There was a brief period in history when this term kinda made sense, as it described those who played video games, as opposed to majority of the population who did not. It also made sense to pretend we actually have something in common due to the fact we enjoy video games back when there was a legitimate threat that government might actually ban this form of entertainment. We felt kinship to each other, because we felt we had a common enemy: a gray haired, conservative lawyer who later got himself disbarred. But that was then.

This may represent you… Unless you are a PC gamer. Or use a different console.

Today the term gamer is useless because everyone plays video games and the game industry has gotten so huge and profitable that there is no threat of it ever going away. Take five random gamers and put them in a room, and chances are they won’t have much to talk about other than recent releases or upcoming games. Let’s do a quick thought experiment: imagine the following 6 people who can all be classified as “gamers”.

• Person A: likes Call of Duty, Battlefield and MADDEN.
• Person B: likes Civilization, Total War series and obscure turn based strategy games.
• Person C: likes Dreamfall, Gone Home and Life is Strange.
• Person D: plays League of Legends almost exclusively.
• Person E: runs a big corporation in Eve Online
• Person F: buys all those weird train simulator games on Steam

I made these examples up, but you know that folks like that exist. Think about what all these different people get out of the gaming hobby? Notice how completely different their favorite games are. How broad the spectrum of experiences gaming offers for all kinds of different folks from different paths of life? What do these six individuals have in common? The fact that they consume interactive media using a computer or a dedicated gaming console. That’s about it.

Just some gamer type folk at this years E3 (via digitaltrends.com E3 photo coverage)

How do we even define who is a gamer? If we say gamer is someone who plays and enjoys video games then this covers almost everyone alive today. This includes your grandma who loves her some Candy Crush on the iPad she got for her 90^th birthday. If this is the case, then the term is pretty much meaningless. Why do we even need it? It would actually be more useful to have a term for people who still don’t play video games since they would be a minority.

Pictured here: a gamer. (via Debra Husz)

There is this notion, that the definition of the term gamer should be more narrow and constrained. Younger generations for example don’t consider “grown-ups” like parents, teachers or the elderly to be “real” gamers. So is gaming a youth culture thing then? Not necessarily. Teenage Jocks who exclusively play sports games with their bros are as likely to get declared to be non-gamers as teenage girls who spend most of their time typing in descriptive emotes into WoW chat on a slow role playing server.

Some argue that to be a gamer you have to play a certain kind of games. So someone who likes “walking simulators” and adventure games is excluded. Except, perhaps if they like the right kind of adventure games, like Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle or the right Sierra games. Someone may tell you that a person who only owns a WiiU console and uses it as a primary gaming machine is not a true gamer. Except maybe if they are a huge fan of the correct Zelda and Mario games which are the right kinds of classic games to like. Wherever you draw the line, there are always special exclusions.

Some say that gamers are people who are passionate about the industry, who follow the gaming news and are active in online gaming communities. But that does not seem right either. Folks such as Anita Sarkesian or Leigh Alexander for example are extremely passionate, and very active online, and yet some adamantly claim they are not and cannot be gamers. Same goes for women who spend months crafting elaborate cossplay costumes and go to gaming conventions and conferences dressed up as their favorite video game characters. There is a lot of gate-keeping that allows some people to be “gamers” just because, while at the same time requiring others to have legitimate and “ideologically pure” motives to even want to aspire to that term.

Pictured here: gamer who is passionate and opinionated about her hobby.

What it boils down to is that the term “gamer” is basically used to denote “people who are like me, and who like the same things as I do” as opposed to the others. People who like the wrong kind of games, wrong kind of consoles, or express the wrong kinds of opinions about the games you like are not gamers. Or maybe they are gamers with an asterisk: casual gamers, fake gamer girls, game-bros, posers, etc.. And whether you are in or out of this exclusive club changes from group to group. You might self-identify as a gamer, but whether or not you will be accepted as one outside of your immediate social circles may very much depend on random attributes like the type of games you enjoy, the type of console you own, how closely you follow the industry gossip, your race, your gender, your political views, and etc. In other words, it’s completely arbitrary. It’s basically synonym for “my gaming buddies” or “the folks from my favorite gaming board”.

True gamers wear rainbow collored trilbies. All others are casuals.

So the definition of the term is either so broad it’s meaningless, or so narrow and arbitrary it is useless. There is no such thing as “gamer identity” or “gamer culture” because no one can agree on what these things could be. And any group who thinks they know what true gamer culture is, simply narrowed down the definition of the term gamer to conveniently exclude everyone who disagrees. Gaming is mainstream, and so by definition gaming culture is mainstream culture. Gamer is someone who consumes games. Gamer is a consumer of a product. What kind of identity is that?

Note how other media forms don’t have an equivalent term. There is no word for people who watch movies, read books, listen to music or enjoy art. Terms such as bibliophile, audiophile or film buff have an entirely different connotation. We use them to describe connoisseurs with refined tastes and deep knowledge of the medium. But people who are connoisseurs of gaming, and want to analyze games as works of art, dissect their themes and discuss their issues are frequently labeled as outsiders who don’t get “gaming culture” and can’t enjoy a good game. People who are the most vocal about their “gamer identity” don’t see themselves as medium’s experts. They self-identify as non-discerning, uncritical hyper-consumers.

Pictured here: a film buff. (via Brows Held High)

That’s not necessarily something to be proud of or something to aspire to. But it gets worse. In recent years the term gamer started to accumulate even more, derogatory connotations. Yes, I’m aware that in the past some people might have used “gamer” as a drop in replacement for “nerd” when they wanted to be insulting. You could argue that it was always somewhat derogatory. This is different though. These days people who love games, and are passionate about gaming related things are reluctant to label themselves as gamers, because the term has been tainted.

Not only does it describe indiscriminate hyper-consumer but it also stands for toxic, entitled behavior that has always been the bane of gaming communities. Gamers are the angry teenagers shouting slurs, obscenities and threats into voice chat. Gamers are entitled biggots who thing gaming should be a safe space for white males where they can be sexist, racist and homophobic without fear of getting called out on it. Gamers are the people who demand to debate feminists critics and insist on lecturing them about journalistic ethics. Gamers are people who are too busy making seven hour log Youtube vlogs about “Cultural Marxism” and spamming Twitter hashtags with anime porn to actually play any video games. Granted, not everyone thinks this way. But more and more people realize you can be passionate about video games without being a gamer. Especially if large online communities don’t consider you a gamer, and seek to exclude you.

Gamers are this fucking asshole in the background who probably thinks he is hilarious.

Here is the thing though: even if a bunch of entitled manchildren decrees you do not fit their arbitrary definition of what it means to be a gamer, it does not prevent you from playing games or talking about them online or offline with like minded people. Because, again, gaming is mainstream now. There are more and more gaming publications targeted at more discerning consumers, connoisseurs and people who want deeper analysis. AAA publishers are slowly realizing they can actually sell games to demographics other than entitled white male teenagers and college students. As reasonable people simply stop identifying as “gamers” (but rather as, say, game enthusiasts) and disassociate themselves from “gaming culture” whatever that might be, the concept of what it means to be a gamer changes for worse. In such an environment being a gamer is all about performing the right behaviors, and adhering to the right stereotypes. It is about perpetuating the toxicity, aggressively policing those who step out of the line, and extensive gate-keeping.

The meaning is slowly shifting from “person who has acceptable opinions about the games I like and is not member of a group I hate” to “insufferable jerk whom I already blocked on Twitter”.

How will gamers be remembered 20 years from now? Likely as bunch of entitled, angry internet assholes. In fact, it’s entirely possible that the inevitable Simpsons reboot will replace the annoying comic book guy with smug gamer dude whose catchphrase is going to be “actually, it’s about ethics…” Because, lets face it – being a know-it-all fan of comic books is not going to be weird for people that don’t remember a time when Marvel and DC did not dominate Hollywood. Being super smug and weird about liking ultra-popular AAA games that everyone likes on the other hand. That’s actually rather comical.

As an actual Slavic person, who was born and grew up in Poland, I feel that I should chime in here.

Witcher 3 does not contain any people of color not because of “mythology” or “history” or “book lore” but most likely because CD Project Red never even considered adding non white characters to their game. They literally forgot that non-white people even exist, which is something that happens when you are a white person, living in predominantly white culture, and consuming predominantly white media. You can literally spend a few years making a cool video game, designing awesome monsters, and interesting characters, and not even once consider giving one of them a darker skin color. Folks who made the game not evil racists (at least I don’t think they are), they just happened to do a thing that white people very often do, which is to ignore everyone that does not look like them. By doing so they contributed to erasure of non-white people in the industry. Witcher 3 is yet another game that features exactly zero people of color. This is a problem.

Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt

It may not be a problem to you, but it is one to many, many people who love and enjoy video games. If you don’t understand why it is a problem to them, or why they would like to see themselves represented in their media… Well, you are a part of the problem.

If Witcher 3 was the only game released this year which was found lacking with respect to race and representation, we would not be having this discussion. But it is not. It is a part of a cultural trend that extends beyond video games and into all popular media we consume. It’s an issue that is bigger than video games.

Because of that, criticism that calls game devs out for lacking diversity it is valid, and constructive. This is something we most definitely should be talking about in reviews, so that CD Project Red (and the industry as a whole) can improve. After all, the dev team did not fail out of menace, but out of ignorance. And the only way to combat ignorance is to make people aware of these issues. Defending the lack of diversity in the game citing “mythology” or “historical accuracy” is incredibly silly and disingenuous.

Firstly, Polish/Slavic mythology isn’t really a thing.^[1] You can’t talk about it in the same way as you talk about Norse mythology or ancient Greek or even Egyptian mythology. There is no concrete body of mythological lore you can print in a book and use as a game setting.^[2]

The ancient Slavic people that roamed central and eastern Europe territories that we now recognize as Poland left virtually no written records. Most of their religious beliefs, customs, rituals and stories have been very successfully erased from history by the efforts of the Catholic Church. For example, there is no such thing as a Slavic people’s version of the creation myth. Doubtlessly such a myth must have existed, but we have no knowledge of it. It was lost to history.^[3] While we know of a handful of Slavic gods that were worshiped, most of what we know about them is based on conjecture based on analysis of the precious few stone and wooden idols that were not smashed or burned by the Inquisition, and church records.

In fact, most of what we know about the religious customs of the day has been sourced from notes of Christian monks about three or four hundred years after the last Polish pagans have died. The same monks who have been actively suppressing that very knowledge for more than a few centuries. There are scant few bits and pieces of folklore that has survived to this day via oral traditions, customs. Some are enduring part of Polish culture to these days. But even those those were scrubbed and sanitized over the ages loosing much of their original meaning and significance. So anyone telling you that Witcher 3 is based on actual Slavic mythology is full of shit. We literally know more about the religion and myths of fictional land of Westeros than those of very real, pre-Christian Poles.

Things that are not authentic Slavic mythology: dwarfs, elves, witchers and whatever the fuck that horned thing is.

Yes, some of the names of the monsters in the game are indeed based on Slavic, and more specifically Polish folklore. But the rest is almost entirely made up. The Witcher novels on which the game is based are pretty standard Fantasy with some “domestic” themes and folklore thrown in. In fact, A. Sapkowski’s entire shtick for early Witcher stories was to take a classic fairy tale (more often something from Grimm Brother’s rather than from actual Slavic folklore), apply 90’s style “edgy” filter by making everyone curse like a sailor, have the Witcher blunder into the mess and then reveal the good guys are actually the bad guys at the end. The books are standard Fantasy pulp, with very standard Fantasy elves and dwarfs imported directly from Tolkien. Geralt’s story arc pivots around fairy tales and trope subversions to ultimately fall into an Arthurian heroic archetype. Sapkowski swims in anachronisms and constantly winks at the readers to the point of breaking the fourth wall.

Also, Witchers, mutated monster slayers with super powers are not, and never have been part of Slavic mythology. Or any mythology for that matter. They are entirely made up by A. Sapkowski who, could easily trademark the term “witcher”, if he has not done so already.

Coincidentally he said pretty much the same things about Polish mythology in an essay he Publihsed in 1992:

Andrzej Sapkowski, Piróg alboNie ma złota w Szarych Górach, Berlin, November 1992

Witcher 3 pedigree is as much D&D, pulp fantasy and Tolkien as it is Slavic mythology. Sapkowski never intended it to be held up as a celebration of Slavic mythology. He was mainly interested in writing interesting story, with interesting setting and cool characters. You can read the rest of the essay (in Polish) on Scribid.

So please, spare me the whole “based on Slavic mythology” excuse, because it is bullshit.

The argument from “historical accuracy” is also moot and void, because the game does not take place in a historical period, but in an entirely imaginary setting. But if we wanted to be sticklers about it and say it is supposed to be “based on” Poland as it existed at some point in time (but, you know, with elves, and werewolfs and drowners) it still would not make sense. As I mentioned above, we don’t know much about Polish history prior to year 966, when pagan chieftain Mieszko I was baptized and crowned by the Roman Catholic Pope. This was a shrewd political move as it legitimized Poland as an official Christian nation, and meant our western neighbors could no longer try to annex our territories in the name of “spreading the faith”. The story of Mieszko is literally page one of our official history as a nation. We really don’t know all that much about our pagan ancestors. We do know that Slavic people did travel and traded by sea and by land, and not just with their immediate neighbors because that’s what you do when you are in Europe.

Painting by Polish artist Józef_Brandt depicting the scene from a Polish-Ottoman war.

Poland, as you may be aware is not some lonely island in the middle of a Pacific ocean where it would be isolated from other cultures . It is a country smack dab in the middle of the big cultural melting pot that is Europe. At the height of it’s power, Polish and Polish allied territories stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Poles traded with, and warred with the Ottoman Empire, Tartars, Mongols and etc.. Polish medieval fashion was full of Eastern or Southern influences. The staple of Polish nobleman attire were ornamental silk belts, and Winged Husars (elite cavalrymen) would adorn their armor with leopard pelts. Neither silk nor leopards are native to Poland, but these materials were imported from Asian and African nations. That means traders, scholars, political envoys… Not to mention that Polish territories also have always had sizable population of Roma people.

I have not noticed it at first, but others pointed out that the map of Witcher 3 universe is essentially a map of Poland rotated in such a way as to specifically erase the neighboring regions that had significant non-white population:

The world of The Witcher books and novels is most emphatically not just the world of Poland. Great swaths of the third game take place in Nilfgaard, the plain-as-day Holy Roman Empire analogue. The Northern Kingdoms are rather obvious as the fragmentary kingdom of Poland before the time of Casimir the Great in the fourteenth century, although individual kingdoms like Temeria have strong flavor from other medieval monarchies like France. There is even a group of islands to stand in for the kingdom of Denmark! The Witcher is Polish, but it is definitely peddling a vision of neo-medievalism that encompasses the greater part of Europe. And, at least for me, what is the most striking aspect of the map? Well, it’s been rotated ninety degrees counter-clockwise and cropped so that Poland’s eastern and southern neighbors functionally exist no longer. It’s just fuckin’ deserts and mountains there, move along. That means no Huns, no Avars, no Magyars, no Pechenegs, no Khazars, no Cumans, no Turks, no Mongols, and no Ottomans can have analogues here, none of the nomadic peoples of color who shaped the face of medieval and modern Europe. That’s really weird, isn’t it? A history of Poland without Hungary or the Golden Khanate is unimaginable to me, yet here it is, and people are defending it as “historically accurate,” whatever that means.

Granted, the world was not designed by CD Project Red. This particular bit can probably be entirely blamed on Sapkowski, and as an author he has the right to set up his world any way he likes. But people defending the game using “historical accuracy” should probably note how the map was manipulated to specifically exclude a number of Poland’s neighbors.

Winged Hussars, Polish elite heavy cavalry. Note the leopard and tiger pelts.

My point is that if you wanted to include a non-white person in a story set in Poland at any point in history, it would take a minimal amount of research to come up with a believable, and historically “accurate” back story for that character. In fact, this works for just about any region or time period in medieval Europe. Observe:

Q: How do we get Morgan Freeman into a Robin Hood story?
A: IDK, crusades or something.

Done. It makes sense (just as much as anything in Robin Hood story would), is historically plausible, and does not really require complex explanation. It’s literally that simple.

But, once again, the world of Witcher 3 is not historical Poland. You don’t really even need a plausible explanation. If CD Project Red wanted to be even a little bit diverse, they could totally do it. Perhaps by including some traders from the tropical Zerrikania that is mentioned but never described it in much detail in the books. Or maybe some people who live in Southern parts of Nilfgraad Empire happen be brown and some of them become soldiers in the army that is now occupying the Northen territories? Because, why not?

Someone could argue that this would be breaking with the so called “book lore”, but would it be though? The developers of the game already had to take many liberties with the source material when they translated and packaged it for English speaking audiences. For example, all the Dwarfs in the game have Scottish sounding accents. Why is that? Well, mainly because of Peter Jackson’s portrayal of Gimli I assume. Sapkowski never specified that his Dwarfs sound vaguely like Scots because in his books they do not. They all speak Common, a language which just happens to sound like Polish because Common languages in fantasy setting always happen to sound like whatever the fuck language the story is written in. It’s a fantasy trope.

But when the voices for the characters were recorded, the development team made an arbitrary choice to make Dwarfs sound one way and not another. There have been plenty of other arbitrary choices made to fill in the gaps, or flesh out things that were not described in much details in the book. Sapkowski never really said that all of his characters are intended to be white. Some characters are described as fair skinned or pale, but nowhere in the books does it say that everyone is. So would making a character whose ethnicity and skin color are never mentioned to be non-white a bigger departure from the source than say… Giving Geralt a plot induced amnesia and having him wander through the world, having weird non-cannon adventures in between the books. You know, like CD Project Red have been doing since their first Witcher game?

So please, stop using my culture and heritage to try to validate your own prejudices. As an actual Pole, and someone who read the Witcher novels before the games introduced them to English speaking world, I can tell you that I would not mind seeing people of color depicted in that universe. It would not somehow devalue my culture or heritage to see non-white people in the game loosely based on the beliefs and folklore of my homeland.

If you do mind, and the very idea of people of color existing in a setting based on our culture and folklore offends you for some reason, then that’s entirely on you.

This War of Mine Gameplay

They worked out a pretty good system: Pavle would go out at night and scavenge for food and supplies. Cveta and Zlata would stay home and guard the groups possessions. When Anton got better, he joined the guard rotation so that the others could get more sleep. He was not much of a scavenger, and he could not carry much loot anyway. Neither could Cveta for that matter. Zlata however was young and agile, and eager to help out. She and Pavle worked out a rotation. Each night one would go out to scavenge and the other one would sleep or stand guard.

On one of her runs Zlata stabbed a soldier in the back.

She found him at an abandoned supermarket. He cornered a young girl and was making threats and demands waving his weapon around. It was a split second decision, but she did not regret it. The girl run off, but later a woman from the neighborhood told them she got home safe. Who knows what would happened to her if Zlata did not bring a knife that fateful night. Zlata, the golden* girl. Zlata the hero, they called her. Anton tried to play the guitar that night, but he was terrible at it. Zlata brought the soldier’s assault rifle and a box of ammo home. The group now had means to defend themselves from raiders.

Pavle found an abandoned villa with lots of supplies. Unfortunately it turned out it was not really abandoned. Few military deserters made a nest in the basement. On the second floor Pavle found a pile of human corpses, all carved up, charred or otherwise broken… Their wounds were not a result of a fight. These people have been tortured and murdered with exceptional malice. There was a locked room at the end of the hallway, and when Pavle tried to force the door open a man cried out for help from the inside. Pavle did not bring a crowbar or lock picks so he was unable to open it. He made too much noise and alerted the deserted. They were heavily armed. Pavle got shot, but somehow managed to get back home.

His woulds looked grave and the group did not have any bandages. Without some sort of medical aid, Pavle was as good as dead.

All the nearby buildings they could easily get to were already picked clean. The spots that could potentially have some left over medical supplies were off limits due to heavy military activity. However, Zlata knew that the deserters would likely have some military supplies. Chances were that at least some of them would carry standard issue med-packs with bandages and pain killers. She also felt bad for their hostage. She could not sit idly while a man was trapped out there with deranged killers. She hatched a plan.

Next night she went to the villa armed with a knife and a set of lock picks.

When she came back in the morning her eyes were hard and fierce.

She brought food, booze, three rifles and lots of ammo, but no meds or bandages. The hostage was safe, she told the group. The deserters would no longer be a problem. The villa was abandoned again. Pavle got worse. His wounds kept opening up and they could not stop the bleeding.

There was a military outpost near by that was very well stocked. They were bound to have medical supplies, and they were known to trade with the locals. Cveta gathered the little surplus possessions they had left and went there to trade for bandages. They told her to leave. Few days earlier Pavle visited the outpost and was caught trespassing and trying to steal their supplies. The soldiers were still very sore about that, and refused to trade. They would not listen to Cveta’s pleading. “Serves him right”, they said.

Pavle got worse. He could no longer get up on his own. His wounds were infected and he was running a fever. They had to take turns bringing him food. None of them had medical training, but it was clear he might not make it without some medical help. Zlata refused to sit idly and watch her friend die. She took off to the military outpost, her trusty knife in her pocket. It had four notches on the handle already. She would add a few more if that’s what it took to save Pavle. That said, she hoped that she won’t have to use it, and that stealth and subterfuge will be enough to steal some medical supplies.

Anton pleaded with her, and warned her not to go, but deep down inside he believed she could make it. Zlata was, after all, the golden girl. God watched over her. She was magical. If anyone could break into a military outpost and come back with supplies, it was her.

She did not make it.

Turns our that a musical prodigy armed with a kitchen knife was no match against four trained killers with automatic weapons.

Anton was devastated. Next night he picked out the best of the four rifles the group had in the house, and put a few clips of ammo in his backpack. He was not a vengeful man, he assured Cveta, and it was not about vengeance. Zlata deserved a proper burial, and Pavle would not make it much longer without medical supplies. If they don’t do anything and let him bleed out, then the golden girl died for nothing. He was lying, of course. But only about that first part. It was about vengeance. Never in his life did he wish death upon another human being. Not until now. He wanted these soldiers dead.

He arrived at the outpost at dusk and got inside the building. He set himself up in a long hallway with a clear escape route behind him. The soldiers would have to climb up the stairs on the opposite side, and he would mow them down as they came in. If he ran out of ammo, he could just take a step back and jump off the balcony and run to safety.

Anton fired a shot into the air to alert the soldiers.

When the first head cleared the stairway he pulled the trigger. The rifle kicked back harder than he expected it to. His shots veered wildly off the target. The return fire was swift and accurate. Single burst of fire echoed in the hallway with a resonant “ra-ta-ta-ta-tat”. Anton’s skull burst into tiny pieces, his cranial fluids staining the walls behind him.

Pavle bleed out to death that night.

Deaths

Temperature dropped, and it started snowing outside. Cveta chopped up Pavle’s old bed for firewood. She had no use for it anymore. At least the blood stained oak and plywood would keep her warm. She kept herself busy, trying not to think about the events of the last few nights. She wanted to weep for her fallen friends, but she could not find the tears. She wanted to scream in an impotent rage, but she just did not see the point. True depression, as she was learning, was not sadness or despair. It was an overwhelming emptiness and a sense of existential enui. But she tried to fight it as best she could. She had to survive for Anton, for Pavle and of course for Zlata.

She sold Zlata’s guitar for some canned food and vegetables. She never learned to play it, and she could not stand seeing it around the house.

She repaired an old radio and tried listening to the few remaining music stations that were still broadcasting. There was never anything good on it. Only bad news, and some sad sounding, old music records playing on a loop throughout the day.

When there were four of them in he house, they were always hungry. There was simply not enough food for all of them. Cveta would often skip a meal or two to make sure Pavle and Zlata were well fed. Now she had more food than she knew what to do with. She figured that if she rationed it properly she could survive a few weeks without leaving the house. The winter was in full swing, and the raiders were getting more and more desperate.

Cveta would usually sleep during the day, and keep watch at night. She had plenty of weapons an ammo in the house, and despite lack of training they provided to be a good deterrent. Cveta was not a good shot, and she never aimed at the raiders. She would shoot at the ground or in the air to scare them off and it usually worked. Most people would give up after seeing or hearing an automatic weapon burst fired in their direction from a window above. On most nights she would expend 4-6 rounds this way. She would pick up the expelled casings from the floor and line them up on the window sill. Each clump of shells symbolized yet another night she survived alone and against all the odds.

Days passed and it stopped snowing. Cveta ran out of ammunition.

That night the raiders forced the door and made her pay for every single shot she fired.

They cleaned out the pantry and looted everything that was not nailed down to the floor. They left her to die, beaten, broken and bleeding. She dragged herself into the basemen, crawled into the bead and slept for three days. She was waiting for death, but death would not come.

Raided

On the fourth night she patched her wounds as best she could and set to work. She chopped up remaining furniture and used the remaining supplies to build a rat trap. Few times she had to stop because of the pain, but she kept on working. She put rotten food and garbage inside and every few days it would trap some stray rodent. She ate the meat raw, because she had no firewood left. And even if she had some, it would not stay in the house for a long time.

Nearly every night the raiders would come back and do a quick sweep of her house. Cveta did not even try to fight them anymore. She would just go to sleep in her blood soaked bed. Her wounds were getting infected and she was running a fever all the time. The bandits could see she was in a bad way so they left her alone, though it did not stop them from taking her stuff. The only thing they would not take was rat meat. They left her traps alone, and so they became her life line.

Every morning Cveta would drag herself out of the bed, and check the traps. Then she would eat, and drag herself back to her bed, usually leaving a bloody trail behind her on the floor. She was not getting any better. In fact, it was quite clear she was dying. She needed immediate medical help or she would die in her bed just like Pavle. There was a hospital in town, several blocks away, but they could not go there before. There was too much fighting going on over there. Now however the front lines shifted elsewhere. Cveta decided that it was worth checking out. She doubted there would be any supplies left there but she did not know what else she could do.

To her surprise, the hospital was still operating. There were were a few medical specialists still there taking care of the sick and wounded. They patched her up, and pumped her full of antibiotics. She came the next night, and their gave her more meds and re-dressed her wounds. They never asked for any payment, and they never complained about wasting precious medical supplies on a complete stranger.

They were saints. They saved her life. To repay them for their kindness, Cveta robbed them blind.

She felt bad about it, but not for very long. War hardened her, and now that she narrowly avoided death, she was determined to survive more than ever. She kept the medical supplies and intended to sell everything else in exchange for food and ammunition. Unfortunately she did not know anyone willing to trade.

Cveta robbed the hospital

She did not want to risk visiting the military outpost again, for obvious reasons. The traveling merchant who sometimes visited the house probably figured she was dead already. For all he knew, she should have been. She was the weakest and most vulnerable member of the group. And yet, here she was. Still standing, still surviving… On a steady diet of rat meat, but surviving nevertheless. Now that she actually had some valuables in the house, she went back to her old rotation, ready to fend of any raiders. Fortunately, they seemed to have given up on her house.

The nights were silent and peaceful. Cveta stayed up keeping watch four more times and she did not encounter any trouble. Her wounds healed up, and the fever went away completely.

Ceasefire

On the fifth night they announced a cease fire on the radio.

I’ve been playing This War of Mine recently and I found it somewhat captivating. They game is not necessarily “fun” in the traditional sense of the word. What it excels at, is emergent storytelling. It gives you a set of characters, locations and scenarios and the ability to build and connect them into coherent and sometimes even moving stories.

The game is small, simple and low key, but it does allow you to have these interesting experiences. I don’t really want to say “deep” because most of the time they are not. But they can be engaging. When I started the game I had no idea the young musician will become the tragic hero, and that the middle aged school principal will become the main protagonist by the end. It just happened that way. That’s what makes the game interesting: that such stories can, but do not have to emerge from the game play.

The first play through was a complete shit show, with people dying in stupid way, and wasting resources on pointless crap. There was no pathos to the story – it was just a string of errors which resulted in unnecessary deaths, and me getting annoyed I can’t unlock the higher crafting tiers due to my own crappy resource management. If you approach This War of Mine as a game and try to beat it, this will likely be the result.

My second time around I realized that this is not really the best approach. The game is at its best when you treat it as an emergent story generator, and try to empathize with the characters, and imagine their relationships. The game systems provide the basic skeleton of the story, and you provide the connective tissue. And then you may, sometimes get an interesting story out of it.

Life is Strange title screen.

Back in 2007 I asked my readers what save mechanic they prefered and the overwhelming number of respondents chose classic “save anywhere” system conducive to save scumming. I bet that if I asked the same question now, I would have seen the same answers. But if you look at the new releases, you will notice that more and more games tend toward a checkpoint based systems. This could be partly explained by ubiquity of consoles and difficulties of managing save game files across a myriad of platforms. But my pet theory is that “save anywhere” systems are simply one of those things that players love, and game devs hate for the same reason: empowerment.

A flexible save system can be game breaking, allowing a determined player to break up challenging segments into tiny, discrete chunks that can be mastered in isolation, or to abuse the random events to always get favorable results. As such it reduces the challenge and gives players meta-gaming tool they can use to brute-force challenges instead of grinding or getting better at a game. Naturally, this is something that many developers would like to avoid – they want to keep their game challenging and make sure no one gets to “cheat”. Hence, we see the shift toward smart, and flexible checkpoint systems in many modern titles.

Life is Strange opening credits.

Personally, I think that trying to force people to play your game the hard way is silly. If a game is too challenging, or too punishing and it forces me to re-play the same segment over and over again until I get good at it, I usually get discouraged and stop playing. Save scumming lets me force my way through the bits of the game I would otherwise find tiresome and let me enjoy it at my pace. I always appreciate it when a dev team decides to trust me enough to give me a potentially game breaking tool, and let me use my own judgment as to how to use it.

The Life is Strange by Square Enix is a checkpoint based game, which introduces an interesting “time rewind” mechanic that for all intents and purposes emulates save scumming. At any point in the game you have an option to hit a button, and go back to an earlier state, allowing you to undo mistakes and change important decisions.

In and of itself, this mechanic is not new. The most prominent title that has used a similar gimmick was the 2003 game Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. But there it has been employed a bit differently. The rewinds in the game were very limited (allowing you to go back only 30 seconds or so) and were tied to a finite, collectible in game resource. They were intended to be an “undo” button you hit after botching a dangerous jump, or accidentally falling off a platform. Life is Strange uses the mechanic in a way I have not seen before. It is not an undo button, as much as it is a “Groundhog Day” button.

Time Rewind Mechanic in Action

Let me explain that. In the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is trapped in some sort of a temporal time loop forcing him to relieve the same day over and over again. As a result, nothing he says or does during the day has any lasting consequences, since the timeline resets itself every night. This lets him get into all kinds of funny shenanigans, but ultimately gives him an opportunity to learn to become a better person through trial an error. Eventually he sets out on a mission to use what he knows about the events that will unfold during the day, and the things he learned about people around him to live out a perfect day.

Life is Strange allows you to do exactly that, albeit at a smaller scale. Max, the protagonist can only rewind few minutes into the past without getting nose bleeds, but this still allows her to do Groundhog Day style tricks. For example, she can have a conversation with someone, learn something significant then rewind back, and use the fact she just heard as a leverage. Or she can pick up a friends’ book-bag from the floor and rummage through it without permission only to rewind time right afterwards. The game also preserves your inventory between rewinds – so anything you pick up or put in your pockets travels back in time with you.

Have I mentioned this game looks gorgeous? This game looks gorgeous.

If you think about it, this is exactly what players do when they save scum. You run through a conversation to see how the characters react to what you say, and then you reload to ace the conversation and get the most favorable result. The rewind mechanic simply lets you skip the tedious bits involving management of save game files. Not only that, it keeps you engaged and immersed in the game world because you are no longer meta-gaming. It is absolutely brilliant.

So is that game world they keep you immersed in for that matter. My one and only complaint about this game is that it is just too short. Life is Strange borrows both the core game-play and the episodic format from the critically acclaimed Taletale Games The Walking Dead series. According to my Steam stats, the first episode subtitled “Crhysalis” took me a little under five hours to finish. And this is with me walking around, examining everything and just taking in the sights. After I finished it, I immediately wanted to go back to Blackwell Academy. Not even to find out what happens next (although I must say that the mystery behind your super powers and the impending cataclysm looming over the town are sure intriguing) but to spend more time with Max and Chloe.

Super Tornado. This is not a spoiler since you see it in the intro sequence.

Chloe, by the way, is voiced by the amazing Ashly Burch of the HAWP fame and she does a spectacular job. In fact most actors are on point, the conversations flow well and are engaging. Blackwell Academy feels like a real place, inhabited by real people rather than just a set of puzzle chambers, conversation rooms and inter-connecting corridors.

The game is a breath of fresh air. I love the fact that you get to play as a teenage girl, facing teenage girl problems (like asshole school principals, rich “mean girls”, nice guys and etc..) in addition to having super powers, trying to find a missing girl, preventing a murder and stopping a super-tornado from destroying your home town. I was overjoyed to play a character who actually has a concrete past (rather than the standard, vague “special forces/marines” background), relationships and insecurities.

Max hanging out in her room, playing a guitar.

Spending 5 hours wandering around Blackwell Academy as Max Caufield was a rather intriguing and eye opening experience. Somehow I have managed to go through 30-odd years of my life without ever wondering how high school experience might have looked from the other side of the gender divide. None of the media I have consumed up until this point have actually given me a clear glimpse of it. Life is Strange did. Perhaps it is because video games put you much closer to the protagonist than any other medium. Perhaps it’s because Max is such a wonderfully fleshed out character who is easy to identify and empathize with. All I know is that viewing the world through her eyes was intriguing and enriching.

Especially that part where I more or less met myself. You see, Warren is basically a snapshot of me, as I existed back when I was around that age. He is somewhat awkward but personable, smart but introverted, super into science, computers and anime and related things. He has zeroed in on the shy, lonely new girl in town, and he set his phasers to “maximum cling”. He is dead set on giving Max so much of his time, attention and support that she simply won’t have any choice but to eventually fall in love with him. It’s not that he is creepy, weird, overly forward or insincere. He seems like a really good kid. He is just, uh… That guy. And now I totally get who “that guy” is. This was perhaps the first time I saw this “boy with an unrequited crush” dynamic without identifying with the guy. Seeing his behavior reflected back onto me, and being able to react to it was definitely eye opening.

Isn’t this what art is all about? Taking you to places where you haven’t been before, and making you feel things you haven’t felt yet?

Geek Girl Book Club: no boy wizards or sad vampire fiction allowed. No boys period. :D

The game, despite short run time is full of little moments like this. I love the complicated, stranded relationship between Max and Chloe. I like that by the end of the episode Chloe’s “step douche” becomes literally your high school arch-enemy. I love that the game lets you dump a bucket of paint on a cashmere sweater of the mean popular girl to shut her up, but then allows you to be nice and comforting to her afterwards. Life is Strange takes a rather nuanced approach to systematizing “moral choice” and gives you more options than the standard Bioware options of “kick the sick puppy” or “send the sick puppy to college”. Because you can always rewind conversations and undo most of your actions at will, the game tends to avoid clear cut “good vs evil” dilemmas, instead focusing on character driven choices or setting up future plot hooks. Whenever you make an important decision, it impacts either your relationship with one of the people at Blackwell Academy, or sets up a dangling plot thread that will doubtlessly come back to hunt you, or pay off big time in the future.

Next time on Life is Strange

This kind of game-play was shown to be extremely effective for The Walking Dead, but Life is Strange gives it a new, interesting twist. It remains to be seen how well the game handles the player choice, and branching of the story. So far the writing is incredibly strong, the characters are vibrant and the story is captivating. That said none of the choices you make in Episode 1 have any payoff or consequences as of yet. I hope hat the future episodes will be as good, or better than this one.

I can’t wait till March to play the second installment. Go buy a season pass right now.

Single player RPG’s however are different. They are often much more focused on storytelling or exploration. They ought to offer much wider variety of magic to the players. But more often then not, when you roll up a mage, and look at the available spell list you realize you don’t really have that many choices. There might be hundreds of spells, but the main difference between them is the color and shape of the particle effect that shoots out of your magic staff. That and the amount of hit points they subtract from the enemy health bar.

Yes, mechanically AoE, DoT, direct damage and debuff spells are very different and allow for a myriad of strategies and tactical decisions. But conceptually, they are virtually identical.

Most games use magic exclusively to hurt and heal and that’s really, really boring.

Don’t get me wrong, it is fun to throw a fireball from time to time. The more deadly it is, the more enjoyable the act. But that’s not all that magic should be about. Right now I’m playing Dragon Age: Inquisition and the only spell I really like is Fade Step. It’s basically a blink style ability that propels you forward much like the Vanguard charge in Mass Effect games. But you can spam it outside of combat – which is how I usually explore new areas. I run around hitting the search button while Fade Step is on cool-down, and mash it as soon as it becomes available.

Most Dragon Age: Inquisition spells are pure DPS.

This is not really a critique of the game itself. I get why the spell system is the way it is: the game involves MMO style tactical combat, and the skills are geared towards that. The classes were designed to be balanced and complementary and with the way you issue combat orders, there is simply no UI space for frivolous spells. The game has limitations that are parts of its design, which were there (albeit less pronounced) since the beginning of the series so I’m not going to lose sleep over it. Skyrim did not have such limitations, but it’s magic system was also primarily concerned with shooting particle effects out of your fingers, buffing your own stats, or putting temporary debuffs or effects on enemies…

It did have Water Breathing though, which was neat. Yes, it was mostly useless, since the game never required you to do any extensive swimming or diving. But the two or three times you actually found a use for it it during the course of the 600 hours you put into the game, it made you feel a little bit like a superhero.

I like spells that have nothing to do with combat.

I hate to always keep going back to Morrowind (which is probably my favorite CRPG), but that game had a really great magic system. Not perfect, mind you, but interesting. It had a lot of really nifty utility spells were useless in combat but great outside of it. The entire school of Alteration was all about practical effects any adventurer would love to have in their toolkit.

For example, it had a spell that opened locks. Mechanically it was redundant because it did the exact same thing as the lock picking skill. From a purist game design point of view it was just useless clutter. But, I love the fact it existed. Think about it: why would a mage ever want to carry lock picks or learn how to use them? Morrowind gave you an option of role playing a mage who thought lock-picking was beneath him/her but still could effectively open locked doors using magic.

By the time Oblivion was released, someone invented mini-games, decided that picking locks must be one of them, that was the end of that useful spell. It got streamlined out of the Elder Scroll series.

In addition to the aforementioned water breathing, Morrowind had a water walking spell. It did exactly what you expected: it allowed you to run (or bunny-hop) across the surface of water as if it was solid ground. You might think it is a silly ability, but I remember learning this spell on every class because it was extremely useful. It allowed you to cross waterways much quicker and without having to do with annoying Slaughterfish and could be used to escape enemies. It was the extremely useful if you wanted to trade with the Mudcrab Merchant.

There was a spell that allowed you augment your jump height, in case you wanted to hop around the world like you were the Incredible Hulk. There was a complimentary slow-fall spell that allowed you to mitigate damage if you jumped to high. There was also a straight up levitation spell which would let you walk upwards or downwards at your normal speed. This meant that city walls, or steep mountain cliffs were not impassable barriers but merely temporary obstacles that mages scoffed at.

Utility spells in Morrowind offered the player an unparalleled freedom of movement that I have not seen in any other game.

The very existence of these spells influenced the game design. The world map was designed with the expectation that the player might be flying in from overhead, running over the ocean floor, swimming to the bottom of the sea and etc… Stationary in game assets were built to be explored from any possible angle. Some areas were specifically designed to be accessible only via application of utility spells or potions. There were side quests that required water breathing, and there were areas in the game that could only be reached via levitation. So if you never learned any spells or put any points into magic related attributes, then you simply had to scrape some cash and either buy or mix some potions to access those parts of the game.

If you were a spell caster or a hybrid class however… Well, it felt great to discover these little exclusive areas. Being able to nonchalantly float up into some stuck up wizard assholes mushroom castle made you feel like a bad-ass.

Inessential, non-combat, utility spells are always nice to have. They make playing a spell caster feel a little bit like being a super hero. Without them, wizards are just a boring damage dealers. I understand why sometimes boring AoE DPS class is what the game mechanics are calling for, and that’s ok. But more often than not, giving the player the ability to use magic outside of combat makes the game more fun. Not only that: they will often force the devs to design more complete, believable and robust game spaces. So next time you are designing a magic system for a single player RPG, consider adding levitation, water walking, or super speed to your spell list. Unless of course you hate fun, and you just want your game to play exactly like an MMO which is something no one ever asked for.

Alien Isolation title screen

The end result of Sega’s no expenses spared approach to the game is a product that is not only well polished but visually striking. The creative team behind the game worked really hard to capture the evocative look and feel of the 1979 film. This involved modeling the titular Xenomorph on the original H. R. Giger design (the one with a semi-transparent head that revealed a partly obscured skull) and using a lot of original concept art, photos, set design documents provided to the studio by 20th Century Fox. The general rule of thumb was that if a weapon, tool or a set prop could not have been made using 70’s technology than it could not be included in the game. The team even reproduced the film grain effect, and made artificial visual distortions appear on the screen from time to time, to emulate the experience of watching the original movie on an old VHS tape, which is probably how most of us experienced it for the first time.

All the computer terminals use these big bulky monochrome CRT monitors and the menus make genuine floppy disk noises.

This attention to detail pays off big time. The game genuinely feels very retro. The hyper sleep chamber you wake up in at the start of the game feels as if it was ripped out straight from the movie. I really like this sort of aesthetic, and I wish we saw more of it in games and movies. The retro feeling wanes a bit as you progress and find yourself crawling through the inevitable air ducts, warehouses and sewage systems. There is unfortunately not much you can do to make such places feel retro which is why I would avoid them. But I can see how they had to be included in a game about running away from an angry alien on a mostly abandoned and dilapidated space station.

Other than the superb visuals and art design, the game has two main strengths to me. One of them is of course the game’s signature survival stealth mechanics. I can honestly say that the Xenomorph in this game is the best incarnation of the creature since the original movie. All of the films, games, comics and other media featuring the beast have failed to capture just how strange, intimidating and relentless it really was. Alien: Isolation nails it. I have not seen a single video game enemy to have this sort of impact not only on the game play but on the mood and pace of the game since… Well Amnesia: Dark Descent. But I’d say that the Alien is actually done better than the Amnesia monster because you are not supposed to turn your back on it. The Amnesia creature was a scary blur that you avert your eyes from because it is to terrible to observe directly. The Xeonomorph is scary, but you must constantly keep tabs on it. The creative team spent a lot of time working on it’s walk cycle and movement. The creature even has dedicated tail physics which allow it to knock things over as it walks around.

Alien: observation

I usually hate not having a save anywhere type system in FPS games but Alien: Isolation security panel based saves actually worked well to build tension. The save points are typically placed often enough not to be annoying and the game does a good job using reasonable checkpoints at important moments to avoid losing progress. That said, saving is always a gamble as it forces you to stand still for 30 seconds in the open when there is an invulnerable, indestructible alien on the loose. Like everything in this game it is a tradeoff? Do you risk exposing yourself to save your progress, or do you keep to your cover and forge ahead to the next save point which might be in a safer, more concealed spot?

Your motion tracker actually makes noise, so you can’t use it when the alien is near by.

The attention to detail exhibited in the set and character design, extends to the stealth game play. There are little things that are perfectly logical but surprising when you first discover them. For example, the motion tracker you can use to check the position of the alien (or other enemies) emits a constant stream of bleeping sounds when in use. Despite what you might expect based on your experience with stealth games, these sounds can actually be heard by the alien as it searchers for you. So when you are hiding in the closet, you need to put the device away as soon as the creature walks into the same room, or else it will hear it and make a bee line straight for you. Things like that add up to an incredibly tight and well executed experience.

The game’s second big strength is it’s protagonist: Amanda Ripley. I have to admit that overall voice acting in the game is a little bit sub par. It’s by no means terrible, but I have seen better. That said, I think Amanda is possibly the best strong female protagonist since Faith from Mirror’s Edge. And yes, I am including the new Lara Croft on this list.

Amanda Ripley is actually cannon. She is mentioned in the second movie.

Don’t get me wrong, Lara Croft is a great character and the new Tomb Rider had a good story. Plot wise it might be even better than Alien: Isolation but it was problematic. I wrote about this in my review of the game: it included a lot of gratuitous ass shots, gratuitous violent death sequences, rape as character development and Lara getting bound and hog-tied in every third cut scene. Amanda does not need to deal with any of that: the game establishes her as a competent engineer and she easily slides into her new role as an action hero without having to spend four cut-scenes crying, having a father figure mentor tell her it is OK and having to go through an almost-rape scenario to finally be able to pull the trigger. She is designed as someone you are supposed to identify with, rather than someone who you should feel bad for, and want to rescue. She is strong, resourceful, brave and driven. She has moments of vulnerability too, but she almost never doubts herself or her abilities.

Part of it might be due to the fact that she was designed to be a carbon copy of Ellen Ripley, which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Ellen has become a quintessential action heroine archetype and as such she is not the worst character to model your protagonist after. I think one minor criticism I have is that Amanda fades into the background a bit too easily. There are chunks of the game where you almost forget she is not a silent protagonist. Her story arc is a bit weak, and the resolution of her quest rings a little hollow.

This was super annoying.

The overall tone, mood and theme of the game is perfect. It hits all the important thematic points an Alien game should: human greed, ruthless bureaucracy, deterioration of social norms when faced with an alien threat, fear, abandonment, isolation, etc.. Unfortunately the supporting characters are not particularly memorable or likable so it is hard to get attached to them. Amanda’s personal story culminates in what amounts to “thanks, but the princess is in another castle” and final scene was beyond disappointing. If you haven’t finished the game yet, brace yourself for an utterly pointless and unsatisfying ending.

I usually hold the opinion that a story can make or break the game. Alien: Isolation shows us that this not always true. Sometimes good art direction, solid game play and a well designed protagonist can more than make up for a sub par story and a weak plot. The game is definitely worth playing for these aspects alone.

Cloudbank is a community of artists, performers and other content creators. It is an endless urban sprawl, bathed in a bright glow of neon sighs and street lights in all of the colors of the rainbow. It is a direct democracy that allows it’s citizens to vote on every issue concerning the city. Urban planning, zoning, weather conditions, color of the sky, brightness of the ambient light and street noise level are all customizable according to their whim. Or at least that’s how it used to be, before the citizens lost control of The Process and it started devouring the city from within. What is this Process exactly? Good question, and most likely the first of many.

The narrative of Transistor is intentionally vague and cryptic. It poses more question than it provides answers. Its thematically rich, but economical with it’s exposition. The protagonist is silent (albeit not by choice) and the narrator is unreliable and almost as confused about the situation as the players are. The dialogue avoids information dumps – it is styled as a conversation between parties already “in the know”. The writers feel no need to explain colloquial turns of phrase, idioms and concepts common in the city. As a result the players learn the story of Cloudbank and it’s downfall indirectly – as if they were eavesdropping on people’s conversations.

Welcome to Cloudbank

I have read many different theories about what exactly happens in the game, and all of them seem equally plausible. I highly recommend going into the game blind, and trying to piece the puzzle yourself. That there is no official / cannon explanation as to what happens in the game. Here is my interpretation. Your millage may vary, but that’s the beauty of the story. Your guess is as good as mine.

What is Cloudbank?

The ever-changing city of Cloudbank is actually a virtual world. The official wiki may claim otherwise but I think there are enough clues in the game to support this claim. The city is endlessly reconfigurable, and while a high degree of customization could be accomplished in the real world, there are points in the game where you have to navigate Escher like architecture with inverted gravity and impossible perspective, which are trivial to implement in software but would be monumentally difficult to accomplish in the physical world.

Escher Landscapes

The very fact that Red, the protagonist can use the Teransistor to “pause” the world during combat seems to support this hypothesis. Granted, one could hand wave this as a simple game mechanic, but the turn() function is mentioned in the game lore, and used against Red in the final boss battle. Since Red can be “paused” by another Transistor user we can assume that pausability is an inherent property of the inhabits. And once again, such a feature is easily implemented in software but incredibly difficult to pull off IRL.

Transistor Turn Combat

The denizens of Cloudbank have a peculiar euphemism for death: “going to the Country”. Or at least we can assume it means death, based on the context in which it is used. In the final battle, and the post-credit sequence we actually see glimpses of what could be The Country – a realistic wheat field with farm houses and barns in the distance. It is not clear whether this is a real world or some other simulated reality, but it does seem to be separate and disjoint from Cloudbank and people who go there typically do not return.

Going to the Country

The final boss battle takes place in a wheat field full of strange silos called Trace Banks. During the turn() sequences each of the silos appears to contain a humanoid silhouette. Attempting to interact with the silos reveals they contain Traces of most of the named characters in the game, including Red. A popular theory claims that this landscape is a visualization of the the internal state of the Transistor. Each of the Trace Banks is a memory bank used to store one of the functions Red integrated into her weapon. Personally however, I like to think that this is a glimpse at the outside world.

Transistor Final Battle

Perhaps the final stage is not a visualization of the internal state of the Transistor but rather a hardware layer visualization of the Cloudbank itself. Perhaps this field contains the traces of every citizen. Perhaps the wheat field is there to symbolically link this virtual layer to the real world, and remind the users they are now operating at a lower level of abstraction. Perhaps the silos represent real world containers that store physical bodies of the denizens of Cloudbank?

I do not believe the final battle happens in the real world, due to the turn sequence still being in effect. However, I do like to think that the last glimpse we have of Red is from the outside of the system.

What is the Process?

The Process is described as the background functions that were used to shape the city. The most interesting bit of information about it probably comes from the in game file on Royce Bracket:

He discovered a formula visualizing exactly how the structures of Cloudbank formed. He studied this formula closely for it filled him with a deep sense of wonder and even deeper sense of dread. He developed predictive algorithms to determine where and when the visualization would take form, and began drawing it out with his own architectural plans, until one day he found it in its natural state. He saw beyond the confines of the city into something more, and there before him was something extraordinary. He took it, and realized the things he saw now stood at his call.

I have read a theory that claims that The Process is some sort of alien entity from a reality parallel to that of Cloudbank. Personally, I think it’s actually something more trivial, and at the same time more complex. The Process is the emergent property of the city itself. Royce discovered a pattern in the Cloudbak’s self tuning, self improving background processes: something akin to limited artificial intelligence.

What is the Transistor?

The Transistor is often refereed to as a “brush” that can be used to freely reshape the Cloudbank landscape. It is a tool for controlling The Process which are the background maintenance programs. It was used by Royce, the city’s chief architect, to reconfigure and build according to the whims of the citizens.

The Transistor

The Camerata was also using it to tap the talent of the prominent thinkers, performers and artists. This was done by “integrating” their Trace. It is never really explained what exactly is a trace: all we know that when someone dies in Cloudbank the Transistor can be used to extract it from their body. The Trace is not fully sentient, but does contain memories and skills of it’s host.

In the final battle, the Traces of all the characters who have been “integrated” are missing heads, suggesting they are no longer active agents. Their conscious being has likely been transferred out of the Cloudbank – they have “gone to the Country”, or in other words awoken in the real world. What is left is basically a left-over, digital copy of their mind. By loading this data into the Transistor Camerata was making the skills and talents of the deceased available to The Process.

What was the goal of Camerata?

The actual goal of Camerata is a bit unclear, but it appears that they were weary of the constantly changing nature of the city. Their motto was:

When everything changes, nothing changes.

At the surface this is a contradictory statement. But to experienced world builders, game designers or dungeon masters this statement does ring true. An environment without some sort of permanence begins to feel as lacking substance after a while. While having ability to fully customize your environment can be incredibly rewarding (see Minecraft phenomenon), it is the permanence of your alterations is what imbues them with meaning and allows you to take pride in creating them. Customization by committee where each change is momentary, ephemeral and dictated by fickle trends and fashion create a highly unstable environment. When constant change becomes the norm, it is hard to be surprised by it.

Camerata

While beauty, substance and meaning can be found in impermanent and ephemeral (consider sand Mandala for example), there is a certain kind of gravitas and presence that can only be experienced when dealing with something old, immutable and lasting. This is something the Camerata felt was missing in Cludbank. Grant Kendrell’s grand plan was to use The Process to introduce some sort of permanence into the city design. More than that, it would be something emergent, unplanned and unexpected.

Royce discovered The Process and was studying how it can anticipate, predict and improve upon city building subroutines. Grant Kendrell suggested seeding it with the Traces of the city’s most prominent artists, architects and performers and then let it loose. The end result would be the city rebuilt and re-imagined in unpredictable ways but keeping with the spirit of the old. It would not be the city the people of Cloudbank wanted, but one they deserved.

But something when wrong when they tried to integrate Red. The Process went rogue, and they have lost control over it. The Transistor somehow changed ownership from Royce to Red but seemingly without granting her access to the full admin interface.

What happened at the end?

As mentioned above, the Transistor is a root / admin interface to Coudbank environmental controls. It seems that only a single user can wield it while inside the Coudbank. Returning it to the cradle initiates a system reboot of sorts. If there are multiple Cloudbank users who want to take control of the Transistor they can fight for it in the simulated wheat field battleground. The loser of the battle is presumably expelled from the Cludbank reality and awakes in The Country. The winner is re-inserted into a rebooted Cloudbank with full admin rights, which is why Red is able to use The Transistor as a “reality brush” in the final sequence.

Red’s partner’s signature function is breach() and it is possible that this is what caused the system glitch. The Camerata was trying to integrate Red for her voice, but he intervened and was integrated himself. As all victims of the Camerata he has likely awoken in The Country. However, his signature skill allowed his trace to breach (buffer overflow?) out of the containment bank in the Transistor and merge with the software running the weapon, which is how he is able to talk to Red throughout the game.

End Sequence

He becomes part of The Process, which is why he has hard time thinking when The Spine is around. Unlike regular Cloudbank users who have reserved, guaranteed memory and CPU cycles, he runs as a background process and must share resources with all the environmental controls. So when a gigantic monster of a process is running near by, there is simply not enough resources to go around. Red can function normally, because as a user she is executed with higher priority.

When Red is unable to use the Transistor to resurrect her partner at the end of the game, she realizes she has been talking to his Trace. The consciousness inside the weapon is not her lover, but rather the best approximation of him, based on his trace as performed by The Process. He can’t be extracted and restored to a user status, because he is merely a background work process. A sentient one, but a background process nevertheless.

Red Logs Out

This is why Red opts to log out. And it seems that in Cloudbank the most expedient way to do this is via a suicide. The credits sequence seems to suggest that she is reunited with her partner in The Country.

At least that’s how I see it. How about you? Do you think Cloudbank is a virtual city, or does it exist in the real world? Is The Process pure software, extra-dimensional alien life form, or something else entirely? What do you think was the goal of Camerata? Let me know in the comments.

Back in the 90’s I used to play Middle Earth: The Lidless Eye which was a collectible card game about being a Ringwraith. Unlike Magic The Gathering and similar games, MELE was not as much about defeating the opponent, but about being the best minion of the Dark Lord possible. Your mission was to recover ancient artifacts, recruit powerful allies and convince major Middle Earth factions to side with Mordor. Whichever Ringwraith secured more resources won. You could also play against someone with Middle Earth: The Wizards deck, who would be doing the same thing, but for the good guys. The players could only fight directly if their minions visited the same location at the same time (a rare occurrence, and easy to avoid if you did not want a direct confrontation) and instead they would try to thwart each-others efforts by playing environmental hazard cards as the enemy minions traveled.

It was more of a board game with quasi-RPG mechanics, but this was why I loved it. Most of my Friends had Istari based decks, full of Dwarfs, Elves and Hobbit heroes. My deck was full of Orcs, Trolls and evil men and I loved it that way. So did they actually, because it was fun to play these good vs evil games. It felt like there was much more at the stake.

You know what I loved best about that game? That Orcs, Trolls and The Nine fallen kings were given names (not always cannon names mind you, but I did not care). It is a simple thing really: give an entity a name, and it becomes a person. It becomes imbued with life and personality. I could write an entire sitcom worth of stories about Gorbag, Grishnákh and Muzgash – the three plucky Uruk Hai minion-friends who got into all source of trouble all across the Middle Earth.

In Shadow of Mordor I became frenemies with Ronk The Flame Monger, who just wanted to learn how to ride a caragor beast while wearing his absolutely awesome flame hat.

Ronk Flame Monger

No, seriously guys, lets take a moment and take in the glory that is Ronk’s hat. As far as I could tell it was unique in my game, and I have never seen it repeated on another Orc captain. I don’t know how it works, or how Ronk prevents his head from being over-heated, but I do think the looks magnificent. He quickly became my favorite and I was overjoyed to help him win duels with other, less fashion conscious Uruks. I loathed having to kill him but the game said I had to. It is a systems thing: in most video games your objective is to bring about a positive change via destructive force. You are always killing enemies, destroying their infrastructure, toppling evil tyrants and etc.. Hardly ever do you get to affect the game world in a positive way by adding something to it – you are almost always a force of destruction and erasure.

Ronk died without ever fulfilling his dream because he had the misfortune of being an Orc leader whose path intersected with half-man half elven wraith assassin and the titular Shadow of Mordor. Oh, you thought that was about Sauron? Nope, that’s you: the protagonist. The silent assassin, ghostly killer, Robert Neville of Mordor but without the “I am legend” epiphany. Your objective in the game is to perpetrate a campaign of terror against the Uruk-Hai natives of Mordor. You use bodies of slain Orc captains to get to their War Chiefs and you use their deaths to draw out and slay the big-boss minions who take their direct orders from the Dark Lord. And when taking Orc lives is not enough your Wraith-half, teaches you how to take over their bodies.

The void that the death of Ronk Flame Monger left in my life was not filled until I met Lûga the Literate One.

Lûga the Literate One

Perhaps he did not look as cool as Ronk, but his love of literature has won me over. From the moment we crossed swords, I knew this was going to be a long lasting bromance. At that time I had already learned how to “brand” orcs, making them into friendly NPC’s. And so, after defeating Lûga I used my wraith powers to convert him into my own minion. This was really the only way to save his life. If he was not one of “my” Orcs he would continue being an obstacle in my way, and would have to be toppled. We had a good system going: Lûga would challenge another captain to a duel, I would swoop in and either shank his opponent in the back, or brand him. Lûga would take the credit for the victory, quickly rising in the ranks. Soon he became a War Chief and helped me to either brand or topple all the other War Chiefs.

My Uruk-Hai Minions

I had a full control of the local Orc society – all of the War Chiefs and captains were branded, and loyal to me. When I heard there was a new captain who rose to power on my turf, I quickly sent Lûga to challenge him. I dodn’t want him dead – I just wanted his eyes to glow blue. As I was branding the plucky upstart, I had a sudden epiphany: I was the new Dark Lord or Mordor. And it felt good. Almost too good. I presume that this is precisely how the Nine Kings fell and became Ringwraiths in the service of Sauron. Because they were offered the same kind of power.

In fact, I realized that perhaps my power was actually more sinister than than theirs. Both the Nine Kings and the game’s antagonists such as The Hammer of Sauron and The Tower ruled by fear and respect. Orcs followed them either because they dared not to refuse their orders, or because they looked up to them as strong leaders. But a disgruntled Uruk-Hai in their armies had options: he could walk away, challenge his superiors, plot revenge. My minions could not do that: my power over them was absolute. I don’t even know what books Lûga liked to read, because I was using him as a tool. He became a weapon in my arsenal without any agency of his own. He was an empty shell, forever bound to my will.

Tûmûg and me did not get along very well.

The Uruks of Mordor keep human slaves which is one of the many ways the game tries to justify the terrible violence and destruction you unleash upon them. But even though their bodies are bound and broken, the spirits of these slaves are free. As you explore the game world, you can often hear the slaves talk amongst each other: they tell stories filled with hope, they sing songs and sometimes even laugh. Orcs whom I branded can’t do any of that. They just stand there, their eyes glowing with the unearthly wraith energy. What I have done to them is a hundred times worse than what they have been doing to the humans. I have chained not their bodies but their minds. I became a monster: an absolute, irredeemable villain masquerading as a hero of the people. I have fallen lower than anyone in the Tolkien lore, and I did not even have a cursed ring to blame for my moral lapse.

You might be tempted to blame Celebrimbor for this, because it is his power that was used in branding, and he has been guiding your hands throughout the game. But while he is not necessarily a good guy, his ultimate goal was to strike a blow against Sauron, and put things right after his own greed and lust for power destroyed his own kingdom and put all of Middle Earth in peril. At the end of the game, he is ready to move on and leave the mortal realms behind. I thought this was a good thing. Both Celebrimbor and Talion would get their final rest, and all the Uruks who survived their reign of terror would be freed from under their influence. They would go back to doing whatever it is that Orcs do when they are not being lead to war by some dark power. But at the last minute Talion convinces Celebrimbor to stay and continue their partnership – you know, in case of a sequel. And that’s absolutely frightening.

It actually shows how little self-awareness the designers had when they crafted the games mechanics. At the very core, the game is very much an exploration of colonialism. Talion is a “civilized” outsider who finds himself among “barbarians” who he neither understands, nor respects. He sets out to disrupt and neutralize their power by coercing or assassinating their leaders to impose his own cultural and moral values onto those people. Mechanics reinforce this, but the story refuses to acknowledge these dark undertones and instead it pretends to be a heroic power fantasy. It is almost as if the story and the game mechanics were designed by two separate teams who did not communicate with each other – which seems to be a common trend in modern video games.

You can’t divorce game mechanics from the story any more than you can do with visuals and music. All of these parts contribute to the overall player experience, and all of them come together to tell a story. Shadow of Mordor is a great example of a really fun game in which the story and mechanics are at odds with each other. You can identify with Talion as a heroic figure only up until you actually realize the implications of the “branding” mechanic which becomes fairly important in the later game. An apt storyteller would try to capitalize on this, and depict Tallion’s inner struggle. But the hero never actually thinks about what he is doing to the Orcs. He hates them, and considers them inhuman monsters to be used as tools in his campaign against the Dark Lord… But you wanted to represent them as sub-human monsters, then why give them all names, goals, dreams and fears? The answer is obvious if you read the developer interviews. It is mechanics: engineered and designed completely separately from the story.

I want to give the writing team some credit for capturing the essence of Tolkien’s Uruk society, for crafting cool villains and aptly telling the story of Celebrimbor despite having to work against conflicting mechanics. But can I really do that? I mean, they did enough research to do deeply hook their story into Silmarilion lore, but not enough to comment on the Orks as subaltern people critiques of the text? The discussion about colonialism in Tolkien’s writing have been an academic staple for decades now – it’s not like we’re breaking a new ground here.

Perhaps this is a symptom of what I like to call a “professional fan fiction writer syndrome” – which is what happens when you tell a die-hard fan to write an adaptation of their favorite thing. They tend to be too close to the source material to step back and objectively look at the critique of the text, and thus unknowingly amplify the source works biases and problematic themes. So perhaps I could forgive them for being over-eager fans and trying really hard to do Tolkien justice.

But if I’m going to do that, then I also have to mention that their story would be ripe for Tropes vs. Women analysis. There are three female NPC’s in the game: first gets put in the fridge to provide motivation for the protagonist, second is remote controlled by Saruman and the third gets damseled and you literally have to carry her out of an Orc stronghold.

There is about 20 minutes of game play between the moment you meet the brave warrior Litrhaiel and the point where she gets super-damseled and you need to carry her to safety.

This is quite sad, especially seeing how that entire rescue mission was not only pointless but annoying from purely mechanical standpoint. It combined all the worst qualities of an escort mission while at the same time forcing you to move at an excruciatingly slow rate. I guess the writers really wanted to have a heroic moment for Talion to remind players he is not just a shadowy assassin and they figured the best way of doing so is to throw a woman under the train.

There is also that thing where your assassination tutorial consists of sneaking up on your wife to give her a surprise snog which is is weird and unsettling for a whole plethora of reasons.

Did I have fun though? Hell yes. Painting the Orc leader-board blue with my Wraith Flame was more satisfying than it had any right to be. The game actually helped me to find a whole new level of appreciation for Frodo and the temptation he must have felt while carrying the ring. I did not even have a ring, and I was having way to much fun being a pseudo-Ringwraith. The Nemesis system is really cool, and I hope that procedural NPC generation really catches on. I’m looking forward to seeing what other games will do with it.

That said, once I have killed or branded all the Orcs on the board, the game lost a little bit of it’s charm. The only thing left for me to do was to hunt for collectibles, do timed trial missions (bleh) or finish up the story. I wish I could have done more with my hordes of minions. All I really wanted was to be able to issue constructive orders. Like, how awesome would it be to order my underlings to free their slaves, to put Uruks to work repairing strongholds or rebuilding villages. If the game suddenly turned from revenge power fantasy into a city building simulator where you get to manage your armies, make sure they are fed, equipped, trained and have to resolve local disputes as an impartial judge, I would not mind at all.

In fact, I kinda wish the whole branding mechanic would not even be there. After all, Orcs follow strong leaders, no? So what if you could simply defeat an Orc leader in a duel and take his place as a leader? What if you could earn loyalty and gratitude of orcs by sparing their lives, helping them win a duel, or rescuing them from a Caragor. Wouldn’t that make more sense? Wouldn’t that remove at least some of the uneasiness that came from enslaving hordes of Uruks and using them as weapons?

The second thing I noticed was that you could customize your outfit, and I immediately knew this game was going to be a blast. I spent about an hour ignoring gravely serious story missions visiting every clothing store in the game to put together a perfect look for my serious undercover policeman hero:

Stylish as Fuck

How did the game react to my strange attire that included a shitty straw Panama hat, gray sweat pants, converse sneakers and an ill-fitting pair of pink sun-glasses worn without a shirt? It didn’t. Because outfits in video games do not matter. And so, whenever they let you customize your clothing, and give you a few “silly” options it can lead to unintended hilarity. Like the scene where I took a girl on a romantic evening date looking like this:

A Romantic Date

It is probably worth noting that I had to fist fight bunch of dudes on my way to the date, so my sweat pants and panama had some blood stains. But my date said nothing of it. Then there was that one time when I parked a car in the hotel lobby, half-way up the stairway. The NPC’s in the lobby were a little confused and they stared at the smoking wreck of my vehicle for a bit, but eventually they decided to just roll with it. The car stayed in the lobby for another three or four hours reminding me that I as the player character am the undisputed lord and master of this puny universe.

This is where I park my car

At this point, you may be wandering: “isn’t this type of shenanigans precisely what Saints Row games are all about?” and “Aren’t the Saint’s Row games better at player agency, freedom to do ridiculous stuff and character customization?” The answer would be yes to both questions. Sleeping Dogs is neither as customizable not as silly as those titles. It’s actually not trying to be either.

The game actually treats its story very seriously. You play an American-Chinese cop who goes back to the city of his birth for a super-dangerous undercover assignment that has him infiltrate the triads. You start as a street enforcer and slowly work your way up in the hierarchy. In the process you have to make many morally ambiguous choices. Your cop supervisors expect you to obey the law as much as possible, but your gangster buddies demand that you prove yourself to them by being ruthless and uncompromising criminal. It’s not supposed to be silly. But it is, when you’re wearing the right hat.

After being a grunt you start to spend spend a lot of time rubbing elbows with the rich, powerful and dangerous people. For example there is a scene where you are driving around an American “investor” around the town:

Not as cool as it should be

It is supposed to be really, really cool. The camera shows you exiting the car in slow motion, and you walk around the front and flip the keys to the valet without breaking a stride. But in my game I actually crashed the car a few times before I reached the destination, so it is a steaming wreck. The guy sitting on the ground behind the car is someone I ran over just before the cut-scene was triggered. He was literally thrown up in the air, and landed behind the car. Every bone in his body is probably shattered right now. But no one blinks. No one says a word. The scene plays out as if nothing happened. I couldn’t stop grinning at the ridiculousness of it.

At another point in the game you go to super important meeting that are supposed to be these quaint moments reminiscent of good mafia films, but… Well it doesn’t work when you dress the way my character, does it?

Meeting with one of the triad lieutenants.

The problem I had with Saint’s Row was that the game was too self aware. The designers knew that the player is going to make a fat guy with a lizard tail, put him in a bunny costume and have him beat people with gigantic rubber dildo. Hell, they counted on it and they made mini-games and challenges for all that shit. They were in on the joke, and they built their setting to be inherently wacky. This approach was initially amusing, but it quickly lost appeal. I got bored of the silliness.

Sleeping Dogs does not know it is being silly. It is fantastically conservative as far as plot and story goes. It even includes a pre-fridged woman: the oldest and most popular video game character motivation plot device. I presume that the writers wanted it to be bloody, violent and heart-wrenching and only occasionally humorous. But because I was able to strut around in my sweat pants and panama hat I was giggling throughout most of the scenes. It allowed me to subvert itself. It allowed me to be this silly, off-kilter agent of pure chaos in an orderly and ordinary world. It allowed me to be the one genre savvy character in pulp Gun-fu action story. In a way it allowed me to make it’s story my own, in a very silly immature way.

Listen buddy, these stylish sweat pants cost me like $1 at Wallmart and you bleed all over them…

This is probably the sole reason why I spent over 30 hours with Sleeping Dogs but only around 6 with Saint’s Row 3. Because it was exploitable. Because it played the straight man to my wacky comic relief character. This is an important lesson about games and comedy: let the player be the clown of the setting. Being the bumbling, spastic buffoon is a natural state of the player character and working against it constrains player agency.

La Noire tried to do this by limiting your range of movement / interactions and giving NPC’s awesome car dodging skills so you couldn’t run them over… Unless you tried really really hard. In fact, tricking the game to let me to run over pedestrians with my car was probably more fun and more satisfying than “winning” the interrogations. Saints Row did the opposite: it tried to make the player to be the straight man and the hero by skewing the setting toward silliness so that player antics seem pale in comparison to the madness exhibited by the NPC’s. Personally, I did not enjoy that role at all. When all the NPC’s are in on the joke, and you (of all people) are the most reasonable person in the entire game world, the possibility of mischief and misbehavior is lost.

Just let me break your game and completely ruin your story on my own terms. No matter how funny you think you are, or how awesome your plot is, I can make it better by way of silly hats or ridiculously absurd behavior. As soon as I install the game on my computer it is my story, to be experienced my way. If you want your audience to experience the story “as is” without possibility of altering it, make a movie or a series instead.

That said, I’m not going to embedd it here because is is extremely shitty. The whole purpose of it seemed to show that gaming is diverse and that gamers do not have a problem with women, but the author felt it was necessary to put in several rape jokes, ablist and transphobic slurs, and make the final punchline involve a woman lying about rape threats. Other than the list of characters it contained, it has literally zero worth (even from the artistic perspective since it is the same panel copied and pasted over and over again with different speech bubbles).

So instead of wasting space, and making you scroll through dozens of of panels which may or may not involve surprise bigotry or hate speech, I will simply reproduce the list in a compact and searchable HTML format for your convenience:

1. Faith from Morror’s Edge
2. Bayonetta
3. Lignting from Final Fantasy
4. Claire Redfield from Resident Evil
5. Parasite Eve
6. Chun Li from Street Fighter
7. Samus from Metroid
8. Miku Hinasaki from Fatal Fame
9. April Ryan from Dreamfall
10. Alice from American McGee’s Alice
11. Jade from Beyond Good and Evil
12. Zoe and Rochelle from Left 4 Dead
13. Kaine from Neir
14. Characters from Touhou
15. Curly Brace from Cave Story
16. Momohoime from Muramasa the Demon Blade
17. Lilith and Maya from Borderlands
18. Joanna Dark from Perfect Dark
19. Recette from Reccetear
20. Chelle from Portal
21. Ayumi from X-Blades
22. Lara Croft
23. Femshep from Mass Effect
24. Sofia Lamb from Bioshock 2

Keep in mind that this is a representative list that is supposed to showcase the best examples of strong female characters in video games as chosen by the Gamer Gater author of the comic. All twenty four of them! And after rattling off about dozen characters from major AAA titles or cult fan favorites they started scraping the bottom of the barrel including obscure indie games, fighting games and etc.. I don’t know about you but I have problems with more than half the characters included on this list.

For example, how is Bayonetta even there? Her special moves literally make her clothes disappear and she wears guns as her high heels so that she can strike better combat poses for the benefit of male gamers. Chun Li, Zoe and Rochelle are optional playable avatars from multiplayer games that are light on story and characterization. Samus is consistently problematic – the very fact that revealing her sex at the end of the game was considered a huge twist should be a clear indication that representation of women in gaming is a problem. And then the Other M took and destroyed everything that was cool and interesting about that character. Same goes for Lara Croft who started as a pinup doll designed to be ooggled by male players, and graduated to a heroine who is almost raped and tortured throughout the game to make male players want to defend her.

Then there are all the obscure Japanese console games that I, as a PC gamer, have not played (or in some cases have not even heard about). I can’t really comment on any of these but I question whether or not an average gamer is even familiar with these titles. Are those household names among the console gamers, or were the authors of the comic grasping at straws at this point?

Out of the characters I recognize, Faith is the only one I really don’t have any problems with. While I was not impressed with her game as a whole, I think she is a great example of a strong female protagonist. She is not a silent protagonist cipher like Chell, and she has both personality and motivation. She is never objectified like Bayonetta or tortured for sympathy like the new Lara Croft. As a player, you’re not supposed to fall in love with her, or worry about her, or try to save her – you are supposed to identify with her. When you play Mirror’s Edge you “become” Faith. I think this is exactly the hallmark of a good female characters in general.

I personally think that this is the one question writers need to ask themselves when they sit down to write a compelling female character: would I want to be her? Is she interesting enough for me to identify with? Because, despite of what many gamers and game designers (cough, Ron Rosenberg, cough) would have you believe, men can totally identify with female characters. If your character is not relatable, then you just end up with yet another “disposable female protagonist”:

Superfelous Female Protagonist via SMBC.

The saddest thing is that the even though the authors of the comic were completely clueless they still managed to list quite a few interesting named female video game characters who are not helpless damsels, vending machines or victims brutalized to further the story of a male protagonist. They actually identified more of them than I could think of on my own. And yet, the list seems very underwhelming…

Almost all the women on it are either NPC’s or secondary characters in games headlined by white, brown haired, gravely voiced, unshaven dudes. Only few of them are actually playable characters, and even fewer are sole protagonists of their own game.

How many strong female video game protagonists who are heroes of their own stories are there? What does it even mean to be a strong female protagonist? Lets try to define some minimum set of requirements that they would need to meet:

• Should be a default protagonist – people always bring Femshep from Mass Effect as a good example of a strong female protagonist, but they seem to forget she is not really the cannon hero of the franchise. Yes, the female voice actor is better than the one voicing Dudeshep but he is still the default choice when you start the game, and his face is on all the promotional materials. Femshep did not even get a recognizable “default face” until the third installment of the series, and even then she only appeared in a few online ads.

  So yes, she is an option but you have to assume that most people don’t pick her, because most people tend to go with default settings. This is an actual thing we know about from focus testing all kinds of different types of software. So choosing the right defaults is very important.

• Should not be a silent protagonist – similarly, gamers always put Chell on these lists. But who is Chell really? What is her story? As much as I love Portal, I don’t really know anything about it’s protagonist. Chell is a cipher with less personality than Gordon Freeman. We at least know that Freeman graduated from MIT and was a physicist working at Black Mesa. Chell’s past is a complete mystery. All we know about her is that she is a vaguely Hispanic looking woman. So for all intents and purposes she is barely a character.

  Ironically, the most fleshed out and interesting character of Portal 2 is neither Chell nor GLADOS, but Cave Johnson. So in a game with female protagonist and female villain, a man still manages to steal most of the spotlight for himself.

• Should not be objectified – I already mentioned Bayonetta whose other qualities are seriously undermined because she was designed top to bottom to be a sex object. This is not to say that a character can’t be attractive or sexy. There is a clear difference between sexiness and objectification and it has everything to do with context. If your female protagonist wears a chain-mail bikini when most of the men in the game wear plate armor you are probably objectifying her. If your protagonist uses “sexy martial arts” when everyone else fights normally, it is probably done solely to titillate the male player.

  If every time your character enters the room, you frame the shot like this you are definitely doing it wrong:

  

  Male Gaze

  This goes back to the “would you want to be her” thing. If you are designing a character who is over-sexualized, wears revealing clothing and uses sexy combat moves you are not creating someone players can relate to. You are creating someone players can be attracted to and ooggle as they play.

• Should not be infantilized – another trend you often see in video games is the tendency to make the female characters overly “cute” and child like. You see this a lot in Japanese games, and several names on the list we discussed fall into this category. Instead of being explicitly sexual, the characters are presented as overly naive and simple minded. The players are not expected to identify or empathize with infantilized female protagonists but instead feel protective of them.

  One particular method of infantalization in western games is “torture for sympathy” tactic. It allows an otherwise capable female character to be temporarily rendered helpless and completely vulnerable for the sole purpose of enticing protective feelings in the male player. Consider the new Tomb Rider reboot in which Lara is frequently beaten, hog-tied, wounded, mistreated, and has to fight off at least one rape attempt. The amount of punishment heaped up on her is unprecedented, and it is framed in explicit manner. There are whole cut scenes devoted to showing Lara shuddering uncontrollably, sobbing quietly by fire, fighting back tears, crying, groaning in extreme pain and etc. Games’ designers admitted this was done on purpose to evoke sympathy. Ron Rosenberg went on record saying he did not believe male players could identify with Lara, so they intentionally went overboard with the torture port to make men emotionally invested in protecting Lara from further harm.

• Should have agency – how can you have a player character without agency? Well, it happens rather frequently. Agency can be taken away from the player during cut scenes, regardless of gender however but it tends to happen to female characters more often. It is not uncommon for games with more than one playable characters to suddenly damsel the female protagonists and have her rescued by her male companions.

  The lack of agency can also be imparted by making the protagonist subordinate to some authority figure. For example in Other M Samus must ask her supervisor to remotely enable combat subsystems in her armor which were disabled by default. While this was intended as an alternative game mechanic to replace in-game power-ups it established a highly problematic power imbalance between the two characters. Especially since not having access to all the upgrades from the start could prevent Samus from getting hurt or dying early on in the game.

Note that I didn’t pick these specifically to exclude specific characters. You could run character of any sex through that list and I would bet that all male protagonists would pass it with flying colors. And that’s really the problem. None of the items on my list is even specifically designed select for a
“strong” protagonist but rather strong character design choices that are already used for men, but almost never for women.

How many female characters from that initial list would still count if we run them through the above? I’d say Faith, April Ryan and maybe Alice. I’m not familiar with all the games on the list so there definitely may be more.

Who are your favorite female protagonists? Were they on the list? Would they pass my test and if not why?

Not that the test is definitive or authoritative – it was just my way of organizing some thoughts on problematic design choices when it comes to female character design in video games. If you want something more exhaustive, I recommend this Guide to Gender Design in Games.