The Last Night in a Mini-Skirt: A Zombie-filled Adventure!

I thought it might be interesting to take a stab at analyzing a non-digital game for once. Look, guys! Actual tangible media to play with! Isn’t this cool? I’m taking a look at a board game called The Last Night on Earth, a game in which you need to eradicate a small town of its zombie population before time runs out.

I’m going to skip over the mechanics of the game because it’s honestly a bit complicated, and I wanted to focus on the character design rather than the gameplay. For the sake of explaining some of the character abilities, players use dice to move their characters around the board and to determine the outcome of a fight between the characters and the zombies. There are also weapons and perks that can be picked up during the course of the game.

There are eight characters to choose from: two male and two female teenagers (the high-school quarterback Johnny, the Sheriff’s whiny trouble-seeking son Billy, the high-school sweetheart Sally, and the farmer’s daughter Jenny), and one female and three male adults (sexy Nurse Becky, Jake the Drifter, Sheriff Anderson, and the local priest Father Joseph). The distinction between teenager and adult is only really relevant in terms of how many hits it takes before the character will die; teenagers take two hits, while adults take three. Players draw their character at random, which is handy in a way; they don’t get to choose whether they’re playing the booty-shorts-clad farmer’s daughter or the scruffy-looking drifter. Choosing characters based on appearances in this game wouldn’t really do you any favours in the long run.

Both genders have a Youth perk, just for the teenagers: they can sacrifice moving for a turn in order to fully heal themselves.

The male characters have the following traits:
Tough: wins fight on a tie (Johnny)
Blitz!: fights a zombie immediately after moving onto a space, and keeps moving (Johnny)
Track Star: May add +1 to his Movement Dice roll. (Billy)
Sheriff: Starts the game with a Revolver. (Sheriff Anderson)
Man of Action: Instead of searching, may take a Revolver from Discard pile. (Sheriff Anderson)
Resourceful: When drawing a Hero Card, may take two cards and choose which one to keep (discard the other) (Jake the Drifter)
Holy Man: May not use Guns and may not be the target of This Could Be Our Last Night on Earth (Father Joseph)
Strength of Spirit: May take a wound to cancel any Zombie Card on the roll of 3+. (Father Joseph)

(Note: The “last night on earth” card requires a male and a female character to be on the same space. They don’t move or fight any zombies ... they just ... I don’t know, bang? No sexy-times for the good Father, and no same-sex sexy-times for anybody.)

The female characters, on the other hand:
First Aid: At the end of the Hero Turn, may Heal one wound from another Hero in the same space. (Nurse Becky)
Handy: May add or subtract one to any roll when testing to see if a Hand Weapon breaks. (Jenny)
Farm Girl: While in the Cornfield or Barn, may roll an extra Fight Dice. (Jenny) (Having a hard time not thinking that this was viewed by the creators as a ‘roll in the hay’ play.)
Lightweight: May not use Guns except the Revolver. (Sally)
Lucky: Once per fight, may force a zombie to re-roll any number of its Fight Dice against her (Sally)

So let’s see: male characters can potentially move faster, have more health, win more fights, have better access to weapons, have the options for which bonus cards they get, and can ‘play the hero’ and take a hit to cancel out the move of a zombie ... and female characters can possibly heal someone else, maybe fix a weapon, pitch a zombie into a haystack, have limited access to the available guns, and gamble at doing better in a fight.

There are also NPCs in this game, including a shop teacher, a mechanic, the school principal, a deputy, and a county doctor. All of them are male, except for — get this — the farm dog named Old Betsy, who is left on the board somewhere to slow down a zombie. Isn’t that nice.

Cosplays of Jenny and the county doctor from the 2007 gaming convention in IndianapolisA few of the cards are decidedly feminist-unfriendly. One depicts quarterback Johnny shielding farm-girl Jenny from some unseen harm; in another, he is holding a flare and looking very much in charge while she follows him, appearing to be at least a head shorter than he is; in yet another, called ‘Unnecessary Self-Sacrifice’ (excuse me while I gag), he is fighting off two zombies while she yet again stands in the background, not getting involved. I don’t know about you, but of the three women in the game, I would think that she would need to be protected the least. Her player token wields a chainsaw and farm girls are stereotypically rough and tough and capable of holding their own. Couldn't they at least keep that part of the trope?

To make up for that lack of character strength, though, there is a card with sweetheart Sally kicking the crap out of a couple of zombies and not looking the least bit frightened, and two cards with Jenny similarly kicking ass and taking names. (Begs the question why she needed Johnny Biceps to look out for her in the first place.) The rest of the cards depicting female characters, though, have the character looking defenseless and afraid, while the cards with male characters have them all looking like confident action heroes. Poor Nurse Becky doesn’t get to look tough at all.

For another dose of masculinity, there is a card called ‘Just a Scratch’ with a male character looking down nonchalantly at deep gouges in his arm. To counter it,  however, there is the ‘Overconfident’ card, depicting Johnny with his fists up, surrounded by shambling zombies.

As a final note, the players’ pieces are made to visually represent each character. Know what I noticed once I started trying to identify who was who? The quickest way to sort the men from the women was to look at their legs. The women’s legs are all bare, as well as Becky’s and Jenny’s arms (and Jenny’s stomach; I think she must be a Calgary cowgirl, in that she really isn't one at all), and all of the men are completely covered in clothing. I think we have the male gaze to thank for that. It’s cool, ladies don’t need our limbs. Let’s leave ‘em all nice and exposed for zombies to chew on. Now that I think of it, the zombie markers all appear to be male. Maybe it’s all right to leave our lady-flesh our for them to snack on after all — doesn’t look like we’re in any danger of joining the shufflers!

All in all, as fun as the game is, if you pay attention to the character design, it’s a bit insulting. There’s a smaller margin of playable success for female characters and that’s never enjoyable, at least not for me. I want to go toe-to-toe with the guys. Like G.I. Jane, only without actually going into the SEALs, ‘cause that’d be ridiculous.

Oh, and did I mention that all of the characters are white?

Trouble in Paradise: Tropico 4

I have come to accept, over the past few months, that the games I love the most are typically sims. I like replicating real life. I like working through scenarios that could happen in real life but not in my life. The idea of having control over a tiny fake person is kind of cool. It gives me that sense of achievement and success when one of my sims gets a kick-ass job and it makes me laugh when I occasionally become jealous of their precious little lives in their hyper-dramatic bubble.

Controlling a city, however, is a bit different for me. I remember playing a version of Sim City when I was a kid (though I’m not sure when or how) and finding it engaging because I could build and organize and create the weirdest possible infrastructure and it didn’t matter if the layout didn’t make sense. This is what drew me in to play Tropico 4 when it was put on sale on Steam last fall. I got to choose what to build, where to put it, which natural resources to utilize, how well my people were allowed to live, etc. Some aspects of this game surprised me, though (and still do, incidentally), that involve racism, sexism and just strange choices of stereotypes to follow.

There are some interesting differences when you first go to create your avatar. You may choose to be either a man or a woman, and can choose either a preset look or customize by choosing complexion/skin colour, hat, hairstyle, accessories, earrings and, for male avatars, facial hair. Here is a breakdown for how many options you can choose from for each, depending on the sex you opted for:

• Presets: 14 male, 6 female
  
• Skin Colour: 11 male, 6 female
  
• Hat: 15 male, 6 female
  
• Hairstyle: 10 male, 7 female
  
• Accessories: 7 male, 6 female
  
• Earrings: 0 male, 3 female
  
• Facial Hair: 5 beards, 4 moustaches
  

Why the inequality here? If you want a positive spin on it, one could look at it from the angle that the developers were trying to get away from the idea that women are more focused on fashion and therefore shouldn't have as many options for clothing and hairstyle available to them, but realistically I think the developers were targeting men with the game and wanted to give them the option of being a bouncer or a pirate (for example) and didn't think to give the female leader those same options.

The disparity in these options seems less important when I remember that in Tropico certain jobs can only done by a specific sex. Anyone can work on a farm, for example, but only men can be college professors and only women can be elementary school teachers. Only men can work in mines and only women can work in the marketplace. Only men can be El Presidente's guards and only women can work in the immigration office. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me. Why have some jobs that only men or women can do? Why not both? (I should note at this point that this game's timeline starts in the 1950s when gender roles were still strictly enforced; however, as this game is hardly set in reality, this aspect of that time period could easily have been done away with, especially if they have women working in power plants and not in the salt mines. That's just plain nonsense.) It's also rather telling that only men are governmental advisors to El Presidente.

Every now and again, though, one of your citizens talks to you about an issue that they feel is important. The first that comes to my mind is the environmentalist Sunny Flowers. Sunny is a stereotypical ‘child of nature’ that spouts ‘peace and love’ to El Presidente when she requests that things be done about pollution and stopping the logging industry and the like. She is very much a caricature of the flower-power movement and of the hippie lifestyle, and I have to say that I’m glad she wasn’t overly sexualized (they left that to the Education advisor, Ms. Pineapple). I like her character in general, though. She's got her beliefs and she's respectful about how she voices them, unlike Public Citizen #2.

Next would be the tattooed, pierced and angry nationalist El Diablo. He’s just plain old cranky and is always wanting El Presidente to crack down on immigration and tourism. He often suggests using violence against foreigners and says that they will incur the wrath of El Diablo. Honestly, I hate whenever this guy’s window pops up. Just based on appearances, he isn’t the kind of guy I’d want to run into on the street; adding a xenophobic side to him just makes him scary and (to this El Presidente) more than a little annoying. It makes me wonder if he was based around those people who are caught on hidden-camera shows saying things similar to “[Nationality] comes to our country and steals our jobs — they should go back where they came from, or else!” I can't think of many instances where a woman would go on repeatedly about things like that (though I should note it certainly isn't unheard of); it was probably just 'easier' to write a male for this particular role.

And then there’s Miss Pineapple. She isn’t so bad, really, except that she’s been hit with the sexualization stick. Typically Miss Pineapple only comes to you if she has a suggestion related to improving Tropico’s education system. Ordinarily I’d consider this a good thing … but then she talks about spanking the kids to get their attention or to punish them for going against El Presidente, and we know that she’s talking about that kind of spanking. It’s weird and kind of brings to mind pedophilia and cases of teacher/student relationships.

There are other little tidbits and trifle that hint at a subtle sexism in the game, but I feel I should mention that there are also racist aspects as well that were likely meant as jokes. Over the course of the game, you receive requests for trade from China and the Middle East. Both of those leaders are horrendously stereotypical caricatures of those ethnicities; the Chinese leader speaks with a parodied Asian accent and makes reference to the mighty Chinese dragon, and the Middle Eastern leader says that he has many wives and that he will throw in camels to sweeten the deal. It seems so unnecessary to include things like that, and it makes me wonder just why Haemimont Games and/or Kalypso Media felt they needed to throw them in.

These problems aside, though, I have to admit that the game is really quite fun and it makes for an interesting break from other sims. Just keep these issues in mind if and when you decide to give it a go!

Hack the Patriarchy!

This week I decided to watch Hackers, a film about a group of high-school hackers who are framed for computer-executed crimes, to look at how it depicts women in the field of technology. I know it was released in 1995, but it’s still relevant, believe it or not. I was also curious to see if it holds up to the Bechdel Test, but I’ll get to that a little later.

I believe that anyone remotely familiar with Regina’s research will also be familiar with the discussions the GOG group has had about how women are often treated in the world of technology, gaming included. They are subjected to harassment, sexualization, verbal abuse and more, as well as being told they aren't as good as their male counterparts simply because they are girls or women. Here are some observations on how Hackers helped to contribute to this particular area of sexism:

• The trailer had nude shots of Kate (Angelina Jolie) from the back (nothing visible) that never appeared in the movie, probably to lure teenage boys to see it in theatres.
• The protagonist Dade (Jonny Lee Miller, Elementary) hacks the school network and invades Kate’s privacy to get into her class so that he can get even with her after she plays a prank.
• At Cyberdelia, Kate dominates an action video game until Dade beats her. He tells her she has “a nice score for a girl”, and when he beats her top score, he says, “Well, it looks like I’m on top.” Not the most subtle double-entendre.
• It is mentioned that ‘God’ is a commonly-used password (“It’s that whole male ego thing”); I always found it kind of funny that a female company executive uses ‘God’ as her password.
• A line of dialogue in which Kate swears is dubbed over so that she uses ‘screw’ instead of ‘f—’; I’m not sure why, though, because Dade says ‘f—’ later on in the movie. Why was it unacceptable for her to use the word, but it was fine for Dade?
• Kate’s boyfriend-type person named Curtis dismisses her interest in computers; calls it “that computer sh-t”. Apparently he doesn’t like that she has a hobby he doesn’t understand.
• Dade tells Kate that if he wins a bet with her, she has to go on a date with him and she “[has] to smile.” If I went on a date with someone I didn’t like, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to smile.
• In one shot in a hacking montage, Kate wears a transparent top that shows her breasts and nipples. The overhead shot hides her face; only her breasts and arms are easily visible. There is no reason for the scene to be shot that way except to sexualize her. Her breasts are also exposed in a dream sequence in which she comes on to Dade.
• Dade tries to get Kate out of trouble after they are arrested, saying, “She knows sh-t about computers. She’s just my girlfriend.” No one bats an eye because girls can’t possibly know anything about technology, as is ‘proven’ by the other women in the movie.

In relation to Kate / Angelina’s boob-shots, there is very little male nudity of any sort: Cereal Killer’s pants are pulled down slightly by a heavy tool-belt, and Joey loses his towel while attempting to get his computer back from a police officer during a raid. In both instances, their buttocks are shown. This seems almost risqué for teenage boys (or more accurately twenty-something men playing teenage boys) and is on the same level as showing a pseudo-teenage girl’s breasts.

There’s even a bit of violence towards women depicted; Kate plays a prank on Dade, as previously mentioned, and when he realizes what she’s done he thinks of a clip from a black-and-white movie in which a man attacks and attempts to strangle a woman. Not overly necessary, I would think; there are other ways to show that one character is angry with another, right?

There are, however, two positive things off the top of my head about how some women are portrayed:

• Kate, the only woman in the movie who's relevant and in any way competent, knows how to hold her own. She makes it known that she's just as skilled as any of the guys, if not more so. She's also sexually confident and uses that to her advantange when she needs to.
• Dade's mother Lauren stands up for Dade when he is arrested for trying to out-hack the villain, saying that she doesn't care if she "[faces] certain death" if that's what it takes to defend her son. She recognizes his skill and knows that while he had indiscretions in his past, he wasn't in the wrong and didn't deserve to be punished for someone else's crime. Awesome mom is awesome.

*   *   *   *   *

Now for the Bechdel Test! If it doesn’t sound familiar, it was coined by American cartoonist Alison Bechdel (she credits a friend for the idea); in one of her comic strips, an unnamed female character offers up her standards for the type of TV and movies she watches. There are only three criteria for the test, and it’s really quite fascinating to think of how many films don’t pass:

1. There are at least two female characters with names and speaking parts
2. who talk to another woman
3. about something other than a man.

I was almost sure that this movie wasn’t going to pass, based on my memory of it, but it barely scrapes through. There are six female characters with names, four of whom have surnames, and only two of them talk to each other at all. There are only three lines of dialogue between Lauren (the protagonist’s mother) and Kate, and while it tangentially mentions Cereal Killer, I think it counts as not talking about a man:

Lauren: “Hi! Well, now I see what all the fuss is about.”
[later in the same scene]
Lauren: “Hey you guys, help yourself to anything in the fridge. Cereal has.”
Kate: “Thank you.”

That’s it. Pretty underwhelming.

The other female characters with names are: Margo Lawless, the secondary villain who is an executive at an oil corporation called Ellingson Mineral; Jennifer, a news reporter; Lisa Blair, who is cyber-stalked by Phreak so that he can get her contact information and is a torso in skin-tight clothing for 98% of her screen time at the very least; and Vicky, present at an anonymous ‘computer addict’ meeting. Excluding Margo, these women have one line each, and including Margo, none of them have scenes with another woman.

It’d be kind of nice if attitudes towards women in regards to gaming and technology, both in the real world and in film, had changed in the last eighteen years, wouldn’t it?

Thinking with Portals: Wheatley

A couple of weeks ago I posted a piece talking about the character GLaDOS in Portal 2. Here is my accompanying piece (possibly the first of two or three) about GLaDOS’ male A.I. counterpart, Wheatley. Two things of note: there will be spoilers in this article, and it’s going to have a very pro-feminist slant because I’ve been reading a lot of anti-feminist things the last few days and I need to balance all of that out somehow, so you may need to take a few things with a grain of salt.

As mentioned in the previous article, GLaDOS is predominantly a cold, calculating character (alliteration FTW). Wheatley, on the other hand, is a bit of a comedic tool — very jittery, a little awkward, strangely inept, and more of a joke than anything. At the beginning he acts as Chell’s guide, leading her through Aperture in hopes of escaping. While looking for a way out, they stumble upon GLaDOS, restarting after her defeat in the first game, and she immediately begins sending you through tests again. Before long, Wheatley devises a plan to take GLaDOS down by putting himself into the position to control Aperture and leaving GLaDOS to rust.

What makes Wheatley interesting to me is that his personality almost completely changes once he gets a taste of power. As soon as he replaces GLaDOS as the main controller of the facility, the phrase “absolute power corrupts absolutely” comes into play, in the literal sense. He goes from being unintentionally goofy to being openly hostile in less than two minutes, praising himself for taking over and marvelling at his greatness. Not a minute later, he becomes enraged when GLaDOS points out that Chell did all of the work for him and that his actual purpose at Aperture was to make GLaDOS less intelligent by offering up bad ideas in order to keep her from becoming completely independent. In retaliation, he tells Chell that he’s the boss now, does the only thing he can think of to humiliate GLaDOS — turning her into a potato battery (quite a step down from being an all-powerful A.I., wouldn’t you say?) — and then smashes both GLaDOS and Chell into a pit in the floor, yelling, “COULD A MORON DO THAT?!”

After taking some time to cool down, Wheatley realizes that Chell doesn’t take him seriously in spite of his new power. He tries to take a leaf from GLaDOS’ book in emotionally whittling her down, but it backfires:

Wheatley: All right, so that last test was seriously disappointing. Apparently, being civil isn't motivating you, so let's try it her way, all right, fatty? Adopted... fatty! Fatty, fatty no parents?
GLaDOS: And...?
Wheatley: What?
GLaDOS: What exactly is wrong with being adopted?
Wheatley: What's wrong with being adopted? Um, well, uh, Lack of parents?
GLaDOS: [to Chell] For the record, you are adopted and that's terrible. Just work with me.
Wheatley: Some of my best friends are actually orphans.
GLaDOS: Also, look at her, you moron. She's not fat.
Wheatley: I AM NOT A MORON!

While researching for this article, I found a clip on YouTube full of quotes from Wheatley. I don’t remember a lot of them from the game, strangely, so perhaps they were yanked. Or maybe my memory’s just awful. Anyway, they exist, apparently, so I’m going to talk about one of them. For one particular ‘exchange’, Wheatley tries to convince Chell to jump into a pit. When it doesn’t work, he tells her that at the bottom of the pit, in addition to her long-lost parents and an escape elevator, are: a trendy fashionable jumpsuit, a handbag, a yacht, hunky men (“possibly a boyfriend!”), members of a boy-band (who “haven’t seen a woman in years, and they’re not picky at all — they don’t care if you’ve got a bit of brain damage, they don’t mind if you’ve been running around, if you’ve been sweating”), and a pony farm.

Everything about this belittles Chell, though probably unintentionally on Wheatley’s part, I’m sure. He, like GLaDOS but not as clever, believes that if he appeals to everything that women are ‘supposed’ to want, Chell will do anything he asks. He also apparently believes that the promise of men who are so desperate to see a woman that they won’t care if she’s at full mental health and doesn’t look absolutely gorgeous is a positive thing in a woman’s mind.

Nearing the end of the game, Wheatley becomes more and more unstable. He begins hurling blame at Chell for everything that’s going wrong, accusing her of using him for her own gain and for taking advantage of him because he wanted to help her. It doesn’t take long for him to make threats of violence against her either.

A lot of these things parallel abusive relationships, and (this may be a bit of a stretch, but humour me) they even reflect the “friendzone” baloney that’s becoming a greater and greater problem in the world of dating. What I mean by that is that Wheatley (read: bitter men, generally) felt a connection with Chell that she doesn’t reciprocate. When she doesn’t help him to further his own gains, he feels used and resents Chell (read: women who aren’t interested in said bitter men) because he voluntarily did things for her when she didn’t promise any reward (read: relationship, be it romantic or sexual; in the game, the reward would have been to escape Aperture) for such tasks, so he gets angry, acts out, becomes violent, and accuses Chell of being the problem.

The only point at which Wheatley feels any remorse at all is when he’s stuck out in space, completely alone and stripped of power (by two female characters, which would make it all the worse for him if he was a human instead of a machine), which makes it quite clear how absolutely hollow his apology is. Even then, ‘remorse’ isn’t the right word; he simply says in mild tones that if he had the chance to, he’d say he was sorry and make things right, all the while completely devoid of any actual guilt like the sociopath he’s become.

Art imitating life, ladies and gentlemen. The only difference here is that the abusive character still comes across as entertaining during his antics, which thankfully isn't generally true to life.

GoG Short #5 - Contrasting Female Images at E3

This week our short episode takes on the game industry and its marketing tactics. Specifically, Rhonda and I discuss the E3 trailers for these two games: Tomb Raider Crossroads and Far Cry 3.

As many of you who have followed the site and my research already know, I am generally very celebratory about game culture. I think that gaming is a wonderful way people can learn about themselves, how to solve problems, and explore their identity. However, I often take issue with how games are marketed. This year's E3 pressers leave me cold looking at how female characters are displayed and the uneven reactions these images produce in game news.

Rhonda and I discuss the controversies these two video clips generated, specifically the issue many male game journalists took with the attempted rape of Lara Croft. I guess it hasn't been easy for many fans of Lara Croft to see her origin story begin gritty, violent, and dangerous. Oh and less boobtastic. She looks and acts like a fully developed character in this trailer, something that I cannot help but applaud. I am left wondering if the male reaction to this character development has something to do with the guilt they might experience now that they cannot openly and freely sexualize her character without some sensation of guilt. 

The trend of game design towards more cinematic, complex, and deep stroy telling is exciting and wonderful. I sincerely wish the marketing executives would avoid such blatant stunts as the one seen in the Far Cry 3 trailer. It is apparent that the opening scene, which few have called pornography (a term used to describe the Tomb Raider video), was purely for shock value. Unfortunately, attention getting stunts like these only diminish what might be a beatiful, intriguing, and engaging game. I'll never know because after this trailer, I'll likely never pick up a copy of the game. 

One of the themes that emerged from my dissertation research is that gamers consider themselves to be very savvy, intelligent consumers mainly because they choose to game over say a more passive media like watching tv shows or other, less engaging hobbies. I hope that at some point in the not too distant future the marketing mavricks at the major game companies will figure this out. 

As always, and perhaps even more so with the controversial nature of this topic, we would love to hear what you think. Drop us a Tweet @game_on_girl or leave a comment here.

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Until next time, Game On!
Regina and Rhonda

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