"Ok, it looks like I can open them from here,
but I won't be able to come in with you.
Here goes!"
In 2013, 2K games released Bioshock Infinite,
the eagerly-anticipated follow-up to the
earlier, hugely-successful Bioshock games.
Infinite's story centers on a man named
Booker DeWitt,
a private investigator with a bloody past
who takes on a mysterious assignment.
"Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt."
What follows is Booker's adventure
to the flying city of Columbia,
where the girl, Elizabeth,
has been imprisoned in a tower
for her entire life.
Busting her out of captivity,
while she busts out of her corset,
Booker shoots his way across Columbia,
getting caught up in all sorts of drama
in the process.
As the game tells players
a garbage story which suggests that
oppressed people are just as bad
as their oppressors
and that the truth is always somewhere
in the middle.
But that's much too big a can of worms
for us to open in this video.
Let's just focus on Elizabeth.
Elizabeth possesses an incredible ability
to open portals to other timelines -
an ability that plays a significant role
in the plot as Booker and Elizabeth
hop forward and backward
and from side to side in time --
leaping from one version of Columbia to another,
and sometimes thrusting Booker
into the past or the future.
So, as a plot device,
which drives elements of the game's narrative,
she's very significant.
In gameplay terms, however,
Elizabeth serves a different kind of role:
that of a glorified door opener.
"Here you go."~
As with most shooters,
Bioshock Infinite often puts you in situations
where you can't progress until you've
cleared an area of enemies.
The way that it frequently does this
is by blocking doors to the next area
that can't be opened by Booker.
Only Elizabeth can do this,
which she does only when all the enemies
have been killed.
For all of her tremendous powers,
Elizabeth is reduced by the game's mechanics
to doing the most basic and menial of tasks.
And waiting around for her to open a door
becomes a significant aspect of how
players experience her.
"Let me scout ahead;
see if there's some way to move forward."
Of course, she performs other actions as well:
sometimes tossing Booker ammo,
first aid, or other useful items.
Or opening tears through which he can have her
summon things,
like weapons or killer robots to help him in combat.
Now there's nothing inherently wrong
with the idea of characters who play a
supporting role in combat situations.
But Elizabeth is an example of a female sidekick
who is reduced to a tool.
There aren't gameplay mechanics
that allow you to have meaningful
interactions with her.
She just opens doors and dispenses useful things
and her tear-opening powers are not her own,
but yours to call on and control
with the press of a button.
"Elizabeth -- a little help?"
"Looks simple enough."
At other times,
she's less like a person and more like
a sexualized slot machine
tossing you the occasional coin.
"Here you go!"
"You're a lion.
As a glorified gatekeeper,
Elizabeth joins a long tradition of female sidekicks
including Alex, from Half-Life 2,
and its follow-up episodes,
and Yorda, from the much-beloved ICO,
whose magic is needed to activate doors,
staircases, and other mechanisms
that allow players to advance.
Yorda also has the distinction of being
the quintessential example of what I call
"the damsel escort mission."
You know, after making three whole videos
about damsels,
I'd kind of hoped to never have
to talk about them again.
But gaming's love of using helpless women
as both narrative and gameplay devices
was too much for even those videos to contain.
Damsel Escort Missions occur when a
female character joins the male-player character
but is largely helpless;
and rather than being a clear benefit to the player,
she feels more like a burden.
In ICO,
players free Yorda from a cage early on,
she then joins Ico on this journey,
and much of the game consists of solving puzzles
so that Yorda, who can't make leaps
or climb walls on her own
can traverse the environment.
Meanwhile, players also need
to protect her from the shadow monsters
who sometimes try to whisk her away.
Spoiler alert!
Yes, in the ending cut scene
Yorda carries Ico out of the crumbling castle.
But what the narrative tells us or shows us
in the end doesn't undo the impact
of how we experience a character
through the gameplay.
Another classic Damsel Escort Mission
occurs in Resident Evil 4,
where Ashley Graham,
the president's daughter,
has caused players tremendous frustration
over the years by burdening them
with the need to protect and manage her.
Whether they are presented
capable or helpless,
female companions often encounter situations
in which they just can't proceed on their own.
Ellie in The Last of Us , for instance, is
hardly a Yorda-like damsel, but when she
encounters a body of water
she may as well be.
And Joel has to go out of his way to get her across.
Now look: there's a lot to admire about
The Last of Us,
but I guarantee you,
nobody's favorite part of that game
was helping Ellie get across the water.
A good rule of thumb is that
if you spend any portion of a game
carrying a female character around,
it's a pretty safe bet that it at least has
some elements of the Damsel Escort Mission.
"Ow! You're heavier than you look!"
To be clear,
there's nothing whatsoever inherently wrong
with depictions of people helping each other
in times of difficulty;
in anything, we could do with a lot more
narratives that focus on companionship,
cooperation, and support.
But the models games give us
rarely offer experiences in which
this kind of support is truly mutual.
Instead we see a pattern of men
frequently carrying and helping women
in situations where they are otherwise helpless.
This pattern is rooted in sexist ideas about men
as protectors and women as the ones who need
this kind of protection.
It's coded into the gameplay that men
are the ones who kill and protect;
and women are the ones who experience
moments of helplessness and need to be carried.
When these female characters are of aid
to the players,
often in rudimentary ways,
as a glorified door opener
or even as a more basic tool.
In the Ocarina of Time dungeon,
"Inside Jabu-Jabu's Belly,"
players must carry the snobby princess Ruto
around, at one point even using her as a weight
to press down a switch.
And in Metal Gear Solid 5,
you've got four sidekick options
to take with you on missions:
a dog, a horse, a robot, and a woman.
Finally, female companions often function
as cheerleaders, doling out little ego boosts
to players for gunning down bad guys
or pulling off other feats.
"And I have to get you out of here.
Now come with me!"
Along with the glorified door opening
and the damsel-like aspects
female sidekicks are there to make players
feel better about themselves;
to make them feel important and skilled.
"You did it! You did it!"
"Wow! You're so cool!"
"You're just trying to impress me"
"Are you impressed?
Got all those guys all by myself."
But these interactions are rarely depicted
as mutually-supportive.
It's not nearly as common in these scenarios
for the male player character to offer
emotional support to their female sidekick:
to tell her that she's doing a great job!
These particular sidekicks aren't designed as
characters that players can actively engage in
developing a relationship with -
characters who are fully fleshed-out people
with their own goals and desires that sometimes
require players to compromise
their own wants or desires.
This pattern of female sidekicks
who serve more as gameplay devices,
door openers and ego boosts
than as people
is a design approach rooted in the idea of
games as power fantasy.
Players get to feel powerful and important,
sometimes issuing orders that are obeyed
without hesitation or doubt.
Companion dynamics in games
almost never model what equal footing,
cooperation, and collaboration in a relationship
might look like,
but instead serve to make the player feel like
the center of the world:
the one in control,
which is not at all a model for healthy relationships.
Of course, a huge number of games
focus on men fighting alongside other men,
and in these games, the male companions
often have some of the same characteristics
we sometimes see in female companions.
"And that's at least ten more confirmed, Hunter 2-1.
Good shooting."
It's very common for male characters to compliment
the player on their good shooting,
or to breach a door that the player character
can't open himself.
However, typically these characters are presented
as equal participants in the conflict,
in shooters ranging from Call of Duty to
Gears of War,
the player's male companions are armed
active, and are portrayed as playing their part
to fend off or eliminate the enemy threat.
Occasionally in these games,
male characters do have to protect other men,
but unlike scenarios in which men protect women,
these less common instances don't reinforce
preexisting cultural attitudes about
men women, and gender.
Similarly, the occasional situation in which
a female character protects a male one,
which happens in the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot,
among other games,
also isn't a problem,
because it doesn't work to reinforce
limiting, harmful ideas about women or men
that already exist in our culture.
In other words,
we live in a culture that says,
generally speaking,
men should be the protectors and
women should be the protected.
When women function as competent companions
whose skills are more or less equal
to those of the player character,
it can challenge these ideas.
The Last of Us goes against the grain
by giving us the character of Tess,
a somewhat rare and refreshing example
of a woman who fights alongside
the male protagonist.
In the later Gears of War games
do a decent job of including
female squad members
who are on equal footing with
their male counterparts.
And thankfully, we're seeing more games
that complicate and subvert the old patterns,
providing players with relationships
with supporting characters who don't function
as mere extensions of the player,
but who feel like separate, individual people.
The 2016 indie title, One Night Stand,
throws players into a situation with a female
character who clearly has her own feelings and
her own desires.
Communicating with her is a matter
of trying to find some common ground
for mutual understanding,
not one in which the player is in total control
of the situation.
In Left Behind, the wonderful add-on
to The Last of Us,
Ellie's companion Riley is not someone
players can issue orders to
or someone they have to protect.
Riley is constantly active,
often taking control of the situation,
sometimes competing and being playful
with Ellie, and as a result,
she doesn't feel anything like the
companion characters in most games --
or even anything like Ellie herself
felt in the original game.
Instead, she feels much more like a
real person accompanying Ellie on the journey.
And while Trico
in 2016's The Last Guardian might not be
a human character,
he does possess some of the characteristics
we'd like to see more of in
human companions in games.
Asking Trico to do things isn't a simple matter
of pushing a button and watching him
immediately obey.
He's not a simple tool;
not just an extension of the player.
Sometimes he's hesitant,
reluctant, even frustrating.
But this makes it feel more like
he's a living, breathing creature
with thoughts and feelings of his own.
And by taking time to pet him,
you can sometimes express your connection
to him in ways that fall outside of the requirements
of the gameplay and the story.
And crucially, Trico is often the one
protecting the player,
rather than the other way around.
He does not exist to fuel a power fantasy,
but to allow for gameplay mechanics
that focus on cooperation, care, and
helping each other.
When supporting female characters in games
don't have this kind of depth,
when they exist primarily to be protected
or to be ordered around,
they not only reinforce harmful ideas about gender,
they also fail as characters.
Regardless of their gender, race, class
or sexuality, a person is more than a tool.
And more than a burden.
And games can and should give us
mechanics and stories that reflect that.