When Does Gender in a Video Game Actually Matter?

WORDS BY SAM HAYES Recently I was playing a game called A Fold Apart. It is a romance game, but what was striking to me about the game was its use of gender. Choosing one’s gender in a game is not a novel feature by any means, however A Fold Apart is slightly unusual in that it is not a game about creating a character or defining the avatar’s personality. The game’s two central actors are entirely pre-determined characters, the gender of which being one of the few decisions the player gets to make. This shows A Fold Apart employing a narrative device that is not available to other mediums, and it left me asking, when is gender of a character, or the sexual orientation of a character, relevant to a story, and if it is not, should designers let players define it themselves?

For context A Fold Apart is a game about two lovers, one of whom must move far away for work. The game chronicles their conversations via text message and their inner thoughts. The story is not an unfamiliar one, but it is differentiated by your ability to pick the gender of either character. Either both can be men, both women, or a man and a woman. What’s more, if you choose the straight pair either character can be either a man or a woman. This choice has very little effect if any on the narrative from what I can discern. This raises the question, why give the player the choice in that case? Personally, I think the choice was made to give the player the ability to tailor the story to be more individually resonant. If you are a man in a relationship with a man, it may be easier to relate this story to your own, equally if you are a woman who moved away from a partner for work reasons, you may like to see the game reflect that. So, is this the future of video game storytelling? Will all characters have a selectable gender and sexual orientation in the future? Well, it may be more complicated than that.

One possible caveat with this approach is players being pushed to play as a character to whom they feel they cannot directly relate. i.e a man playing as a woman. There is evidence to suggest that this is not the case, however, often players do not sit down with a game to play as themselves. A study conducted by the psychology department of Middlesex University found that in the first Dragon Age game 30% of men played as a woman and 10% of women played as a man. While not practiced by the majority of players, there are a sizable number of players that play as a different gender, and for various reasons. Whether a safe space to experiment with how one presents gender-wise or an exercise in empathy, there are numerous reasons a player may not wish to play as the gender they identify as. That being said, this is not a practice engaged in by the majority of players. Furthermore, there is a clear disparity between the proportions of people choosing to play as the opposite gender in games. A possible reason for women playing as men may be what has been dubbed the “Lara phenomenon” after Tomb Raider heroine Lara Croft. In a 2007 paper on the Lara phenomenon, researchers Jeroen Jansz and Raynel G. Martis noted that:

“The massive popularity of female protagonist Lara Croft ever since the release of the first Tomb Raider game in 1996 seems to have paved the way for a woman who contrasts the dominant stereotype”.

The majority of older video games featured men in the role of protagonists and many depicted kidnapped women as the central actor’s driving motivation, such as many entries in the long-running Super Mario series. While strides have been made to account for and ameliorate historical gender balance of video game protagonists may lead more players to play as women as a point of novelty, since many of the games they play may feature male protagonists.

A classic game that leaned into this expectation was 1986’s Metroid. The English language game manual said of protagonist Samus Aran “He is the greatest of all the space hunters”. This pronoun is also used in the Japanese version of the manual, which as noted in a 2013 blog post by Clyde Mandeline, rarely uses pronouns once the identity of the person has been discerned. As such, the use of this pronoun was very intentional. This is significant because Samus wears a robotic suit for the majority of the game only revealing after the game that she was a woman the entire time. The developers knew that players would assume the person in the robot suit was a man and that the revelation would be surprising, since the idea of a woman protagonist in a game was not the norm. While Samus has gone on to be seen as a strong female character, I will not unconditionally congratulate Metroid as the game did feature a mechanic whereby the more quickly the presumed male heterosexual player completes the game within a certain time limit, Samus will appear in a skimpier outfit. This sexualization of Samus persisted through many entries in the series undercutting the game’s feminist themes. 16

In spite of this, many fans of the game do still see Samus as representing empowerment. The character’s importance came to the forefront when 2010’s Metroid Other M, among other criticisms, was seen as stripping agency from Samus. Samus took orders from the male commander Adam Malkovich. This disappointment would have been nowhere near as prevalent if Samus’ womanhood were not a powerful artistic statement in 1986. I bring this up to show that a certain character’s gender identity informs how they are interpreted in a given cultural context. The same goes for sexual orientation, 2013’s Gone Home is an archaeological narrative game where the point of view character Katie learns of her sister Sam’s conflict with her parents while Katie has been away at college. This conflict stems from the parents not supporting Sam’s relationship with her girlfriend Lonnie. Gone Home’s coming out narrative simply would not make any sense if the player could choose Sam’s sexual orientation. Though it should be noted that the player’s position in the story as an onlooker means the player had no agency in the story to begin with, with the player assuming the role of a Lockwood rather than a Heathcliff.

For my final point, I must return to A Fold Apart. The reason the game can so easily implement gender choice is due to the game’s simple art style and lack of voice acting. The cost of implementing this feature is much greater for games that strive for complex, photorealistic graphics. This cost would only be compounded by having to hire multiple voice actors. This is not to say that it is impossible; games such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey offer this choice and photorealistic graphics, and an important aspect of the Mass Effect games is the player’s ability to roleplay as different gendered versions of a single character with whatever sexual orientation the player wishes. It is understandable that many studios may want to make the choice for the player however, especially with the ballooning budgets of blockbuster games. I do think there is scope for more games to allow the player to choose the gender and sexual orientation of their character, but designers still have many reasons to make that choice for themselves, either for cost or narrative-related reasons.

Is Nicole Flattery the new Lorrie Moore? I t’s been a year since Nicole Flattery’s debut collection of short stories, Show Them A Good Time, was reviewed in this magazine. This review was one of the few that didn’t compare Flattery to Lorrie Moore and, indeed, “the next Lorrie Moore” or “90s Moore” look set to become the tags by which her style is referred to – even if, as a young female graduate of English Studies at Trinity, her subject matter will inevitably be compared to Sally Rooney’s. The epigraph for Flattery’s debut is from Moore’s story “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens”.

Comparisons to Moore, along with the detail from Alice Maher’s Yggdrasil on Fergal Condon’s brilliant yellow cover design for Flattery’s book, indicate that this promising young writer has been given our collective blessing to take up the mantle of the next female virtuoso – a much beloved artistic talent whose work is not only technically accomplished but really engages its audience.

Faber & Faber published Moore’s Collected Stories in 2009, a collection that begins with four new stories – which were later included in Bark (2014) – before diving into her back catalogue. The technical accomplishment of these newer stories is a propitious step forward in Moore’s writing, and offers a tantalising glimpse into what Flattery’s obvious talent might develop into.

Both writers are frequently praised for their humour. But while Flattery and “90s Moore” derive most of their comedy from details that are either incidental to or don’t quite fit into the dramatic framework of their stories, 21st Century Moore, particularly in “Debarking”, allows the eccentricity of fully developed external characters to bring comedy into the fold of the story’s dramatic arc. Incidentally, Moore’s comedy is real comedy – laugh out loud – not just the half-funny stuff we pretend is good enough because it appears in a work of literary fiction.

I don’t find Flattery as funny as Moore, in fact I don’t think she’s trying to be. At the same time, the attention Flattery pays to the trickiness of narration is, for me, the most striking and exciting aspect of her work, and not something I notice Moore engaging with much. Flattery opens up fascinating gaps between a close third person narrator and the psychology of the character they’re supposed to be telling us about. Where Moore’s characters negotiate professional, familial, and romantic relationships, Flattery’s protagonists dominate their stories almost to the exclusion of everyone else. “Abortion, A Love Story” is her only story with more than one character who’s more than a shade, and I think it’s her best (it’s also by far the longest, which bodes well for Flattery’s upcoming novel).

When reviewing books, we tend to compare younger writers to older ones because that’s the only thing that means anything, really. Adjectives are too subjective – what’s “enthralling” to me might not be to you, and whether something is “provocative” is largely a matter of taste. Properly engaging with a writer’s work is tantamount to a good review. Book reviews also serve, however, to tell us whether we might be interested in buying the book; to this end, saying something like “Nicole Flattery is the next Lorrie Moore” or “Claire Keegan is the spiritual successor to John McGahern” is of much more use, despite the inevitable inaccuracies.

Moore might be the best short story writer working in the US today; Flattery is a talented, exciting Irish prospect. You should be reading them both.

WORDS BY FIACHRA KELLEHER

Coronavirus Paintings

// Frieda Hughes in Lockdown

It seemed that on a global level, with each country’s eventual lockdown, many were inspired to launch themselves into creative productivity. Painting or writing became an avenue for many to direct fears and frustrations through at this time, but Frieda Hughes does this for a living. As both a therapist and an artist, Hughes encourages her clients to express themselves through painting and sketching, to literally and figuratively draw out their emotions and study them. From 24 May, Hughes has recorded and uploaded this process to YouTube. Hughes began posting videos online eight months ago and has since developed a modest following. Her uploads are generally posted sporadically and vary in length, from an eight second video of her pet owl doing a trick, to a recorded poetry reading almost an hour long. They are all barely edited, nothing but the awkward starting and stopping of the video recorder snipped out. But since late May the uploads have been more regular. Hughes posts weekly updates of what she calls her“coronavirus paintings” in a series titled ‘Painting with Purpose’. Hughes says the aim of this series is to use painted colour and shapes to show how she feels in a literal way, it is the process by which she paints most of her works and one she recommends to her therapy clients because it presents an avenue for alternative self-expression. For Hughes, colour and feeling are linked via a sensory and emotional overlap, possibly a form of synaesthesia. Blue means happiness, yellow and orange are friends, brown is commitment and lethargy. In this series, Hughes is embarking on a deliberate lockdown project, using her talent to create three unique paintings to reflect her experience going into lockdown, during lockdown and her expectations after restrictions in Wales ease. The project is thematically structured like Dante’s Divine Comedy, the journey through hell. From a creative standpoint the process is fascinating to watch. The spontaneity at the beginning of the painting maturing into an abstract vision is artistically inspiring and exciting. Moreso, watching someone in the moments of creation and raw expression is exceptional. It becomes clear that the value of the therapy is the segmentation of feeling and qualifying of emotion. One must ask themselves “what do I feel” and “what does that look like” without fear of self-contradiction or the need to engineer linguistic clarity. There is no struggle to be understood. While at the beginning, the painting starts vague and the emotions seem difficult to draw out, eventually Hughes emotionally fastens herself to the canvas and the paints are something of a conductor for the feelings which become increasingly easy to access. In a sense, the process becomes like mining, difficult and blind at first but when she strikes gold, (or blue, purple or black) it is revelatory and fruitful. The emotions, no matter how dark or difficult, become almost secondary to the painting, they are evoked in service of the painting. It frees her of the weight of her emotions. This smooth and steady outpouring of emotion is magnetically attractive to watch. Hughes talks for the entire length of the videos casually and confidently about how she is feeling while she moves the brush across the canvas. As a passive viewer, I found myself listening earnestly and in solidarity with her feelings. In her frustrations and fears, Hughes echoes the thoughts that many of us are experiencing: the trapped oppression of isolation, the desperation for clarity and eventual resignation that it will not come, and most pressingly, the gratitude and recognition that to stay home and observe the pandemic as an artist is to stay safe and is, as such, a privilege.

WORDS BY SHANE MURPHY