Choosing Imitation Over Innovation
January 2008 Issue
Features
- From the Editors
- Craft Check: Gaming Gloves
- Gaming in the Media: Women Working in Games - 5 Viewpoints, 2 Ways to Play
- Market to Me: Women as players
- Gamer vs Gamer: An old debate for the new year: casual vs. hardcore
Interviews
- Industry Interview: Naomi Clark
- Blogger Interview: Mighty Ponygirl [Feminist Gamers]
Articles
- Gender & Live-Action Role Play: Reality Repackaged
Author: Samara Hayley Steele
- Planning a Women-Only Gaming Group
Author: Robyn Fleming
- Celebrating women in the industry
Author: Andrea Rubenstein
- Choosing Imitation Over Innovation
Author: Richard Pilbeam
In this ongoing series, Samara shares her experiences as a female LARPer in a male-dominated LARP Organization.
Robyn outlines the trials and tribulations of organizing an all-women gaming group.
Andrea looks at some of the influential women in the video game and tabletop gaming industry.
Richard discusses ways in which imitation and a lack of innovation help to perpetuate sexist themes in games produced by the RPG Maker community.
Gamer Stories
Reviews
- Super Mario Galaxy
- Retro Review: Pitfall!
Odds 'n Ends
The essential game-authoring tool for creating exciting, original RPGs without programming knowledge [...] comes with a wide variety of commands enabling you to shape a world and tell a story completely from your imagination.
- Enterbrain’s RPG Maker promotional video
Enterbrain’s RPG Maker series of programs are, right now, probably best known to mainstream Western audiences as the chisel with which Super Columbine Massacre RPG! was sculpted from a lump of badly-dithered photographs and Marilyn Manson .midi files. For the uninformed, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is a rushed, bug-ridden, borderline-unplayable recreation of the 1999 Columbine shootings in which the player takes control of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as they wander around a poorly-drawn representation of Columbine High School and engage in Dragon Warrior-style turn-based combat against characters like “Nerdy Girl”, “Openly Gay Man” and “Church Boy”, none of whom can effectively defend themselves as you cast “Shotgun” on them from your magic menu. Upon reaching the library, the boys commit suicide and wake up in Hell, where they wander around aimlessly, fighting monster sprites from Doom 2 with plasma rifles. Eventually they run into Nietzsche, who opens a magic portal which allows them to defeat Satan, who is represented using a picture from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.
The author, Danny Ledonne, rather than deleting the download link and henceforth claiming that Super Columbine Massacre RPG! was made by some other guy who happened to have the same name, has instead tried to drum up as much publicity about the game as possible, entering it in the “Guerilla Gamemaker Competition” at the Slamdance film festival and, when it was rejected, making a documentary about how his unique message was being stifled by The Man. He continues to maintain that the game is a serious exploration of the massacre, although the exclamation mark and use of the word “super” in the title, as well as the inclusion of Darth Vader and Bart Simpson as characters, have led some to question his sincerity.
Yet, and this is depresses me like nothing else, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is arguably one of the more successful products of the RPG Maker community because it does provide a genuine alternative to mainstream electronic role playing games. Granted, it’s an alternative which is physically painful to play through thanks to both its adolescent posturing and the ineptitude of its execution, but it also isn’t the work of somebody who played Final Fantasy VIII and thought, “Yeah, I’ll steal that.”
I am by no means going to defend Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, but it does provide a useful point of comparison when we consider how little the community is willing to go out on a limb and do something different. Since the only genuine restraints are technical and no real programming knowledge is required, RPG Maker would seem to be a perfect invitation to undermine and subvert the some of the genre’s most persistent, stifling tropes with regard to character and storytelling, if not the core gameplay mechanics. However, this fails to take into account the kind of people who actually use it, and therein lies the problem; the majority of the community are fanboys first, designers somewhere around eighth and writers last. Fanboy is a deliberate word choice; the community is also overwhelmingly male. The resulting combination of male privilege and a lack of inspiration results in some of the genre’s most sexist tropes being either unthinkingly regurgitated or, in some instances, made even worse.
Woman? I have a name, you chauvinist pig! Why, I should neuter you right this minute!
- Ivy the Paladin, The Chaos Prophecy
As good a place as any to start in an analysis of the products of the RPG Maker community is The Chaos Prophecy, formerly The Choas Prophecy until somebody pointed out the spelling mistake on the title screen. It’s fairly typical of the community’s output, aping the style and gameplay of 1990’s Japanese console role playing games like the early Breath of Fire and Final Fantasy games. The game is presently unfinished, but what players have so far should be familiar to everybody reading: A young man, Kune, sets out on an adventure with his best friend, Chester, and potential love interest, Athena, after their hometown is destroyed by monsters searching for a magic pendant. What we have of the game has been polished to professional standards, and it even includes voice acting for important story events, but its story and characters remain firmly within the confines of what RPG players have seen hundreds of times before. Whilst we are led to believe that Athena is the chosen one who will save the world, the story still revolves around Kune in his role as her protector, and Athena herself does extremely little. It’s reminiscent of a similar relationship in Final Fantasy X, in which the summoner Yuna was the chosen one, but the story was told from the perspective of her guardian, Tidus. However, while Tidus functioned as the main character and narrator, he was still expected to defer to Yuna and respect her status as The Last Hope For Humanity.
In The Chaos Prophecy, however, the woman who is ostensibly the chosen one has no real say in the story – or what we’ve seen of it – and all she does is fill the single most over-used role for women in fantasy games: the party healer. With no effective weapons or attack magic, she is reduced standing in the back row and providing support to her male companions while they do the hard work. We only know she’s important because we’re told she is. Neither the audience nor the characters are given any real reasons to respect her. Her characterization outside of combat is problematic, too; The Chaos Prophecy is a light-hearted comedy adventure, so expecting in-depth characters is a pointless exercise, but Athena is still a total eye-roller. Her first interaction with Kune is to complain that he’s late picking her up – because her taking the initiative and going to his house is out of the question along with, heaven forbid, doing something on her own – and then she kisses him on the cheek to embarrass him (which is horribly embarrassing for the player as well). Beyond kissing people – yes, she does it more than once – her only direct action is to use her magic amulet to defeat a goblin, and even this happens by accident rather than design. Her role in the plot is a cringe, but most importantly it’s a cringe we’re familiar with from countless other games. Although nobody was standing over the creator’s shoulder and telling him to recycle such a familiar male / female character dynamic, he has chosen to do so anyway.
The Chaos Prophecy’s second female character, Ivy, has a substantially smaller role in the action, joining shortly before the end of the demo. While Athena is a character type common to the material of which The Chaos Prophecy is derivative, Ivy breaks with these traditions by being explicitly portrayed as a feminist. Or, rather, she’s portrayed as Rush Limbaugh’s idea of a feminist: cold, bitchy, openly man-hating and prone to threaten any men who look at her the wrong way with castration. In fact, “I should neuter you right this minute!” quickly becomes her catch phrase, and she utters it at the end of every single battle, resulting in utterly bizarre situations where she threatens to neuter sentient slime molds and birds with skulls for heads. After she’s killed them.
This exterior, however, is shown to simply be an act later on. She talks about how good-looking Kune is after meeting him and, while she is asleep, a thought balloon appears above her head showing Kune’s face surrounded by hearts. This is one area of the game which manages to break with the traditions of its source material, but it does so by indulging in two amazingly crass stereotypes simultaneously: that women who stand up for themselves do so because they hate men, and if a woman shows no interest in a man, it means she’s totally hot for him anyway and just hasn’t expressed it yet.
Before we leave The Chaos Prophecy, I should say a quick word about its dating simulation minigame. It is possible for Kune to take either Ivy or Athena out to dinner with him at a restaurant called “The Matchmaker”, owned by a man with an accent that’s probably supposed to be French. This opens up an interactive dialogue with Kune’s date (or “deet”), who prompts him for answers to various questions. Impress her sufficiently, and you unlock hidden magic spells (which don’t work in the demo). What’s telling about these deets is that the “right” answers are so blindingly obvious that, at first, I thought they were a bluff. They weren’t; telling Ivy “I really dig butch chicks with purple hair” will impress her, while “I only like you for your boobs” will make her mad. Despite the massive differences in their portrayals, both women are ultimately equally predictable, shallow and only defined through the way the male lead chooses to relate to them.
I may be a girl, but I’m not afraid of bugs!
- Princess Vera, Sagawind: Episode One
As The Chaos Prophecy’s inability to define women in any terms other than their relationship with the male hero hints at, there is a common thread of wish-fulfillment running through many of the games created on RPG Maker. A degree of indulgence on behalf of the creators is to be expected, of course, but by prioritizing their own personal fantasies and what makes them feel comfortable, they have largely failed to create worthwhile, fully-realised female characters. While games featuring female leads certainly exist, they tend toward light-heartedness and focus on exploration and puzzle-solving rather than character and story. This is understandable since, with a few exceptions, these women are barely two-dimensional. Even “women” is pushing it, since they are often portrayed as children, emotionally if not physically. Sagawind gives us a ditzy princess who, despite being described as a feisty tomboy, is unreasonably proud of fact she’s not scared of bugs, gets lost in a forest about five steps away from her home, and can’t pull on the switches in the dungeon properly because they’re rusty and she’s too weak.
Another game, Heroes’ Realm, is a deliberate attempt to mimic the first Final Fantasy game, with the ability to select your party members’ gender as well as their class, which is an excellent idea (and Heroes’ Realm is a truly excellent game as well) on its own, but it is not a game where we’re asked to identify strongly with the party members or their feelings. The author of Heroes’ Realm, however, has also created a more plot-heavy, character-focused game called Runelords, in which the main character and identification figure is male.
It’s only when we compare the games with male protagonists to games with female protagonists that we notice how reluctant the community is to create games in which the player strongly identifies with a woman; games with male leads are prone to include lengthy, introspective story sequences in which the player is asked to reflect on the hero’s emotional state, but female leads are kept squarely at arm’s length. What is reckoned to be the best game the community has produced, A Blurred Line, has a well-developed, well-written male protagonist, but the female lead is embarrassingly shallow, instantly falling for the hero because he’s such a lovable goof, then being relegated to a plot device in order to provide motivation, as well as possessing some astonishingly poorly-drawn animated cleavage that looks more like chest hair. The game is not complete yet, but as her usefulness to the plot is now over, I would not be surprised if there’s a motivating death scene waiting for her somewhere around the corner.
This generally appalling handling of female characters would be understandable, if no less annoying, were these professional products with money and careers riding on their success; game developers are often pressured into playing it safe and recycling a formula which allegedly has been successful in the past. But we’re dealing with amateur productions where the success or failure of the product is quite literally immaterial, yet the creators remain so heavily influenced by the commercial games they play that their approach is often even more conservative than the mainstream commercial industry itself.
Change event graphic: Rape Set.png
- Command line in iLL nATURED 2
Well, not always. There is, of course, no ESRB involvement in the RPG Maker community, which allows for the creation of material featuring high levels of violence, nudity and sexuality. While this would theoretically allow for the creation of material which is truly adult and challenging, it largely remains both juvenile and overtly misogynist, with the best example being iLL nATURED 2. Unfinished, and abandoned years ago, the game is a fantasy epic which uses sexual violence as punctuation, and overtly sexualizes every female character in the game including, most disturbingly, a ten year old girl. Just to make sure you don’t miss the subtleties, several monsters are disembodied, ambulatory vaginas. While the thinking behind it is horrific, the game is quite difficult to take seriously, as sub-Super Nintendo quality sprites with breasts the size of their heads persist in wearing chainmail bikinis in the snow, and women being lead to the guillotine still put effort into shaking their asses on the way. Anybody exploring the game’s component files will find folders full of 256 color pornography with names like “her_tits_are_in_pain.png”, none of which, to the best of my knowledge, actually features in the game at all. Why the creator bothered including this is mystifying (and Ivy would neuter him right this minute).
As I said earlier, it’s important to remember that the majority of the people in the RPG Maker community are fans who think it would be cool to make their own game, rather than designers and programmers with defined ideas and goals. The eventual product is a reflection on the mindset of mainstream console role-playing game fans, imitating and emphasizing the elements they find appealing about the games they play rather than innovating. By examining what is created, we can come to understand the degree to which persistent genre tropes, including sexist and misogynist elements, have become ingrained as immutable laws of the universe among these areas of RPG fandom. Sadly, we can also see the lack of desire to change them.
