This week I got lots lost in Arts Two, got my timetable mixed up twice and couldn’t work out how to use the university printing system. Clearly if woman game player stereotypes need a normal saviour: it’s not me.
To further incriminate myself when I was a young girl Tomb Raider was my favourite game because I wanted to be Lara Croft. I didn’t think she was real (had that going for me at least plus the graphics weren’t that good by todays standards) but wanted to be her all the same.
Keeping in mind though, nineties media in general wasn’t orientated toward feminism. There was the ‘girl power’ movement which was more a marketing tool than anything, which the Spice Girls were kind of the figure head of. “Look girls you can be empowered by identifying with one of this sexy woman stereotypes. What you’re a man? Never fear, we have you covered as well because in the music videos you can see their nipples through their shirt.” Don’t even get me started on the ‘supermodel’ phenomenon.
Another way of looking at this is given the social power of the ‘sexy female’ figure in the nineties I don’t think you can dismiss Tomb Raider as a voyeuristic spectacle. Plus you can’t get around the fact that in the game Lara does awesome action stuff, which puts her outside the model of the passive muse: for which the male hero fights or the nurturer: which helps or enables the hero in some form. You could blanket term these as an ‘enabler’ role which women characters often take in videogames. Lara is not an enabler, she’s not even a female character option: she’s it. She’s the only character aside from bears and tigers and the like.
GLaDOS from Portal is still an enabler and let’s face it even if she’s not directly sexualised she’s instructing you in the use of ‘magic portals’ it’s not much if a leap to make something sexual out of that. I haven’t played Portal, so perhaps I should stop picking on it.
Well, that’s my rather weak justification of why it’s ok that I wanted to be Lara Croft (just keep telling yourself that’s normal.)
Having said this: its not the nineties anymore! This is not a universal justification.
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