[0:25]Welcome to the second episode in our multi-part series exploring the roles and representations of women in video games. This project examines the tropes, plot devices, and patterns most commonly associated with women in gaming from a systemic big picture perspective. Over the course of this series, I will be offering critical analysis of many popular games and characters, but please keep in mind that it's both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy a piece of media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects. I just want to caution viewers that as we delve into more modern games, we will be discussing examples that employ some particularly gruesome and graphic depictions of violence against women. I'll do my best to only show what is necessary, but this episode does come with a trigger warning. It's also recommended that parents preview the video first before sharing with younger children.
[1:16]In our previous episode, we explored the history of the damsel in distress and how the trope became so pervasive in classic era games from the 80s and early 90s. We also explored some of the core reasons why damsel characters are so problematic as representations of women. So if you haven't seen it yet, please check that one out before continuing to watch this one. As a trope, the damsel and distress is a plot device in which a female character is placed in a perilous situation from which she cannot escape on her own and then must be rescued by a male character. Usually providing an incentive or motivation for the protagonist's quest. Now, it might be tempting to think that the damsel in distress was just a product of its time and that by now, surely the trope must be a thing of the past. Well, while we have seen a moderate increase in the number of playable female characters, the plot device hasn't gone away. In fact, the damsel and distress has seen a bit of a resurgence in recent years.
[2:52]And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Suffice it to say, the trope is alive and well, even today. And since the majority of these titles still focus on delivering crude, unsophisticated male power fantasies, developers are largely unwilling to give up the damsel in distress as an easy default motivation for their brooding male heroes or anti-heroes. Remember that as a trope, the damsel in distress is a plot device used by writers and not necessarily always just a one-dimensional character type entirely defined by victimhood. Now and then damsel characters may be well-written, funny, dynamic, or likable.
[3:34]However, this extra character development tends to make their eventual disempowerment all the more frustrating. Damsels on the more sassy end of the spectrum may struggle with their captors or even attempt an escape on their own, but inevitably their efforts always prove futile. Occasionally, they may be allowed to offer the hero a last-minute helping hand or to kick the bad guy while he's down, but these moments are largely symbolic and typically only happen after the core adventure is over or the danger has passed. These token gestures of pseudo empowerment don't really offer any meaningful change to the core of the trope, and it feels like developers just throw these moments in at the last minute to try and excuse their continued reliance on the damsel in distress. Periodically, game developers may attempt to build a more fleshed out relationship or emotional bond between the damsel character and the male protagonist. In the most decidedly patronizing examples, depictions of female vulnerability are used as an easy way for writers to trigger an emotional reaction in male players. As we discussed in our first episode, when female characters are damselled, their ostensible agency is removed and they're reduced to a state of victimhood. So narratives that frame intimacy, love, or romance as something that blossoms from or hinges upon the disempowerment and victimization of women are extremely troubling because they tend to reinforce the widespread regressive notion that women in vulnerable, passive, or subordinate positions are somehow desirable because of their powerlessness. Unfortunately, these types of stories also help to perpetuate the paternalistic belief that power imbalances within romantic relationships are appealing, expected, or normal. Okay, so we know that the damsel in distress is alive and well in gaming, but that's not the full picture. There's an even more insidious side to this story. Over the past decade, game companies have been desperately searching for ways to stand out in a market increasingly oversaturated with very similar products. As a consequence, we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of games attempting to cut through the clutter by being as dark and edgy as possible. So we've seen developers try to spice up the damsel in distress cliché by combining it with other tropes that involve victimized women. I've identified a few of the most common of these trope cocktails, which join together multiple regressive or negative representations of women, including the disposable woman, the mercy killing, and the woman in the refrigerator. The term woman in refrigerators was coined in the late 1990s by comic book writer Gail Simone to describe the trend of female comic book characters who are routinely brutalized or killed off as a plot device designed to move the male character's story arc forward. The trope name comes from Green Lantern issue number 54, in which the superhero returns home to find his girlfriend murdered and stuffed inside his refrigerator. This trading of female characters' lives for something meant to resemble male character development is of course part of a long media tradition, but the gruesome death of women for shock value is especially prevalent in modern gaming. The woman in refrigerator trope is used as the cornerstone of some of the most famous contemporary video games. It provides the core motivational hook behind both the Max Payne and the God of War series, for example. In each case, the protagonist's wife and daughter are brutally murdered, and their deaths are then used by the developers as a pretext for their inevitable bloody revenge quest. It's interesting to note that the reverse scenario, games hinging on a woman vowing revenge for her murdered boyfriend or husband, are practically nonexistent. The gender role reversal is so unusual that it borders on the absurd, which is one of the reasons why this scene from Disney's Wreck-It Ralph is so humorous. I could do a very long video just exploring this one trope in gaming, but today I want to look at how the woman in refrigerator is connected to the damsel in distress and specifically the ways game developers have found to combine these two plot devices. One popular variation is to simply use both tropes in the same plot line so as to have the male protagonist's wife stuffed in the fridge while his daughter is damselled. In Outlaws, your wife is brutally murdered and you then have to rescue your daughter.
[7:48]In Kane and Lynch, your wife is brutally murdered and you then have to rescue your daughter. In Prototype 2, your wife is brutally murdered and you then have to rescue your daughter.
[8:01]In Inversion, your wife is brutally murdered and you then have to rescue your daughter. In Asura's Wrath, your wife is brutally murdered and you then have to rescue your daughter. In Dishonored, the Empress is brutally murdered and you then have to rescue her daughter, though it's heavily implied that she's your daughter too. It's no coincidence that the fridge plot device and the damsel plot device work in much the same way. Both involve female characters who have been reduced to complete states of powerlessness by the narrative. One via kidnapping, the other via murder. The two plot devices used together then allow developers to exploit both the revenge motivation and the good old-fashioned save the girl motivation. Believe it or not, there is another more insidious version of this particular trope hybrid, which I call the damsel in the refrigerator. Now, you may be asking yourself, how can a frigid woman still be in distress, since by definition, being frigid usually sort of requires being dead? Well, here's how it works. The damsel in the refrigerator occurs when the hero's sweetheart is brutally murdered and her soul is then trapped or abducted by the villain. This oh so dark and edgy twist provides players with a double dose of female disempowerment and allows developers to again exploit both the revenge motivation and the saving the damsel motivation, but this time with the same woman at the same time. This trope combination can be traced back to old school side scrollers like Splatterhouse 2 and Ghouls 'n Ghosts. But the damsel in the refrigerator has definitely become a more popular trend in recent years. In Medievil 2, your murdered girlfriend's soul is stolen and you must fight to save her. In the Darkness 2, your murdered girlfriend's soul is trapped in hell and you must fight to free her.
[9:52]In Shadows of the Damned, your murdered girlfriend's soul is trapped in hell and you must fight to free her. In Dante's Inferno, your murdered wife's soul is trapped in hell and you must fight to free her. In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, your wife's soul is trapped on Earth and you must fight to free her. The damsel in the refrigerator is part of a larger trend of throwing women under the bus in increasingly gruesome ways in an apparent attempt to interject what I'll loosely refer to as mature themes. Developers must be hoping that by exploiting sensationalized images of brutalized women, it will be enough to fool gamers into thinking that their games are becoming more emotionally sophisticated. But the truth is, there's nothing mature about most of these stories, and many of them cross the line into blatant misogyny. Since what we're really talking about here are depictions of violence against women, it might be useful to quickly define what I mean by that term. When I say violence against women, I'm primarily referring to images of women being victimized or when violence is linked specifically to a character's gender or sexuality. Female characters who happen to be involved in violent or combat situations on relatively equal footing with their opponents are typically exempt from this category because they're not usually framed as victims. As I mentioned in our last video, the damsel in distress doesn't always have to be accompanied by a heroic rescue.
[11:26]Sometimes the hero fails to save the woman in question, either because he arrives too late, or because, surprise twist, she's been dead the whole time.
[12:02]Or in the case of the 2009 version of Bionic Commando, not only has your wife been dead the whole time, but turns out, she's actually a part of your bionic arm.
[12:18]Yes, you heard that correctly. His wife is his arm.
[12:28]But the most extreme and gruesome variant of this trend is when developers combine the damsel in distress with the mercy killing. This usually happens when the player character must murder the woman in peril for her own good. I like to call this happy little gem, the euthanized damsel. Typically, the damsel has been mutilated or deformed in some way by the villain, and the only option left at the hero is to put her out of her misery himself. We can trace this one back to the original 1980s arcade game Splatterhouse, in which your kidnapped girlfriend is possessed, and the player is forced to fight and kill her. After saving his bitten beloved in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, the hero must then kill her to gain the power to defeat the vampire lord. In Breath of Fire 4, Elena has been turned into a hideous monster, and then begs you to kill her. In Gears of War 2, Dom is motivated to rescue his captured wife, Maria. When he finds her, she has been starved and possibly tortured into a catatonic state, and so he shoots her. In Tenchu: Shadow Assassins, the princess meekly asks the hero to cut her down to get to the villain, which he does. A particularly egregious example can be found in Grand Theft Auto 3, when after you've rescued Maria Latore, it's implied that the protagonist suddenly shoots her because she's talking about stereotypically girly things.
[14:00]The writers deliberately wrote her character to annoy the player, so in the end, the violence against her becomes the punch line of a cheap misogynist joke. Sometimes these killings happen via cut scene, while other games ask the player to participate directly by pulling the trigger themselves. In the Castlevania Dracula X Chronicles remake, if you don't rescue Richter Belmont's beloved Annette, she will turn into a vampire and you'll then have to kill her.
[14:39]The captured women in Duke Nukem 3D beg you to kill them throughout the game. This misogynous scene is regurgitated and actually made worse in the 2011 follow-up, Duke Nukem Forever, developed by Gearbox. Another popular Gearbox game, Borderlands 2, also uses this plot twist when Angel asks the player to murder her as a way to try and thwart the villain's evil plans.
[15:10]The end of Alone in the Dark gives the player the choice between killing your girlfriend yourself, or letting Satan kill her by being reborn in her body.
[15:31]The Wii game Pandora's Tower includes one ending in which Elena begs you to kill her before she completes her transformation into a monster.
[16:29]And the player can't advance in the narrative until you shoot her in the face.
[16:38]These damselled women are written so as to subordinate themselves to men. They submissively accept their grizzly fate and will often beg the player to perform violence on them, giving men direct and total control over whether they live or die, even saying thank you with their dying breath. In other words, these women are asking for it, quite literally. The euthanized damsel is the darkest and edgiest of these trope hybrids, but it's also an extension of a larger pattern in gaming narratives where male protagonists are forced to fight their own loved ones, who have been possessed or brainwashed by villains. When Kratos finds his mother in the PSP game God of War: Ghost of Sparta, she morphs into a hideous beast, forcing you to fight and kill her. An act for which she thanks you with her dying breath.
[17:29]After your girlfriend is transformed into a green ogre and grabbed by the Ghoulies, she chases you around trying to get a kiss. Later, you must beat her unconscious before she can be returned to normal. The final boss in Shadows of the Damned turns out to be your own girlfriend, who you must shoot down. Similar scenarios are replicated in dozens of other titles as well.
[18:06]Although the narratives all differ slightly, the core element remains the same. In each case, violence is used to bring these women back to their senses. These stories conjure up supernatural situations in which domestic violence perpetrated by men against women who have lost control of themselves, not only appears justified, but is presented as an altruistic act done for the woman's own good. Of course, if you look at any of these games in isolation, you'll be able to find incidental narrative circumstances that can be used to explain away the inclusion of violence against women as a plot device. But just because a particular event might make sense within the internal logic of a fictional narrative, that doesn't in and of itself justify its use. Games don't exist in a vacuum and therefore can't be divorced from the larger cultural context of the real world. It's especially troubling in light of the serious real-life epidemic of violence against women facing the female population on this planet. Every nine seconds a woman is assaulted or beaten in the United States, and on average, more than three women are murdered by their boyfriends, husbands, or ex-partners every single day. Research consistently shows that people of all genders tend to buy into the myth that women are the ones to blame for the violence men perpetrate against them. In the same vein, abusive men consistently state that their female targets deserved it, wanted it, or were asking for it. Given the reality of that larger cultural context, it should go without saying that it's dangerously irresponsible to be creating games in which players are encouraged and even required to perform violence against women in order to save them. Even though most of the games that we're talking about don't explicitly condone violence against women, nevertheless, they trivialize and exploit female suffering as a way to ratchet up the emotional or sexual stakes for the player. Despite these troubling implications, game creators aren't necessarily all sitting around twirling their nefarious looking moustaches while consciously trying to figure out how to best misrepresent women as part of some grand conspiracy. Most probably just haven't given much thought to the underlying messages their games are sending, and in many cases, developers have backed themselves into a corner with their own game mechanics. When violence is the primary gameplay mechanic, and therefore the primary way that the player engages with the game world, it severely limits the options for problem-solving. The player is then forced to use violence to deal with almost all situations because it's the only meaningful mechanic available, even if that means beating up or killing the women they're meant to love or care about. One of the really insidious things about systemic and institutional sexism is that most often regressive attitudes and harmful gender stereotypes are maintained and perpetuated unintentionally. Likewise, engaging with these games is not going to magically transform players into raging sexists. We typically don't have a monkey see, monkey do direct cause and effect relationship with the media we consume. Cultural influence works in much more subtle and complicated ways. However, media narratives do have a powerful cultivation effect, helping to shape cultural attitudes and opinions.
[21:16]So when developers exploit sensationalized images of brutalized, mutilated, and victimized women over and over and over again, it tends to reinforce the dominant gender paradigm, which casts men as aggressive and commanding and frames women as subordinate and dependent. Although these stories use female trauma as a catalyst to set the plot elements in motion, these are not stories about women. Nor are they concerned with the struggles of women navigating the mental, emotional, and physical ramifications of violence. Instead, these are strictly male-centered stories, in which, more often than not, the tragic damsels are just empty shells, whose deaths are depicted as far more meaningful than their lives. Generally, they're completely defined by their purity, innocence, kindness, beauty, or sensuality. In short, they're just symbols meant to invoke the essence of an artificial feminine ideal. In fact, these games usually frame the loss of the woman as something that has been unjustly taken from the male hero.
[22:28]The implication being that she belonged to him, that she was his possession. Once wronged, the hero must go get his possessions back or at least exact a heavy price for their loss. On the surface, victimized women are framed as the reason for the hero's torment. But if we dig a little deeper into the subtext, I'd argue that the true source of the pain stems from feelings of weakness and or guilt over his failure to perform his socially prescribed patriarchal duty to protect his women and children. In this way, these failed hero stories are really about the perceived loss of masculinity and then the quest to regain that masculinity, primarily by exerting dominance and control through the performance of violence on others. Consequently, violent revenge-based narratives repeated ad nauseam can also be harmful to men because they help to further limit the possible responses men are allowed to have when faced with death or tragedy. This is unfortunate because interactive media has the potential to be a brilliant medium for people of all genders to explore difficult or painful subjects. So to be clear here, the problem is not the fact that female characters die or suffer. Death touches all of our lives eventually and as such, it's often an integral part of dramatic storytelling. To say that women can never die in stories would be absurd, but it's important to consider the ways that women's deaths are framed and examine how and why they're written. There are some games that try to explore loss, death, and grief in more genuine or authentic ways that do not sensationalize or exploit victimized women. Dear Esther, Passage, and To the Moon are a few indie games that investigate these themes in creative, innovative, and sometimes beautiful ways.
[24:16]These more contemplative style games are a hopeful sign, but they're still largely the exception to the rule. A sizable chunk of the industry is still unfortunately trapped in the established pattern of building game narratives on the backs of brutalized female bodies. Violence against women is a serious global epidemic. Therefore, attempts to address the issue in fictional contexts demands a considerable degree of respect, subtlety, and nuance. Women shouldn't be mere disposable objects or symbolic pawns in stories about men and their own struggles with patriarchal expectations and inadequacies. The dark and edgy trope cocktails that we've discussed in this episode are not isolated incidents or obscure anomalies. Instead, they represent an ongoing recurring pattern in modern gaming narratives. In most cases, the damselled characters have simply gone from being helpless to being dead, which is obviously not a huge improvement from her perspective. I know this episode has been a little bit grim, but please join me next time for the third and final installment covering the damsel and distress, where we'll take a look at some titles that attempt to flip the script on the damsel and then we'll go on a quest to find examples of the elusive dude and distress role reversal.
