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Hillary v. Xbox: Long Ramble on Video Games, Movies, Representation, and The Gaze

Lauren

Dear Sen. Clinton,

I’m writing to commend you for calling for a $90-million study on the effects of video games on children, and in particular the courageous stand you have taken in recent weeks against the notorious “Grand Theft Auto” series.

I’d like to draw your attention to another game whose nonstop violence and hostility has captured the attention of millions of kids — a game that instills aggressive thoughts in the minds of its players, some of whom have gone on to commit real-world acts of violence and sexual assault after playing.

I’m talking, of course, about high school football.

Of course I’m not too hot on GTA:SA. I haven’t played it myself but have spent enough time watching friends play to get annoyed. I was curious, especially having read some of Dr. B.‘s research on race representation in video games. This short post got me a-thinkin’.

One of the reasons I can’t lose myself in gaming is the inability to feel represented by the characters, part of the reason I find myself resisting movies as well. As per a comment I left on Pandagon today in response to watching The Woodsman, a movie in which the audience is compelled to sympathize with a pedophile after he is released from prison:

“One thing that truly bothers me — and I know there will be a number of people who will feel compelled to throw out examples once I’ve said this — is that this was another case of telling a martyred man’s story with a sympathetic eye while the victimized women serve only as catalysts for his internal change. I’d like to see more stories about realistic characters told overall, but I think the movie industry is ripe for change when it comes to the telling of hard, challenging women’s stories.

“I have to say that when I saw the movie, the protrayals of survivorhood really bothered me. The female characters didn’t need to be treated flippantly, but neither did they need to be damaged beyond repair. Further, I have a hard time sympathizing with child abusers and rapists. But that’s intensely personal.

I watched that movie, reluctantly, and when it was over I felt like shit.”

Granted, there are plenty of games and non-Lifetime movies that focus on women’s realities, but more often than not, women in entertainment mediums serve as tools for male advancement and enhancement. Part of this is the perceived audience, the production’s mental images of men lining up to buy movie tickets and video games, and only reluctantly tagging along with their female significant others if a woman’s face graces the accompanying promotional poster.

And so, when I commented on Pandagon again on the GTA:SA “Hot Coffee” mod, I said:

“I hate to be a buzzkill but for the most part no one seems to care about perpetuating tiresome stereotypes of urban African-Americans (or for that matter the poor, hick white folks in the game — and Glory Hole Park anyone?), and if the game does anything, it re-presents these stereotypes in a new, exciting! way.

And unfortunately the game sticks to these stereotypes in all the ways in which choice isn’t an option — the charaters’ ridiculous catch phrases, for example, which as far as I know cannot be turned off. It’s tiresome to play and to listen to, no?

“And again, even though the game is ripe for criticisms of race representations, all anyone wants to notice is the violence and the sex. Is it because of the imagined audience?

“Sure the game is interesting and has useful innovations for tech and gaming, but the story and world itself is pretty fucked up, especially if you realize that the world you have to act in is actually quite limited.”

The limitations of sight, story, and representation are one of the hardest things for me to get over when I am supposed to immerse myself into an alternate world. The choices are too limited, the gaze too focused. Books have a different effect on my brain — as a reader I am free to create any picture of the characters, scenery, and actions I like, even differing from the author’s vision as I see fit. The brain alters any act or vision it finds abhorrent to fit the reader and modifies a full, but base, storyline. Oftentimes, when I read, fictional characters lack a face or body at all, and move about in words and empty space.

The jump to watching movies and playing video games is difficult, in that that there is a visual representation, complete with a gaze that almost never matches my own. It is not only irreconcilable to me that I am not represented in form, but that the gaze does not represent mine.

Like Senator Clinton and other congressional prudes, I resist these kinds of games and movies, but for totally different reasons. Too often these media are an attempt to shock us back into feeling after having been made numb by preceeding exploitative “entertainment.” I can’t be entertained by active promotion of racism and sexism and respond negatively to such shock. As with watching The Woodsman I leave the experience feeling like shit.

[Editorial via Chuck‘s post on Correlation v. Causation]

7 thoughts on Hillary v. Xbox: Long Ramble on Video Games, Movies, Representation, and The Gaze

  1. Have you read The Bone People, by Keri Hulme? Your comments on The Woodsman made me wonder what you think if it, if you’ve read it.

  2. The shallow sterotypical representation of all characters in media
    make me hesitate to participate in any of the media. In reading books, I would agree that a person has the ability to imagine the context and situations better than most other media, but still the representations of characters will often force me to put the book down without finishing it.

    I think we have become for to cliche in media, and we always have the same cliched response from legislators

  3. Many women I know identify therefore very strongly with the male point of view and often not that much with their very own. It’s the process of Othering yourself, definitely.

  4. The thing about the GTA controversy is that after one wades thought the stereotypes, the unrelenting violence, the subjugation of everyone (but particularly women), the thing that got everyone’s panties in a wad was some non-explicit sex that would be hard pressed to receive a PG rating in a movie.

    It’s like the Janet Jackson Super bowl fiasco, got after 20 minuets of sophomoric bump and grind and choreography designed to appeal to an adolescent with retarded notions of sexuality, the big offensive act was a half second of nipple.

  6. It’s kind of beside the point, but I wanted to comment the lack of games that you can feel that you can identify with. I was never very into gaming until I met my husband, who introduced me to Sierra’s old line of adventure games for the PC. There was one particular series I really fell in love with called Gabriel Knight. This is one of the few series of games I’ve played where (in the second and third installments) you actually play half of the game from the perspective of Grace Nakamura, an intelligent and interesting female character (the main character is rather chauvinistic, but they compliment each other nicely). The games were also created by a woman (Jane Jensen) and are very in-depth and clever. But since the adventure genre appears to be dead you’d probably only be able to find these old classics on ebay.

    These games were not only good because of the strong feminine presence, but also for the storylines. The first two games were developed into novels (unfortunately, the third and best of the series was not) – but it shows the strength and importance of the storyline in the games themselves. Oh – and Jensen’s husband, Robert Holmes, composed the BEST music I’ve ever heard in a game…this really added to the depth and quality of the series. My husband and I have extracted the music from the games and listen to it frequently – I can’t think of any other game we’ve done that with.

    As I said, it’s a bit off point, but it was certainly refreshing to play games that acknowledged that women were more than the prize in the castle and stories don’t have to be simplistic.

  7. Or, you can do what I do and play text adventures. All the fun of reading, all the fun of games, and all the funs of computer communication (I don’t understand the word “jump”) in one package.

    Yes, retro is fun. I like games made by Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin.

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