And here is my avatar for Kingdom Of Loathing currently:
It's not just these games too. In Deus Ex 2 I chose the female Alex, in my various playthroughs of Fallout and Fallout 2 I'd be female, and I spend more time with my female sim communities of women than my male ones. If I had a WoW character, it would most definitely be female*. I realize that usually whenever presented to choose a gender in a game, I split about 50/50 in deciding between male and female, depending on my mood, but I get a lot of fun of tramping around with digital boobs and dresses.
Now consider this statement that I ran across from Leigh Alexander's blog Sexy VideogameLand:
"And, speaking of genre evolution, my colleague Stephen Totilo is re-evaluating the word "RPG," looking at the games we have today and which ones literally let you "play a role" -- what do you think of the idea of LittleBigPlanet, which lets you feel like a game designer, and Guitar Hero, which lets you feel like a rock star, as "role-playing games?" Either way, he and I both seem to agree that our traditional genre labels are becoming pretty useless."***
If I am playing role, then I'm certainly playing a female role. And just so y'all know, I am biologically a male; I have a penis and an y-chromosome accompanying my X. Also in terms of gender I certainly identify as male, even going so far as to slam down some beers with my bra's on a Saturday night (not really). But from time to time, when I play a video game I choose consciously to have a female be my digital stand in, or play a game where that decision is made for me. Even more revealing, sometimes I am peeved when I can't choose to have a female avatar stand in as myself within a digital game world (goddammit, Halo).
Most guys partake in Cyber Drag in video games; much more, it seems, then they do in chatrooms, social networks, or other digital realms**. Perhaps because its because that because this is an imagined or fantasy space that we simply "play" is such a thing permissive. Or perhaps we aren't putting ourselves into drag at all, but giving us some T&A to look at while we kill some dragons, rock out, or whatever. In any case, I want to spend this day looking into the question of Cyber Drag.
Uses of the avatar differ from game to game, and it would be a major lie if I said that every time I made a new female Sim or rocker I was projecting my own identity and (un)gender into the character. Rather, it's more of a form of ultra-spectacle: for the Sims the female is literally put on a rotating display where she remains completely complacent (even smiling happily) as we (the male gamer in my case) make her into the physically (or rather digitally) perfect woman. I would be lying if I didn't try with careful precision to make my Rock Band chicks look smokin' hot, or my Sims unreasonably thin and pretty. There is potential in these spaces for identification, sure, but really we are distanced in identification; especially in the Sims because that woman on screen is more of a puppet we issue commands to than a woman we place our own identity into. She's like a perfect wife, she'll do anything we command her to.
Mary Flanagan talks about the failure of the computer game to break down that wall of objectification/identification in her essay "Hyperbodies/Hyperknowledge". She uses Lara Croft from Tomb Raider as her example on how identification occurs in five different ways with the 3rd person character instead of one. In summary (and probably not doing her whole argument true justice) these positions are (1) a godlike omniscient position of control and "puppeting" Lara Croft, (2) viewing Lara Croft as an autonomos female entity seperate from the player, (3) identifying oneself as a sidekick/companion to Lara, (4) being a vouyeristic spectator to Lara Croft, and finally (5) identifying the self as Lara Croft. To give a few banal examples to demonstrate, over the course of playing Tomb Raider I may view the Lara-Avatar falling into a pit of spikes and saying "shit, I died". In this case, I collapse my own identity with that of Lara Croft, embodying the position of (5). Another point I might (hypothetically) say "Lara Croft would be so hot if she weren't so damn pixely"****. In this case, I'm taking vouyeristic pleasure out of looking at Lara Croft as something seperate to me, taking up position (4). Also, leave Tomb Raider running, don't touch anything, and just watch Lara; she'll do the occaisional autonomos hair flick or ambient action. This is what Flanagan means by point (2), because even though we control Lara through keystrokes there are certain actions that are uncontrolled by us that are carried out by the avatar, demonstrating that this person on screen is no quite us, that we don't control everything she does because we are not her. Flanagan goes outlining the rest of these points but her main issue is that these 5 points of viewing Lara happen simultaniously during the play of the game. Therefore, if a male gamer were to play as Lara, that moment of possibly placing and identifying oneself as a female body is simultaniously negated by the fact that we are also distancing herself from her in multiple ways. Instead, Lara Croft is a willing puppet of male control, and we are given the privilidged invisible camera viewpoint of seeing her dodge traps, shoot bad guys, and fall to her doom (several times) in the comfort of our own chairs in front of a computer monitor. We don't really end up being in cyber drag at all, because we don't occupy the female space.
However, I don't want to be so bleak and end right there. Because while I do find that Flanagan's arguement is true not for just Tomb Raider but almost every 3rd person platformer/shooter game, it's not true for every game. For example, Portal does some incredibly interesting things with identification and gender that breaks down those "5 areas of identification" that Flanagan talked about in her essay. I've argued in the classroom that Portal is a game where gender-bending/fucking/obliteration occurs quite thoroughly and I'll try to summarize some of my points right here*****. For example, within the game the control of the character never breaks, there are no moments where the female avatar acts of her own volition. Also, the 1st person perspective. The female avatar also certainly isn't a looker, the sight of looking at her through a portal isn't that of necessarily of vouyeristic pleasure but reflection; you aren't looking through a portal at a woman, but looking through a portal at yourself. So Portal, I've argued in the past, collapses the identification of player with it's avatar completely, inserting the player's identity into a digital female body. That doesn't mean it happens in other places to a lesser degree.
Now take some of the old Black Isle Role Playing Games: in Fallout or Baldur's Gate we certainly are distanced from the player avatar, taking on the classic RTS point of view of omniscience and control. However, this distance is so far (and the graphics technology so inadequate) that the avatar almost has no sexual definition, and is certainly not titilating, vouyeristic, or sexual. There is still that sensation of control, of puppetry at a distance, but I describe my own experience of playing from this perspective as still much more "role-playing" as a Baldur's Gate female than playing as Lara Croft or one of my Sims. Because the main difference is that the actions I undertake in the game serve as placeholders of the actions I would otherwise undertake if I were really in that digital world. Sure, Fallout has (limited) dialogue options but each possible point of dialogue represents a different attitude or question I would ask. I would use different words than my character, but they would (ideally) mean the same things. Again, the "class", "skills", "techniques", "role", or whatever are a reflection of the player's identity, and every action becomes a reflection of what how the player wants to define himself. So in character creation, choosing a gender doesn't change the game mechanics or gameplay drastically, but its a choice that is given for the player to take up, being asked to identify as the opposite sex as opposed to a male or female identity being forced on the player. This mechanic is perhaps what is at the core of cyber drag.
Ultimately, what I think everything above illustrates is both a movement that is emerging and at the same time being resisted, one that has been accurately predicted by us smarmy intellectual academic types for a while now. Donna Haraway, in her Cyborg Manifesto, discussed how technology was slowly merging (wo)man to machine, doing away with Freudian and phallocentric/patriarchical understandings of sexuality and society. I feel the same thing is being done in video games. With the word "immersion" being thrown around 100 times a second in the gaming sphere, we forget that such immersion involves us extending ourselves as a digital entity into a game, that we need an avatar and digital placeholder to represent ourselves into that world. This digital extension inherently has no gender, and it is only some game designer's decision that this extension be "coded" (both ) as male or female. But a man in woman's clothing is (genderly) neither man nor male, as is my malicious serial killing Fallout character who is coded as female but played by a man.
So now that nobody is listening, I want to ask: Do you cyber drag? Why? As you might have guessed in your reading, I'm myself am not too informed on Drag culture or theory, so perhaps I'm using the word "drag" inappropriately to describe this phenomenon. Is there something that I'm missing that would disrupt or support this train of thought? Really, what do you think?
To read Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, click here.
To read Flanagan's article on the idea of the Hyperbody, click here.
---footnotes---
*WoW, however, ends relationships and destroys lives, so I will never have a WoW character.
** It would be interesting however, to see how often males playing females/females playing males occur over erotic chat channels or just in random non-game digital spaces. How many people listed under "female" on facebook are what (the white hetero patriarchical) majority would call male? This is a train of thought for another time, but really: "On the internet, no one knows you are dog".
***"Oh Survival Horror, Where art Thou?" Alexander, Leigh. http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2008/09/o-survival-horror-where-art-thou.html
**** I mean, she's really not that hot. Angelina Jolie is, but Lara Croft...eh.
***** I plan on posting the original paper onto the blog eventually. My summary doesn't really do justice to the wealth of things going on in Portal concerning gender and identification, and if I posted everything I wanted to say about it now this post would be about 3 times longer.
