A quick peek at the covers of any of this year’s major film or video game releases shows that where entertainment is concerned, gender politics are not sexy. Granted an array of powers and abilities, the women of our society’s fictional worlds still can’t pose in front of a camera without running the risk of spinal injury. Some might say ‘business is business’ and shrug it off to booty and brawn selling better and faster than titles that pass the Bechdel Test. But apart from obvious moral objections, this also isn’t strictly true.
This year’s annual report published by the Entertainment Software Association revealed that women account for 48% of the gamers in the average U.S. household – and that the demographic of female players aged over the age of 18 was significantly higher than that of male players under 18. Assuming this (growing) female population has even a passing interest in fair representation, a change has taken place in the video game industry. Unlike in the past, when a twisted mutually beneficial relationship existed between sexism and the entertainment industry, it now seems that video games maintaining gender inequality do so at their own financial risk.
When female characters aren’t in danger of wardrobe malfunctions and damage from even the least-experienced in-game archer, they’re absent from games altogether. Next month, the seventh instalment of the history-based action adventure franchise, Assassin’s Creed, will make its way to stores. Named Assassin’s Creed: Unity, the game is set during the French Revolution, which featured prominent female figures such as Jean-Paul Marat’s assassin, Charlotte Corday.
The game came under some controversy when comments on the absence of a playable female character in the game’s co-op mode was met with the reply that including female characters would’ve meant too much extra work for those developing the game. When this didn’t go down well, Assassin’s Creed’s publishing company, Ubisoft, released a statement to gaming news website Kotaku. A declaration of equality of all kinds among its staff and past releases, the statement came off sounding instead like, ‘We’re not sexist, many of our friends are women!’ And they’re strong, too. Don’t forget it!
Apart from the company’s poor choice of words, Ubisoft’s record is better than most, and they’ve done some interesting things to combat and discuss issues surrounding gender inequality. They have had a playable female protagonist, with a dedicated game. The roles women play in their games are at times reproachable, but female presence isn’t completely lacking and neither are all women presented stereotypically. Ubisoft also included an instance of male rape in another of their open-world action adventure games, Far Cry 3, a problem which remains largely undiscussed in society as a whole. It was a brave move, and while the sensitivity with which that scene was presented may be debated, Ubisoft deserved to be acknowledged for that much.
In light of both these clear hits and misses, last week I travelled to a Unity event in Paris, to learn and – and share with GLAMOUR – exactly what about the production process made it difficult to have playable female characters present in the game. Speaking to Creative Director, Alex Amancio, the answer was quite surprising:
“To be honest the whole issue is not a production issue at all. The thing is (and this has to do with what we did with the shift to new generation consoles, Xbox One and PS4) if you look at previous Assassin’s Creed games, the main motivation of the player was the narrative. This is how you led the player forward, and this is really good for linear games, but not so good for open-world games because the linear relies on urgency. Urgency means, ‘The world is ending, you have to save whoever, and save the world’ and then, you know, open-world wants the players to stop and fish for two hours. It’s a problem. So we shifted the notion from narrative to progression.”
This shift means that rather than a strict narrative, the game is progressed by the actions a player undertakes to make the lead character, Arno, a better assassin. To keep things simple, this new mechanic requires that there be only one main character, and this character had been chosen as Arno early in the game’s four-year production. Including another character (female or not), would have negatively impacted this change of focus from narrative to progression. Still, this seems to say that the main character may just as easily have been a woman. How then, did Unity, which may differ from other Assassin’s games, come to have Arno as its lead? Amancio says: “The idea was to always try to take a character that represents the period in which the character is set. The character almost becomes a metaphor for the period, I like to think. Arno is a metaphor for the French revolution. He’s at war with himself as much as the country is at war with itself.”
By this statement and as Amancio later said, there was “absolutely no reason” why there couldn’t be a playable female protagonist in Unity or in future Assassin’s games. Only this time around, the character who best exemplified the revolutionary setting was chosen to be the game’s main investment. And this happened to be Arno – a man. The Unity team have also promised an array of female characters in-game. One of these characters (a Templar, named Elise) plays what Amancio calls “a major big part of the main story”, as Arno’s love interest.
But despite these explanations, it can be argued that even justifiable decisions around narrative and character choice don’t exist in a vacuum outside of widespread sexist thought. Our choices as individuals, a core team, or as a corporation, will always reflect our times. Ultimately, Unity is only one of many games making mistakes in terms of a much broader injustice occurring among and against both men and women in the video game industry – and unfortunately, it’s an easy mistake to make. So easy, that developers and publishers of video games have chosen to underrepresent almost half of their U.S. buying population. The problem is bigger than Unity, but hopefully the backlash garnered by its negative aspects will go towards improving gender equality in the video game industry.
For a more in-depth history lesson, here’s a look at the representation of female characters in video games over the years.
Despite what traditional history telling would have us believe, women played a decisive role in the French Revolution (1789- 1799). There were key female figures both for and against the revolution, despite even extreme-leftist opposition to women joining the struggle for better living conditions. Among these were politicians, assassins and death-mask-makers. Players of Unity can look forward to meeting, if not playing, some of these women in-game:
Charlotte Corday
Arguably the revolution’s most infamous assassin, Charlotte Corday is credited with the death of Revolutionary extremist, journalist, and key leader of the Jacobin movement Jean-Paul Marat. Corday, who thought the revolution had taken too extreme a turn with the help of people like Marat, stabbed Marat while he was bathing.
Marie Tussaud
Now famous for opening London-based wax museum Madame Tussaud’s, Tussaud became involved in the French Revolution through her mentor, Dr Philippe Curtius, who also taught her to sculpt. After narrowly escaping the guillotine herself, Tussaud was employed to create the death masks of the revolution’s notable guillotine victims such as Marie Antoinette and Maximilien Robespierre.
Pauline Léon
Not content to let the men fight the revolution alone, Léon petitioned the French Legislative Assembly to ask that the government allow for a female militia that would arm women to defend their homes against counter-revolutionists. Later, Léon also help to found the all-female ‘Society of Revolutionary Republican Women’, which fiercely resented the assassination of Marat.
March to Versailles
The early days of the revolution saw women rioting over food scarcity in Parisian marketplaces march together to the Palace of Versailles. Once there, the women petitioned their concerns, which included the demand that King Louis XVI move from Versailles to Paris to show his commitment to ending the city’s problems. This the king did do, and the role of women in the French Revolution became a pivoting one.
