaze, which places the audience in the eyes of the (typically) heterosexual man who made the film. Coupled with the representative role of the image, this male predisposition undermines the actresses depicted on screen. Men make meaning, whereas women have meaning placed onto them. Women do not control their narrative, they are stripped of human agency. For Mulvey, this is carried from the domain of the diagesis, the world of the screen, into the very flesh of the theatre space and audience itself. In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey sees the male gaze as an asymmetry of sexual power, which “reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle” (1973: 14). This is because, as she reveals, cinema deploys an array of sensual pleasures. Drawing on Freud, Mulvey reasons that one of these primordial pleasures is in scopophilia (the pleasure of looking), by viewing the theatre as a voyeuristic space. As a voyeur peeks through a keyhole into a private world, he derives a joy from it because what happens inside it is out of his control. In the same way, cinema portrays “a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on voyeuristic fantasy” (1973: 17). Mulvey notes that this feeling is strengthened by the way that the auditorium is placed in darkness, whereas the screen is bright with the film projected onto it, promoting the “illusion of voyeuristic separation” (17), as though the audience is looking through a stranger’s window from a street at night. But the pleasure derived from the voyeur is only in his ability to imagine as though he is in the world he secretly views. Therefore, Mulvey moves to the next pleasure of cinema. Scopophilia is compounded with an anthropomorphic “fascination with the human form”, where all objects in a film become personified and symbolic, allowing the audience to identify with anything and anyone portrayed on the screen (17). What results is a synthesis between sexual desire and egotism, the formation of erotic and sexual identities (18) which are played out in both the diagetic space and the spectator’s mind. This structures a world stratified by sexual imbalance, one in which “the male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is stylised accordingly” (19), bleeding together narrative and spectacle. She is the signifier “for the male other … bound to a symbolic order which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions” (15) constructing a perception of female sexuality which is overtly sexualised.
With this reading of female spectatorship in film it can be concluded that men, when watching cinema, watch others. Women watch themselves as men see them, and cinema acts as a social mirror. But games are not cinema, and the logic and laws of female spectatorship for film cannot be carried over to video games in the same way, and so the way women see games, and how games and gameworlds see them, becomes an interesting question. That been said, some conclusions of this discussion of subjectivity, spectatorship, narrative and sexuality can be applied to video games.
Firstly, it can be argued that a male gaze is constructed in video games. When we play, we see. But we see as a man would. For a start, it is widely assumed that most game developers are men. The International Game Developers Association’s special interest group, Women In Games (SIGWIG), state their mission, to “develop methods to support, promote and encourage women currently employed in the industry” (archives.igda.org), which is a sentiment reflected by similar groups and organisations worldwide. The widespread existence and consensus of these various groups profess a concern for the current inequities and gender imbalances within the games industry. In Canada at least, this is beginning to change. Women In Games Vancouver (WIGeh) has mapped out the increased inclusion and advancement of women in the industry over a ten year period, culminating in the 2009 promotion of Jade Raymond as President of Ubisoft Toronto Inc (womeningamesvancouver.com/about). However, it should be understood that broadly, women are still underrepresented in game design and development. As a result, games depict women from a male worldview, and present somewhat distorted mythologies of contemporary femininity. Tracy Dietz noted in her 1998 study of female characters in top-selling Sega and Nintendo video games that 28% of these games “portrayed women as sex objects”, and only 15% as “heroic characters”, who of which were “sexualised or trivialised” (paraphrased from Dill et al 2005: 116). Similarly, Hardy 2009 addresses these distorted and sexualised representations of women in pornography, as ones made for and watched by men. What Hardy notes however, is the emergence of an “authentically female voice to speak those very ‘truths’ about female sexuality that pornography had always claimed to express” (2009: 7) through the involved participation of females in “the production and consumption of sexually explicit material” (6). Notwithstanding, when we play games, we view and interact with a world made and played by men. In this respect, without the female agent involved in the production process, games are subject to the same male gaze of cinema. Regardless of their biology, the player becomes a man.
Secondly, it can be said that video games have emerged amongst the most able conduits of spectacle. In finding parallels between cinema and gaming, the audience in both cases is immersed in a representative and narrative, metaphoric and symbolic world of assembled images, sounds and texts. Much like the diagetic space of a film, the gameworld is one more iconic than realistic, and therefore able to bring the audience into the same imagined and perceptive space of experience. But where cinema does this with large numbers of people, games do this on a much smaller and sensually involving scale. The individual, not the collective, is unified with the representative world of the game.
This though is where video games depart from understandings of spectatorship and spectacle. In shrinking down the model of cinema spectatorship to a one-on-one level, Debord’s central thesis is at its most concentrated, “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (1967: th 1), as the spectacle has usurped genuine human interaction. Nowhere else can this be most immediately and tangibly seen than in video games, where the player literally lives human experience and interaction through an immersive bombardment of narrative images. The game is a spectacle which transports the player to a semiotic middle ground wedged between the symbolic and the real, and whilst in this state, they are more susceptible and suggestive to certain messages. It is tempting to reason that as long as the player can discern between the real world and the gameworld, they cannot be affected by the representations of femininity housed within them. However, for Dill et al “this conclusion ignores the way human beings, as social creatures, learn lessons from depictions of human social interactions, even if these interactions are not portrayed as real” (2005: 126). This in itself should give credence for the concerns of the depiction of women in video games, and Dietz reinforces this by stating that “even if the child accepts the notion that video games are not real, he or she may still not challenge the ideas and characterisations presented in them” (126). Games teeter on a potentially dangerous edge between the symbolic and the real.
This is partly due to the way in which games can command and structure the senses on a level not seen before. As Barthes noted, the marrying of the image with sound and text removes subjectivity in interpreting that image. We are forced to ‘look’ at that audiovisual image in a very specific way. Games however add another perceptive layer to the audiovisual image which further acts as a channel to funnel meaning through. When we play, we see. But by the same token, when we play, we touch. We feel. Games are texts designed for sight, sound and touch. They are beyond images and are instead turned into interfaces. The player is fused with the gameworld, because as they touch it physically, they are made intimately aware of their own body, and engage with it in a discourse of haptics and feedback.
In When Species Meet, Haraway theorises the relationship between sight and touch, image and interaction, as a key proponent for embodiment. For Haraway, this opens up a series of feedbacks, demands and inputs between humans and technologies. To embody a character in a gameworld, we must to some extent, leave and sacrifice our own bodies, our own identity, and assume that of the character in game. But this is not easy to do, we need some greater incentive to leave, we need space for humans built and forged into the architecture of the gameworld. Characters, in whatever form they may be, facilitate this space. Without us they are inanimate, abstract, unembodied and lifeless. At the same time, when we play as these characters, we become unembodied and lifeless. We sit for hours on end in front of the game, lose awareness of time, space, hunger and bladder control. It is as though we have left our own bodies for those in the game. While in a state of embodiment we need a concession, and both bodies must make this for embodiment to occur in the first place. The player’s body in the lounge room (or wherever they may be), and the player’s body in the game, are directly mediated by the technology which weds them, the controller. We press it, it vibrates. We move it, swing it, and it feeds back to us through the character, the representative consequences of our physical actions. This is the bridgehead where we are able to engage on a level of kinaesthetics, with the character in the gameworld, and where he or she or it is able to interact with us. Designer Erik Adigard makes a similar observation on his writings of hand pictograms on mechanical devices to encourage human input. Adigard sees these simple illustrations as a testament to centuries of the human hand in completing manual tasks which have been replaced by machines. But the role of the pictogram implicates space for humans in the machine, and opens up a conversation between man and technology. When we touch the machine, we connect with it, “we still need to grasp and hold objects in order to make contact with the physical world, so we intently hold our computer mouse to touch information, we obsessively hold our cell phone to talk and now we choose our iPod as dancing companion” (Adigard in Levy: 2007). In the same way, it is through the controller which embodiment can occur. For Haraway, this is because it is “action in the contact zones” which acts as an anchor between the two worlds the player is simultaneously occupying (2008: 263).
But for the sake of this discussion, it should be considered that whether while in this state of suspended embodiment, a player is subject to a male gaze. Returning to Mulvey’s analysis of visual pleasure in cinema, almost paradoxically, this added sensual apparatus of touch does not make the player more voyeuristic than the cinema goer. Unlike the cinema goer, the private world of the narrative addresses its audience directly. The voyeur assumes control of the world they are viewing, and in essence, this breaks down the illusion of voyeuristic separation which cinema inadvertently constructs. In doing so, this deconstructs any sexual identities the images may have implicitly placed unto them. Although the gameworld has its own internal and denoted meanings, woven into them through male game developers, the world is subject to the gaze of the player. The male gaze is at least partially counteracted and deconstructed. Barbara Creed reaches a similar conclusion inMedia Matrix, that the contemporary individual is “conscious of both its immediate local world or community and of the other ‘worlds’ and peoples which make up our planet. Born not into the familiar uterine waters of the human womb, the global self navigates through the boundary-less, unmapped domain of cyberspace” (2003: 203). For Creed, the open-endedness of cyberspace deconstructs the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the female spectacle (Mulvey 1973: 19). Games, like most new media, leave affordances for the audience. If the player is a man, they will read the world with a male gaze. But in the same way, if the player is a woman, they will read the world with a female gaze. They are postmodern in the sense that they are designed to have no dominant reading, they have space left within them for the global individual to embody and accommodate.
Embodiment through the controller combined with the audiovisual haptic interface, empowers and enables women to be involved in the meaning-making process of the game, because they become intimate parts of its meaning. Where cinema positions women as the “bearers of meaning” (Mulvey 1973: 15), through video games and interaction with the male gaze they become the active makers of meaning. What this discussion emphasises and indicates is that there is an important need to remodel and reshape our understandings of both female spectatorship and the way new sexualities are constructed by new media, for we increasingly inhabit a world where the distinctions between subject and object, active and passive, male and female, are blurred and disembodied, made sexless and unengendered.
References:
Adigard, E (2007), “Metropolis, Hand and Interface” in The Hand Book, Levy J-B (ed), Italy: Lars Muller Publishers [retrieved 29/11/10, from http://madxs.com/metropolishands]
Barthes, R. (1977) “Rhetoric of the Image” in Image, Music, Text. London: Flamingo, pp 32-51.
Berger, J. (1972) “Ways of seeing”, London: Penguin, BBC.
Creed, B. (2003) “Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality”, Crows Nest NSW: Allen & Unwin.
Debord, G. (1967) “Society of the Spectacle”, library.nothingness.org [retrieved 29/11/10, from http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4]
Dill, K.E., Gentile, D.A., Richter, W.A., & Dill, J.C. (2005) “Violence, sex, race and age in popular video games: A content analysis”, in The Influence of Videogames on Youth 7. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Hardy, S. (2009), “The New Pornographies: Representation or Reality?” in Mainstreaming Sex: The sexualisation of western culture, Attwood F. (eds), London ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3-18.
Haraway, D (2008), “Crittercam: Compunding Eyes in Naturecultures” in When Species Meet, Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, pp 249-263.
Mulvey, L. (1973) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Visual and Other Pleasures. Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989.
