Good, efficient movement is about being as much a part of an environment as possible. No matter if you’re looking for a scientific definition, a more humane approach, or a more down-to-earth explanation, when looking at the evidence you’ll always end up at the notion that movement is founded on a deep relationship to one’s environment. Similarly, in the recently-released Overwatch, we have Tracer, who can practically teleport around the battlefield, giving her unpredictability and high-speed maneuverability. The only playable female character in this game, Lilith, is able to “phasewalk.” She moves through another dimension, invisible, impervious to bullets, and faster than everyone else. Another action game-and a popular one-where you can see this is Borderlands (2009), a game that is to action games what The Expendables (2010) is to action movies: purposely over-the-top and genuinely lighthearted. The notion that women can move in ways that are unavailable to men is quite common, especially in videogames, in which they are often supplied as an alternate character to the muscular male hero. And that difference is significant, with the title of these songs communicating ideas of how we perceive femininity. All three games are about striving to survive and succeeding at it against all odds-this is reinforced by the fact that the ending songs in Portal and Mirror’s Edge both have the same title, “Still alive.” It’s not the usual brawny triumph sung out at the end of most games, once everything has been conquered. Instead, we have these women using creativity, agility, and an ability to see the paths and doors where, for everyone else, there are walls and barriers. It’s a significant deviation from most first-person action games, which typically follow male characters who overcome their surroundings by force. The only uncontrollable force in these otherwise totally-ordered worlds is the main character, and the only weapon that this character has is her ability to move in unpredictable ways. All three take place in mostly white, sterile-like environments, fully controlled and fully observed by the antagonists-vicious AI in case of the Portal games and equally vicious authorities in Mirror’s Edge. The similarities between these games are striking. In Portal, you sometimes see Chell if you place portals in a specific way, but Faith from Mirror’s Edge (I’m talking about the first game, not the recently-released Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst ) is shown only in cartoon-like cutscenes and once in the final scene of the game.Īs if women in games will only find power in their physical absence All three games ended up having female, non-white protagonists, who are almost never shown on screen. Perhaps the most known cases of this are Portal (2007), Portal 2 (2011), and Mirror’s Edge (2008). There are, however, titles that try to avoid that, and whether through coincidence or not, they happen to star women. Most often, these games are about men shooting people with a variety of guns. Think of first-person games, which show the world from their protagonist’s eyes. However, this can be avoided by not showing women on screen at all. This happens especially when their bodies are visible, when they can be made to pose for the viewer, sometimes in a manner so absurd it would break their back. It’s well-known that most female characters in videogames are strongly sexualized. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s plausible, and the fact that it is tells us something about female characters in videogames, and how we think about women in general. When he saw the effect he decided that it was great and that’s how the heroine should look-and thus the legend was born. When I was a young girl, I read an anecdote about Lara Croft-it said that her iconic look was created when her designer wanted to enlarge her breasts by 50 percent but accidentally entered 150 percent in the window.
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