Greg Rucka's Post 9/11 Pin-ups.

In the opening gambit to Greg Rucka's Queen and Country, Tara Chace sits poised for her first hit. Freezing and exhausted, her target; a Russian General the American's want dead, slides out of a car. Tara fires a single bullet straight into his skull and thrusts her frozen bones into the shadows. Moments later she is spotted and makes a break for it, cue chase sequence, bullet to the leg, then eventual escape. The cold seductive killer, watches, destroys, then slips away into shadow.  That should be the end of it.. but upon return to London the mission, which was simply a favour for the CIA, has lost any shimmer of glamour. Her first kill was meaningless when it should have been for Queen and Country.

Batwoman: Elegy tells the story of a disgraced twenty-something dismissed from the military academy that had promised vengeance. Kate Kane is a vigilante super-heroine. In the opening glossy two page spread Batwoman has her sensible red boot pressed against a young man's throat. "You know what I want Rush" Her shocking red lips against her grey-white skin are a wound and a threat. "I want your secrets, I want where and I want when, I want her name. And you ... really... want to give it to me."  This emphasis bristles with sexual tension, she is the potential dominatrix, ready to punctuate her questions with the brutal work of her fists.

 But the cliched questions and the overblown dialectic suggests that she is new to the role... This is outlined beautifully in an article by Q Magazine's Colin Smith.  Referencing the moment she meets Batman, He writes: 

It's a lack of substance on Kate's part that's emphasised as she stumbles backwards with the shock of The Batman's appearance, faced with a character that's as solid and unmoving as a fundamental moral principle. Kate, we're surely being told, is a cartoon of herself, but this man in a mask is profoundly real. 

For Smith, Batman's assured competence (READ: white, wealthy hetero-normative power) sits in stark contrast to Kane's approach to vigilantism which is fueled above all by anger. When Kate's father discovers a cache of weapons she has stolen from his barracks he informs her:

 "I was actually relieved when I realized what you were doing with all this stuff. But here's a little biscuit for you to chew on, Kate. You're not a soldier anymore, and you're not a cop. Just because you survived beast at the point and you were senior elite in gymnastics doesn't mean you're a damn crimefighter and its going to stop now."

His anxiety is gendered. Jake Kane highlights his daughter's feminine achievements: the moment she survived the attack of "beast" referencing a potential rape, and her talents in gymnastics. In so doing, he airbrushes over his daughter's successes in military school. Only once Kate informs him "I've found my way to serve", proposing that the work will bring direction and discipline to her life, does Jake Kane accept her decision. His attempts to undermine her plans give her a platform to explain the decision. Rucka filters her personality through several layers, purposely weaving a narrative that shows more how others respond to Kate, rather than asserting and reasserting her core values. The following double page spread, stunningly produced by artist J.H. Williams, reiterates the reference to gymnastics.

Also she's a keen trainspotter.

 Five images of her fulfilling masculine mocked-up missions in army gear is overlaid by her contorted body as she retrains on gym beam. It is this flexibility to deny and reclaim gender stereotyping that makes Kate Kane so powerful.


In contrast, Tara Chace is unbending, determined, masculine and, as a result, brittle. Running on empty, Chace freezes, gets into fixes, gets shot, and above all is driven almost mad by the bureaucrats in London and undermine her decisions and treat her as a commodity. Following being attacked and electing to CHARGE at him like bloody lunatic  Chase is chastised by Mister Kinney; a higher up. "You! Chace! I want an answer by God! You stupid Bitch! Your orders were to draw them out, not to engage!" She is visibly exhausted, fag in mouth, the adrenaline having ripped through her. In a rage, she passes him "You have a problem with my performance, you're free to take it up with D-Ops.... at which point I'll be delighted to tell the home office about how you arrived just after the nick of time." The next time they meet, Chace is given a chance to explain her decision. [left] She smiles. "Next time you find someone shooting at you... and you're unarmed, try running towards the shooter" Then scowls "And pray the shooter isn't me."

Colin Smith, in his review of batwoman opens :

It's impossible to say whether "Batwoman: Elegy" is an angry comic book that's been written by an angry man.

But I strongly suspect that it is.

Not only is Rucka angry, but Kate Kane is furious and Chace, livid. In both series this anger is given meaning by the discrimination it responds to. Chase crumbles under the pressure of fulfilling the masculine role of spy, whilst being undermined by her female body; which gives scumbags like Kinney the opportunity to call her anything they want, undermine her decisions and insinuate that she is unable to cope with war. The female body takes the brunt; Chace self-medicates alcohol, cigarettes; whilst the brutal work of the active spy, and the stress and the strain of London politics additionally take their toll. The final panel of her time in the series shows her body dealing the final blow to active service as she sits holding a positive test for pregnancy. The battleground of Queen and Country is located not in Afganistan, Iraq, or in London, but in Chace's body which is devastated by active service. Despite this, Rucka does not suggest that Chace is unsuitable for active service, but rather that her female body impacts how the men around her respond to her work. It is society's perception of the woman at war which eventually destroys her career.

Kane on the other hand is removed from the army when she admits she is a lesbian.She removes herself from the institution that would seek to undermine her by choosing vigilantism. This choice allows her to experiment sexually and lose control of the stark and austere persona she had pursued in military school.

Another torn apart female body. 

 The choices she makes in her own appearance, sexual preferences, and the feats she performs are not politicised. Unlike Chace, she has less responsibility, and her body is not the battleground. Rucka's Post 9/11 pin-ups attack the institution. Not the military or MI6; but the institution of gender which expects women to perform like men, but continues to undermine them for the gender they attempt to conceal. Kate Kane's desire to serve her government has been squashed. Time and again that the insults of others; that she is too sexual, too feminine, too gay, too much, only feed an overarching desire to serve herself. Only by rejecting the constraints of  "institutionalised" gender roles and by living through their decisions, can Rucka's heroines coherently construct identities that are strong and female.

Blackwell (Series) and the Female Legacy.

*Spoiler warning* This post contains spoilers. It will ruin your gaming experience, but those spoilers are necessary to explore the gender narratives of this excellent collection of games. So if you don't think you will play, you're not interested in point and click, or want to read my analysis anyway, read on gentle traveller. p.s. Most of the spoilers come from the first game in the series: The Blackwell Legacy.

[Trailer]

That's a ... pretty severe attitude,
wouldn't you say?

The Blackwell series is a collection of four point and click adventure games which trace the relationship and life of Roseangela Blackwell and the ghost that has haunted the women in her family for three generations. The game begins with Rosa scattering the ashes of her aunt, who, we learn later, was the previous host to smooth-talking 40s ghost Joey. Her voice is monotonous, and if you watched the trailer, like me you may have laughed at the opening line delivery by her voice actress. But as the game begins you quickly realise that her monotonous drawl is an intrinsic aspect of the disillusioned new yorker's personality. Rosa is anxious, she is shy, she is not charismatic and so the monotony of the voice is the culmination of these aspects. In a commentary that comes with the game, the writer Dave Gilbert compliments a colleague who animated Roseangela's walk, noting that she looks slumped and lazy; her walk is as hesitant as the character to whom it belongs.

Her isolation is illustrated by the games opening puzzle; a punk-ass teenager mans the door to her apartment, and refuses to let her in, because he knows everyone in the building, but he doesn't know her. From the players point of view, entering into a game about ghosts and spirits, you imagine shenanigans are afoot. Is she dead? Is this a dream? Is this kid pranking her? But it turns out that he simply doesn't know her, despite her living in her current apartment for several years. A freelance writer, Rosa, seems to fit a stereotype of a recluse. But then even this representation of an ordinary, dumpy, awkward woman as a protagonist of a video game is innovative.

As the game gets into full swing Joey appears, explains that Roseangela will be haunted the rest of her life, and that she must help restless spirits pass by solving the mysteries surrounding their deaths. Roseangela and Joey have a tense relationship which carries through several hours of gameplay without being resolved. Occasionally the ghost is flirtatious, occasionally cruel, and consistently his overt 40s sexist names, "doll", "kid" and "sweetheart", invade conversation. Joey is the vehicle that forces Rosa out of her apartment and into the adventure. To begin with he berates her, but they develop a more equal partnership once Rosangela appears to accept the role that she has been given.

So a ghost walks into a bar...

 At times, Rosa enjoys the ghost hunting, but this enjoyment is consistently overshadowed by the fear that she will, like her aunt, go insane. This is the threat that pushes her into ghost-hunting since the insanity is always articulated as a lack of acceptance of the role forced on them by Joey. Insanity pervades the first three games as a consistent theme set against the theme of death. Indeed for most of the characters that Joey and Rosa encounter one of two fates is laid before them: madness or death.

There is strong emphasis on the fact that Joey haunts only the female members of the family. Perhaps therefore he represents a particularly gendered form of madness. He frequently, terrifyingly, threatens his host that IF she reveals his existence she WILL be locked up in a loony bin, and that he will make her life a living hell. However light Rosa makes of these threats the game uses the achievement system (steam) to reinforce them. "Crowd Control" is awarded if you never speak to your ghostly friend in the presence of another character.

Blackwell Unbound is the second game in the series and it follows Lauren's (Rosa's aunt's) time with Joey. The game is sad. Throughout you know of Lauren's unhappy ending in the mental asylum. Within the game, as the trailer shows, Lauren is warned that she "may die". "Oh, is that all?" she replys. Ironically it is the insanity that she fears which is to be her fate.

In placing the two female protagonists in this bind; with only a choice between ghost hunting and insanity, Dave Gilbert creates an interesting narrative about female fear and agency. Rosangela certainly is a character who prides herself on clarity: a freelance reporter her intelligence and analytic skills are the source of her self-esteem (limited though it is). Thus she takes more pride in working out how to drug a neighbour's dog than in having established a friendship with that neighbour in the first place. Not making sense and loss of agency is far more threatening than isolation. Joey has removed the majority of that agency, so little wonder that the Women in Rosa's family have fallen into madness. Incoherence is a particular fear for a well-educated, probably (ambivalently) feminist, character. Aware and frustrated that there is a "Legacy" of madness amongst women in her family, Rosa has over-compensated.

There is a recurrent spot where the
pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous
eyes stare at you upside down.

Another legacy emerges. If we consider literature and women's history, we stumble upon other narratives of the female search for clarity, and for being taken seriously. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story traces a young woman who under the rest cure stares at patterns in the wallpaper, and in them she finds her own form of clarity but in the process goes insane. Outspoken women, difficult women, angry women, frustrated women, have through the century been derided, laughed at and considered insane by those around them. In my family, we have our own legacy of female madness. By which I mean, my granny was difficult, my mother is emotional, and I am both. Rosa's visceral fight to maintain coherence, despite her paranormal activities, is her fight against the supposed hysteria that has plagued her family.

Typically in videogames, the central aim is to not die. The choices you make have consequences that will or will not lead you to death. If you fail to jump here, or you miss the quick-time event there, then the consequences for your character will be a swift and painful death. In the context of a point and click, especially this one, the only consequence for failure is not progressing with the narrative. In this regard, the fear of loss of agency is elegantly placed in a point and click character; because failure leads to stasis; not unlike the rest cure that Aunt Lauren suffered. By using the frustration of point and click to articulate Roseangela's working role, Gilbert demonstrates that her sarcasm, her irritable personality and her self-imposed isolation might have deeper feminist anxiety driving them. The fear of being incoherent.

Indie Games for Girls (and Boys) Introduction

Blackwell: Excellent Games for Girls (and Boys)

So there was This interesting article on the Mary Sue about upcoming releases. It is a list of anticipated triple A games that were due for release that might be interesting to the Mary Sue's predominantly female readership. I was pleased to see that they went for the games with guns, the games that are typically not placed in women's demographic. I was just a little disappointed by the lack of indie titles, though they did include "Torchlight 2". So this post is probably going be part of a series of reviews and previews of existing indie titles, through my inevitably rose-tinted glasses. I'll start with the Blackwell games, a series of point and click adventures so good they were worth playing twice. Then in upcoming articles I'd like to cover, The Binding of Issac, a game I have sunk seventy hours into (and counting) and perhaps I'll do a couple of shorter articles on interesting titles and the problems they encounter when they use gender in their titles Nimbus, Hamilton's Great Adventure, and Dangerous High school Girls in Trouble. In each case I hope to interrogate the gaming industries stereotyping of female characters and explore the claims that female characters are under-represented or poorly characterized.

My decision to look at indie games is two-fold. First this is a less well trodden path; fewer people look at indie games as a medium. Secondly, indie games are not constrained by the barriers placed on games produced by established publishers. Without the marketers and businessmen's input, in theory, these video games should represent a wider selection of female characters. My aim with these reviews and articles is wonder at how games now are representing women, and to consider exactly what makes for decent female character development, and what is the result when bad characterization enters games. 

Are women playing the major roles?

How interactive are female characters? 

And, especially important, how do game mechanics delineate gender? 

Video games are medium unto themselves. By exploring the specifically interactive modes that these games use to articulate gender, I will be able to show how games should be designing female characters to depict their strengths, and their weakness in ways that cohere with game mechanics, art design and characterisation. 

Madness Returns: Puberty is Pretty Rough.

'This unmitigated disaster is your doing. And it will get worse. Your Train keeps a hellish schedule. Get moving... The change has begun'

'The train is perfectly capable of terrifying me, Cat.'

Alice: Madness Returns is not the best game ever made, but it is certainly the best in-game exposition of female puberty.

Video games traditionally under-represent women. With a couple of exceptions such as Metroid, Portal, and Red Dead Redemption, women in games are not well rounded. Thinking on the characters that come to mind from this brief list, what makes, Samus, Galdos, Chell and Bonnie different is their overt masculine qualities. Feminine and vulnerable women are generally over-sexed, whiny or difficult. They are foils to the protagonist, that is, if they merit inclusion at all.

Initially Alice circumvents these issues by presenting it's eponymous protagonist as a child. She begins the game in a doctor's office, as she leaves a very young kid enters the office saying: 'It's my turn to forget, Alice.' No delineation, other than height, is made between the teen Alice and the six or seven year old boy. She wears the simple smock of her infantile brethren, and whilst she is almost twice as tall as these strange dwarfish children she is similarly wan and pale. She has been in therapy a long long time. Her vulnerability is her initial personality. Her wonderland seems at best escapist: the game to stop a runaway train is Alice's attempt to eradicate the memory of childhood trauma.

The wonderland we first encounter is captivating, light and absolutely stunning. Whilst helpless in London, unable to so much as jump; in her fantasy she is lighter than air. Her skirts allow her to triple jump across wide expanses of sky. Alice's initial experience of wonderland is childhood fantasy becoming a reality. Careless and and free she negotiates the simple and linear opening level of Madness Returns with ease. That is, until she finds the vorpal blade, and meets her first enemies, dolls and black slime, combined together. Blood, and the shedding of blood, becomes her first taste of dealing with the difficulties and frustrations of an aggravated childhood. Her transformation from child to adult is initiated through these attacks.

As Alice grows steadily more experienced in violence, and aggression she gains an adult understanding of the world. The game's writers links narrative transition directly to character development. As pubescent fantasy, the story is carried predominantly by Alice's sexual experiences. The more blood she sheds, and the more deeply entrenched she becomes in wonderland, the easier it is to re-examine her past. Her childhood, we learn was torn apart by the fire in which her parents and sister were killed, as she struggles to piece together these experiences she battles the horror and fear which all teenage girls encounter. But Alice has the advantage of experiencing these emotions and the difficulties through a fantasy in which she wields a razor sharp knife. Lucky girl.

Perhaps if such monsters were not presented, the knife would be turned upon her own body. Wonderland offers not simple a childish escape but the opportunity for action. As she destroys life, Alice becomes the active character in an inert world. This is emphasised by her encounter with the Walrus. As in the original Alice game, the side characters are unable to escape the clutches of passivity. The Walrus has Alice round up his cast, mutters the inescapable riddles. The side characters, with the exception of the cat, watch the oncoming destruction of wonderland without batting an eyelid. They welcome and submit to oncoming disaster because inaction is so tempting, so easy. They too, seem like children, trapped in the fantasy of wonderland but unwilling to take the action which would allow them to grow.

By continually battling the violent the demons which plague and destroy her childhood wonderland, Alice is negotiating the path to adulthood. Unable to remain as it was, wonderland is a spectre to which Alice clings but can no longer sustain. Either she chooses to forget, to ignore the traumas of her past as her Doctor suggests, (The doctor later reveals his true motives) or she fights through and embraces the trials and difficulties of puberty. In creating this narrative the developers have produced a brilliantly polished character The narrative is driven, not be the illusive and ridiculous notion of a gothic train, but by Alice's desire to grow. The train represents the onslaught of technology and development, these are things Alice does not really reject at all. She recognises that her nostalgia for wonderland is destructive, another kind of forgetting, which would ultimately lead to her own destruction. Whilst all around her cling to the past, she fights for the future. The train is not her enemy, it is merely her means of getting places.

Alice is no longer able to stay in her childhood fantasy, she must except the onslaught of puberty. This is made particularly clear when she comes to the red queen's castle and is confronted with a long heart-shaped passageway. Red and slimy, it drips, it is, after all a vagina. This blood is not limiting, it is liberating. By walking the passage Alice's development continues and culminates in meeting with the red queen. A mirror image of Alice herself or perhaps her sister, the queen decodes the riddle: 'The train is trying to destroy all evidence of your past, and especially the fire.' Through self-reflection, Alice can find the truth. Through individual growth she can save herself. The deadliness of self-reflection is another theme throughout Madness Returns. The potent philosophy of escapism and avoidance is encouraged by wonderland's cast of characters, but Alice must defy them.

As a videogame Alice: Madness Returns thrives because it counteracts the persistent lack of control present in Carroll's novel with interactive gameplay. The game allows that sense of self-control, and engagement which the original story never delivered. As Alice becomes more deadly, and more aware of sex the in-game collectable memories offer a new narrative.

Rather than simply being told things the narrative allows Alice to re-experience memories in a new and sexualised light. She talks of the fluffy undergraduates who fell in love with her older sister. And in one unerring moment of self-consciousness, Alice remembers the advances of one creepy old man whose advances turned towards her younger self. This, is Carroll himself, or rather Charles Dodgson who appealed to the real Alice Liddell, sent his manuscripts and it is believed; asked for nude photos. The writing in this game is astounding, revealing and dangerous. Rather than shirking responsibilities, or being too attached to the material, (one thinks of Burton's Alice) it interrogates the author, and the story.

Madness Returns is a game all girls should play. Alice is weak, she is terrorised, tortured only to be empowered by action. Her puberty is a process of violence, death and emotion. Rather than being tempered, she fights, rather than being sexy she is sexually aware. By smattering the game with sticky juices Alice becomes a gripping and engaging experience, which encourages reflection. Rather than escapist fantasy, wonderland becomes the space in which Alice can investigate her own burgeoning self-awareness. The game offers teenage girls a similar space to encounter the realities of a bloody and violent puberty so rarely touched upon by mainstream culture.