Video games are part of a constantly evolving industry. Everything involved, from the graphics to the game design, is expected to be always improving. A modern game is nothing like a game that was made thirty years ago, except for in one regard, its portrayal of women. Since the early days of video games, female characters have been viewed in two ways, as prizes to be won or as unrealistically sexualized characters that provide gamers with visual pleasure. Much like in Mulvey’s arguments regarding the male gaze in Hollywood cinema, this creates a dynamic where men are the active characters exploring these video game worlds and women are simply passive objectives and attractions to motivate and entertain the consumer. Due to this, the player is forced to look at this world through the eyes of a heterosexual male. Even when the protagonist of the game is female, it is simply to give the player a butt to stare at as bad guys are fought. Grand Theft Auto V is no exception. In fact, it may be one of the clearest examples of the male gaze in video games.

Grand Theft Auto is a series that is praised for its innovative open world gameplay. In these games, players take control of a criminal in a city where they can engage in missions, play multiplayer events, or just simply roam around wreaking mayhem. GTA V was very well received when it was released in 2013. It won 7 awards, including Game of the Year in the VGX awards, an annual award ceremony hosted by Spike TV.

In the game, you play as three characters, Michael, Trevor, and Franklin, as they perform crimes and heists in the fictional city of Los Santos. This city has a large amount of NPC’s, non-playable characters that roam around performing many of the same jobs that a normal city would require. There are policemen, firefighters, paramedics, store cashiers, construction workers, etc. There are also pedestrians that walk around the city streets. The developers of GTA V paid very close attention to detail when building Los Santos, meticulously modeling it after Los Angeles. Many sections of the city have the exact same streets and buildings as LA. It’s very similar to its real world counterpart, except for in one regard.

Even though the population of Los Angeles is 51% women (U.S. Census Bureau), Los Santos comes nowhere near that. None of the characters that you can play as in the main story are female. The only women that appear in the main plot are the relatives and acquaintances of our protagonists. They are typically shown as annoying, adulterous, and self-destructive. The first time we meet Franklin’s aunt she’s yelling at him for being a freeloader. The first time we meet Michael’s daughter, she’s been tricked into starring in a porno. The first time we meet Trevor’s neighbor, she’s cheating on her boyfriend by giving oral sex to Trevor in exchange for heroin. These women are shown as awful people, but worst of all is that they play no major part in the main story. The named female characters are mentioned briefly but soon forgotten as our anti-heroes go on adventures in Los Santos. Furthermore, there is a severe lack of women in the jobs that the NPC’s perform. There are no female police officers, no female firefighters, no female paramedics, and no female construction workers. In fact, the only working women in Los Santos are strippers and prostitutes. In a game where the male criminals are at constant odds with the male police force in a male dominated city, women play no consequential roles.

Though it may be easy to look at a video game the same way that you look at a film, it’s important to look at the actual “game” part of the video game. GTA V is, at its heart, a game where you shoot and drive away from enemies. Most missions either consist of killing some number of enemies or trying to escape the cops. Recall that there are no female cops. There are also no female gang members, body guards, FBI, or really any female enemies. In the game part of GTA V, all the obstacles are male. Not only are the female characters inconsequential to the plot of GTA V, they also never get in the way of the player during the game portion. The only time that female characters play into the missions is when they need to be saved by our protagonists. One example of this is our first interaction with Michael’s daughter. We need to rescue her, against her will, from her porn shoot and bring her back home. In these instances, the female characters act more like objects that the male characters assert their ownership over. This is a common trend in video games, women are often treated as objectives.  In GTA, women never play active roles, they never stand in the way of the player and their goal. Women are only ever passive, either as an unimportant side character or as the objective the player is trying to capture.

The few women who do inhabit the streets of Los Santos are highly sexualized. As mentioned earlier, the first time we met Michael’s daughter, she’s about to star in a porno. This isn’t a unique first introduction.  The first time we meet Michael’s wife, he catches her cheating on him with their pool boy. While Michael’s yelling at her, she’s yelling back in a towel that just barely covers her breasts.

The women in GTA V are introduced as sexual beings and are never shown to be anything more than that. Recall that the only working women we see in Los Santos are prostitutes and strippers. In the GTA universe, women cannot exist in a nonsexual manner.

It’s sadly no shock that the few female characters in GTA V are sexualized. In the video game industry, this is an unfortunate norm. An analysis of video game covers showed while only 5.8% of male characters were portrayed in a sexualized manner, 42.3% of the female characters were. Furthermore, 49% of the female characters shown had unnaturally large breasts (Burgess). These video games force the player to look at the world as a heterosexual male, where women are only ever sexual objects.

It’s no secret that the Grand Theft Auto series is heavily influenced by Hollywood crime movies. GTA V itself was heavily inspired by the 1995 movie Heat, which is about a group of bank robbers. Certain missions are obvious homages to this movies, including a mission nearly identical to the opening sequence of Heat where players must steal from an armored truck (Petit). This might lead some to brush off GTA’s portrayal of women as just them staying true to their source material, attributing the sexism to Hollywood and not to the game developers. However, this is far from the truth. In the movie, the female characters play a significant role in the plot. The bank robbers constantly grapple with the fear of losing their loved ones. They tell themselves that they are willing to drop everyone and everything at a moment’s notice in order to evade the cops, but their relationships are depicted as important in their lives. Even though their relationships put their careers as criminals in jeopardy, they struggle to maintain them, even when doing so can lead them into a trap. The women in this movie are important to the plot, unlike the women in GTA V. The developers of the game made the choice themselves to depict women in the way they did.

Some might argue that GTA V is a special case in regards to its lack of playable female characters and otherwise sparse cast of female NPCs. There are some very popular video games that star female characters including Tomb Raider and Life is Strange. This may be true but games with female protagonists are still the minority in a sea of male video game stars. An analysis of video game reviews showed that women were severely underrepresented in video games as active and playable characters (Ivory). That being said, I agree that GTA V is an extreme example with almost no female characters. But even in games with female protagonists, the male gaze is present. I was able to do my own research to show this using Steam.

Steam is the most popular online store for computer games. You are able to search through its library of games by filtering tags, short phrases that are attached to each game. There are 1,238 games that are marked as first-person or third-person. These tags refer to the perspective the player uses to look at the main character. In a first-person game, you look through the eyes of the character whereas in a third-person game you look over the shoulder of the character. These account for a good portion of the games where you identify as one character. Of these 1,238 games, 59% of them are first-person and 41% are third-person. This is no shock, first-person games allow you to more easily assume the role as the protagonist. 141 of these 1,238 games are also tagged as having a female protagonist. Of these, 62% were 3rd person and 38% were 1st person (Steam Online Store). This is the complete opposite trend than we saw earlier. When there is a male protagonist, we see through their eyes. They act as a blank slate that the player can project themselves into. When there is a female protagonist however, they’re more likely to be seen. This is the male gaze. If we are playing as a female, we’re not supposed to identify as them, we’re supposed to stare at their butt as we make them act out our fantasies.

Another argument one might make is that these video games have no female audience and thus are only catering towards their consumers. It’s true that in our culture, there is a strong stereotype of the typical gamer being a teenage male. This, however, is far from the truth. Though at one point teenage boys may have been the bulk of the gamer population, the Entertainment Software Association reports that women aged 18 or older represent 31% of the total American gaming population while teenage boys, age 18 or younger, only represent 17% (ESO). This shows that female gamers are a significant portion of the consumers of these video games, and yet the industry still only offers a male perspective.

Modern video games still stick to the age old gaming tradition of portraying women as either sexualized objects or as prizes to be won. GTA V may be an extreme example, but the fact that it is so widely praised only shows how accepted this practice is in the video game world. This is a very ugly side to an otherwise progressive medium. Video games are able to offer us experiences that would be impossible to experience in other mediums. In fact, they are just now being recognized as a legitimate form of art. I can only hope that video games will continue to evolve in a direction that will lead them away from the ugly aspects of their past.

 

Citations:

1. Burgess, Melinda C. R., Steven Paul Stermer, and Stephen R. Burgess. “Sex, Lies, and Video Games: The Portrayal of Male and Female Characters on Video Game Covers.” Sex Roles 57.5-6 (2007): 419-33. Web.
2. Ivory, James D. “Still a Man’s Game: Gender Representation in Online Reviews of Video Games.” Mass Communication and Society 9.1 (2006): 103-14. Web.
3. Census 2000. Census of Population and Housing. Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau, 2002. Print.
4. Petit, Carolyn. “Taking Scores: Heat and Grand Theft Auto V.” GameSpot. 8 Oct. 2013. Web. 18 May 2016.
5. Steam Online Store, 18 May 2016
6. “More than Half of American Households Play Video Games Regularly” The Entertainment Software Association. 28 Apr. 2016. Web. 18 May 2016.

In 2003, a group of college dropouts were about to make the best decision of their lives. These friends had been making articles and videos about video games on the internet for a couple of years, but when an old video of theirs was going to be featured in Computer Gaming World, a popular PC gaming magazine, they decided on a whim to use the publicity to launch a new video series (Rigney). That series would go on to be the longest running web series on the internet, winning many awards.

Still running today with 258 episodes and 14 seasons, Red vs Blue spawned one of the most successful internet entertainment companies of the past decade, Rooster Teeth. Around this company is a large fandom with fans that aren’t just passively consuming the content. The unique internet culture fostered by companies such as Rooster Teeth offer many opportunities for their fans to be creative in their own right.

Red vs Blue is a machinima, a film that uses video games as a medium for its production. All the sets, characters, and action are filmed inside of a video game (Lowood). When the founders of Rooster Teeth made Red vs Blue, they had no idea there was even a term for what they were doing. Though the art form predates Red vs Blue by a few years, it is by far the most popular machinima to date. It was the first machinima that many people ever saw, including the current CEO of Machinima.com, a popular machinima hosting website (Rigney).

The creation of machinima itself is a great example of how fans can be creative with the media they love. Rooster Teeth has gone on to produce live action shorts, web comics, game shows, news shows, animated series, documentaries, podcasts, and most importantly let’s plays

Let’s plays are recorded videos of a game being played as the player provides commentary on their actions (Fjællingsdal). This phenomena has grown in popularity in the past decade thanks to video streaming sites such as YouTube. Rooster Teeth entered this market with their Achievement Hunter division. By this point, Rooster Teeth had grown to such an extent that it was comprised of many different divisions, one such division was Achievement Hunter. This was a group that produced videos that showed how to attain certain achievements, challenges that can be completed in a game for a point value, for new and upcoming games. They then ventured into entertainment let’s plays with their aptly named Let’s Play label. This started with just Achievement Hunter, but has since grown to include many subsidiaries of Rooster Teeth including Funhaus, Screw Attack, Kinda Funny, and the Creatures. Rooster Teeth continues to be popular, with videos hosted on their own site as well as YouTube. As of 2016, the Rooster Teeth YouTube channel has 8.5 million subscribers, and the Let’s Play Channel has 3.5 million subscribers.

Though they became a viral phenomenon in their first year as a company, they did not see monetary success for some time. In fact, hosting a website where people could download that week’s latest episode was costing them more than they ever anticipated. This prompted them to offer sponsor packages. For a small yearly fee, fans could become a sponsor which allowed them to view videos early (Rigney). This eventually grew into their community website. Similar to Facebook, fans could have a profile where they could post pictures, have blog posts, and form groups with other members. Rooster Teeth staff all had profiles and would often join in discussion with fans.

The Rooster Teeth website predates YouTube by a couple years, but they started using YouTube early on as a second location to host videos. YouTube has fostered a participatory culture where members can contribute in a number of ways. Members can view videos, which adds to its view count. This seems like just a number, but it determines how much ad revenue a channel receives, making it very important. Members can also post videos of their own and comment to have discussions about the video in question. This creates a community between the members. Through the medium of YouTube, “members build a connection with the community and the media content creator when providing feedback through comments and video responses” (Chau).  Through these connections, media consumption becomes more of a discussion than just a one way relationship. Viewers are able to share their ideas with the content creators and it’s not uncommon that they are actually listened to.

Rooster Teeth takes these discussions to another level with their live podcasts. In these podcasts, a rotating cast of Rooster Teeth staff have candid conversations with each other about their jobs and their everyday lives.

Because they are streamed live, fans are able to use Twitter to send messages that will be seen by the podcast members. Many of these messages are replied to during the live broadcast, creating a direct discussion between the fans and the creators. Fans often produce images based off of stories or jokes that are said on the podcast. They are then able to tweet these images to Rooster Teeth, where they can be featured on that very same podcast. In this way, creative fans can affect the media they are consuming as they consume it.

In addition, fans are constantly sending original artwork to Rooster Teeth. This might include paintings, sculptures, knitted apparel, written works, and even swords. Any notable submissions may be featured on a video or a podcast. The relationship Rooster Teeth has with its fans is much more intimate than those of TV shows or movies. They have candid conversations with their fans through blog posts on the community sites, comment threads on YouTube, and their live podcasts. This gives fans direct access to the people behind Rooster Teeth, making them feel as if they know the Rooster Teeth staff and are friends with them. This is why many fans send in gifts, because they genuinely like the people they are giving gifts to. It helps that any artwork sent in has a chance of being featured by the staff themselves; this encourages creativity in order for your work to be shown on the media you love.

Let’s plays are creative works. Few successful let’s play channels are silent and only show off the game, viewers are drawn to amusing commentary or activities done by the players in the game.

Successful let’s play channels add their own personality and creativity into their videos (Fjællingsdal). Furthermore, in order to make a let’s play, you need to enjoy video games. That seems very obvious but it’s important. The audience of a let’s play and the creator tend to share a love for video games. This is why, “Let’s Plays meet the definition for interest-oriented communities; they consist of groups of people sharing the same passion or interest for games…” (Fjællingsdal). Because of this, the audience members are able to see themselves in the content creators they are watching.

When fans see Rooster Teeth, they see geeky fans who love playing with video games. They feel as if they’re not much different from the people they idolize. This entices them to make their own videos and become creators themselves. But they don’t need to go that far to flex their creative muscles; they can assist in the creation of the let’s plays by suggesting games or activities that can be the subject of a new let’s play. Like I said earlier, let’s plays are creative work but that doesn’t mean all the creativity has come from the creator. If fans have an idea that they think would make for a good let’s play, they can pitch the idea in the form of a comment on a video or a tweet. On top of that, in certain games where players can make their own maps, or levels, fans can even make the set on which a let’s play can be filmed. Rooster Teeth will often take these suggestions and will credit fans who come up with good ideas at the start of those videos. This connection with the community allows for the fans to be a part of the creative process, and so allows the fans to be creative themselves.

Due to their success, Rooster Teeth has been able to work on ambitious projects, such as their own video game and their own feature length movie. These are both things that require a lot of resources, but the core of Rooster Teeth, the let’s plays and machinima, only require a video game and creativity. Fans can set out to mimic the products they love by making their own let’s plays and their own machinima. The unique nature of the content Rooster Teeth produces allows anyone to try and copy the content they love with the same quality that they enjoy. Rooster Teeth actually offers a platform on which community members can post their own videos. Fans can create achievement guides and let’s plays for the rest of the community to watch. Each week, Achievement Hunter has a weekly update video. Towards the end of each week’s video, they highlight a community video of the week, congratulating and giving publicity to the creator of that video.

The online entertainment industry is full of successful young people who became sensations overnight.  Rooster Teeth itself was conceived by a few guys in their twenties. In fact, “seven of the ten most subscribed [YouTube] partners are teens and young adults ranging between ages fifteen and twenty-four…” (Chau). This tells fans that they themselves could be successful in this industry. It doesn’t require a lot of experience or connections, all it takes is a fan with a video game and creativity.

Rooster Teeth is well aware of the creativity of its fans. In an interview with the online website Indewire in 2014, Burnie Burns, a founder of Rooster Teeth, estimated that a third of their staff had their start in the fan community (Konow). They frequently ask the fans for artwork, suggestions, and names for their products. In the Rooster Teeth store, you can find countless designs that started as a fan submission. The current creative director of the company, Gavin Free, started as a fan over 13 years ago. As a young teen in Great Britain, Gavin loved their content and was an active member of the community for years. Now he lives in Austin, Texas, where Rooster Teeth’s offices are located, and plays a big role in many of the company’s productions.

The fans of Rooster Teeth receive many opportunities to be creative and contribute to the media they love. This is only possible due to the staggering amount of communication between the fans and the creators. There doesn’t seem to be as big of divide between the two as there are between Hollywood stars and their fans. This unique relationship owes itself to the internet and the culture it has created. I predict we’ll see more media take this form in the coming years, with more collaboration between content producers and consumers.

 

Sources:

1. Fjællingsdal, Kristoffer. Let’s Graduate: A Thematic Analysis of the Let’s Play Phenomenon. Thesis. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2014. DiVA. Web. 18 Apr. 2016.
2. Chau, C. (2010), YouTube as a participatory culture. New Directions for Youth Development, 2010: 65–74. doi: 10.1002/yd.376
3. Rigney, Ryan. “How Rooster Teeth Won the Internet With Red vs. Blue.” com. Conde Nast Digital, 25 May 2012. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.
4. Konow, David. “Rooster Teeth’s Burnie Burns On Why Massive Crowdfunding Success Shouldn’t Hurt Its Brand.” Indiewire. 27 June 2014. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.
5. Lowood, Henry. “Found Technology: Players as Innovators in the Making of Machinima.” Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected. Edited by Tara McPherson. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 165–196. doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262633598.165

 

Children’s movies seem very simple, so simple that some may be inclined to say that they are devoid of any hidden meaning. The cute aesthetics and simple plots make these movies attractive to children, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t themes that underlay these movies. Even though kids might not consciously notice these hidden messages, it doesn’t mean they aren’t there. All stories work by presenting a real social conflict, masked to fit into the fictional universe of that story, and then presenting an imaginary solution to that conflict. In order for this to work, that social conflict needs to be applicable to our lives in some way. Films that are able to pull this off keep our attention because they are able to show us a solution to a problem that we deal with in our lives. Coraline is an example of this. This cute movie for kids is actually about being ignored and not fitting into the world around you.

First let me summarize the film to you. Coraline is a stop motion film about a young girl who moves to a new home. Coraline is bored in her new home. She looks for some way to entertain herself, but her parents are busy, her neighbors are all dull people who can’t get her name right, and the one kid her age she meets, Wybie, is a creep that she catches watching her. Then she finds a small door in her living room. Beyond it lays a tunnel that leads to a world that looks very similar to her own, but everyone is focused on making her happy. And they all have creepy button eyes, but that’s beside the point.

There she finds her other-mother and other-father, who actually pay attention to her. She spends the night there, having fun the entire time, and wakes up back in the regular world. Her mom tells her it was a just a dream and goes back to ignoring Coraline. That night, Coraline goes back to the door and finds the tunnel once again. This time she encounters many magical wonders, such as a garden in the shape of her face and an elaborate circus of trained mice. Then her other mother tells her that in order to stay, she has to sew buttons onto her eyes. Obviously, Coraline isn’t too thrilled about this. She tries to escape and everyone there deforms into ugly versions of themselves.

Her other-mother is a terrifying spider-like monster that is controlling the whole world to try and keep her there. She eventually escapes, but she realizes her parents have been captured by the other-mother. She goes back into the other world to save her parents and after tricking the other-mother, she saves the day. When she returns to the real world, her parents don’t remember a thing. Coraline, with a new appreciation of her own world, seems happier and gets along with everyone she once despised.

Let’s take Coraline and first look at its most obvious theme. Coraline is a child who feels ignored. Throughout the beginning of the movie, she tries to make decisions for herself but never gets her way. She wants to spend time with her parents, but she is ignored. She says that she doesn’t like her dad’s cooking, but she’s ignored. She attempts to talk to her neighbors, but again she’s ignored. In fact, they all mistakenly call Coraline Caroline at some point, and when she corrects them, she’s repeatedly ignored. Coraline’s life is just a series of memories of being ignored by different people.

This is what it’s like to be a child. Children aren’t taken seriously, they can’t make decisions for themselves, and they need to listen to their elders. This can often make it feel to them that the world is ignoring them, that what they say doesn’t matter. Throughout the movie, Coraline is talked over by other characters. When Coraline comes back from the other world the first time, her mom doesn’t even seem to register what Coraline is saying. Coraline feels like she doesn’t belong in her own world and is frustrated by this. This is why Coraline finds the other world so attractive. This is a world where everything is literally about her. Everyone listens to her and respects her decisions, they let her decide what to eat for dinner. They even put on big shows just for her. She wants to stay there forever but in the end, it’s all a sham. They want to take away Coraline’s eyes and imprison her. Whenever Coraline goes into this other world, she is always wearing pajamas. This makes me believe that this other world is a constructed fantasy of Coraline’s. The struggle she undergoes with the other-mother is actually an internal struggle. She created the world she believed she wanted, but then it turned out to be too good to be true. This fantasy dreamland turned into a nightmare. This is Coraline realizing that a world where everything is about her just isn’t feasible. She is maturing. She’s giving up her childish view of the world and learning to appreciate how things actually are.  In the end, Coraline is seen working towards actually having conversations with her family and neighbors. Kids may feel as if the whole world is ignoring them, but that’s only because they’re looking at it the wrong way and they need to grow up. If you want to be heard by others, you have to make an effort to listen yourself.

Coraline tries to control people in the beginning of the film. She doesn’t do this on purpose, she simply wants to be entertained. However, being entertained means that her parents must drop whatever they’re doing and spend time with Coraline. She is selfish and doesn’t realize it. She encounters a fantasy where everything is about her, and she almost loses her eyes. Everything in Coraline is a puppet, but the puppets in the regular world are more human-like because they have actual eyes instead of creepy buttons. The eyes have been said to be the windows to the soul because they allow someone to express their emotions. They also show a person’s free will and intentionality; unlike buttons,  eyes can choose where to look unlike the buttons. Essentially, eyes are what makes someone a person. When Coraline constructs a world where she has everyone at her beck and call, she almost stops being a person. Being so self-absorbed that you believe that everything should be about you takes away your personhood. Our individuality arises from the fact that everyone else around us are different people with different wants and needs. If everyone around you wanted the same things that you wanted, would you still be an individual? This film is showing the dangers of narcissism. Coraline doesn’t realize that her parents have things that they need to do. Coraline’s mother was injured in the move, but Coraline doesn’t seem worried at all, she’s only worried that her mom can’t spend time with her. Coraline learns her lesson. She is seen serving others lemonade, an acknowledgement that the other people in her life also have wants and needs. In order to be happy as a person, you have to come to terms with the fact that you aren’t the most important thing to everyone in your life, they are also individuals with their own agendas. Accepting this will allow you to become a good person and avoid becoming a fake narcissistic doll.

Hidden inside Coraline, we can also see a commentary on the stop-motion industry. Stop motion is an old art form that require a lot of time and energy to get even a few seconds of film. In the Behind the Scenes for Coraline, they state that it took an animator a full work-week to get 90 seconds of film. With the rise of computer generated images, CGI, the stop-motion industry has gained some competition. CGI fills the exact same niche that stop-motion did. Throughout the beginning, Coraline is mistakenly called Caroline, a much more popular version of her name. Stop-motion can be mistaken for CGI, in fact I myself thought Coraline was an animated movie when I first watched it in 2009. It’s just not as popular as CGI so people will assume it is CGI unless shown evidence otherwise, such as a choppy frame rate. At one point, Coraline says “I’m way too old for dolls.”

This shows how stop motion is seen by people, it’s just playing with dolls like a kid would. Coraline is ignored throughout the film and feels like she doesn’t fit in. In this new world where CGI is becoming increasingly more popular, stop-motion needs to work to stay relevant. Coraline eventually learns to fit into the world around her by compromising and doing what others want to do as well, like letting her neighbor Bobinsky plant turnips in her garden. Stop motion has compromised in order to survive in the world of today. Instead of fighting against CGI, Coraline actually uses some CGI in conjunction with the real dolls in order to make certain scenes better.

Coraline is a film about not fitting into the world around you, but unlike many other films with a similar theme, the solution we’re given is that it is our fault. In order to find your place in the world, you need to work towards that. This film tells us that the fault lies in ourselves, not the world around us. Coraline felt as if everyone was against her and that they were ignoring her, but in fact she was just being a self-absorbed brat. We’ve all been there at some point in our lives. The only way to fix it is to accept the blame and grow up.