Issue 50 - The Truth about Little Girls

[The Escapist Staff]

Bonnie RubergIn the course of her gaming career, Bonnie Ruberg has been a boy, a man, a zombie, a pokemon and a ninja, but she has "never been a little girl ..." In The Truth About Little Girls, one of America's preeminent feminist gamers attempts to get a handle on gaming's lack of innocent femininity, and why it may not be a bad thing.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Patrick
http://www.kingludic.blogspot.com
A sexualized take: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060607/sheffield_01.shtml

A more avante-garde take, note the little girl is also black and deaf:
http://www.tale-of-tales.com/8/

I'm trying to bring in some multiple perspective action to my current project, so you can play little girls or little boys in a magic school setting. It'll be something.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Ben
http://igotnoshoes.blogspot.com
"Old women have always been forced out to the fringes of society. When they no longer became socially useful, we used to get rid of them by calling them witches and burning them at the stake. Today, we come to a strikingly similar end by marking them as comic, disgusting and essentially non-human - the octogenarian bundled up in her armchair in Florida, gumming at a bowl of pudding."

The idea that old women are forced onto the fringes of society seems pretty weak. As far as I can tell, this is a phenomenon of the modern world, in which old people loose their traditional value as a sort of memory/information databases.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Karmakin

Off hand...

I think the best "little girl" character done in gaming is Marona from Phantom Brave. You have there really all the innocence you're looking for. (And make no mistake, that is what you're looking for).

Other, more basic little girl characters can usually be seen in puzzle games of every sort, and off hand, one that jumps to mind is the Japaneese "rubber swing" games made for the Super Famicom. Never released in NA, but they were good.

But lets take this a bit further. It's one thing to be physically a "little girl', and another thing to have that innocence. So wided the viewfinder quite a bit. In a lot of games, characters start innocent but lose that along the way. Is this a bad thing, or a good thing? Personally, I think that form of storytelling, in games that have a strong story is always prevailent, no matter if the characters are male or female. Practically every character in the Final Fantasy series, for example, has gone through this.

Would Garnet from FFIX, or Yuna from FFX count as examples of "little girls"? They're not so young, but they are out of touch with the world. They are innocent.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Christy Marx
http://www.christymarx.com
I was one of those women designers that Ken and Roberta hired to create adventure games. I did Conquests of Camelot and Conquests of the Longbow for them. Sierra was great fun in those days, with a wide-open creative environment the likes of which no longer exist. I was hired along with my late husband, Australian artist/illustrator Peter Ledger, who did the art for the Camelot game.

I also write for TV, animation and comics, so I enjoyed the challenge of bringing storytelling techniques into games. Since then, I've continued to do writing and design for other games, including console and MMOG, but I would dearly the opportunity to create another adventure game. Is anybody listening?!!!

I would also like to point out that Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suit Larry, has formed a company called iBase Entertainment [http://www.allowe.com/Sam/index.htm] and is releasing his own adventure game. If you were a fan of the Larry games, help make Al's new game a success. Then we might see more of them!

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: David Pettitt
http://360.yahoo.com/icecreamsuit
Darn, someone beat me to mentioning Phantom Brave's Marona. As well, I have on my bookshelf Stretch Panic, which features the little girl Linda. Finally, I am quietly hoping for a Psychonauts sequel with Lili Zanotto as a playable character.

However, these merely serve as exceptions which prove the rule. It seems that North
Americans don't want little girls featuring in their media. Make a list of all movies intended for adult comsumption with a little girl as one of the leads; 90% of them are horror movies, because there's something so darn creepy about little girls. But why? Are little girls so strange and inexplicable that the only way we can see them is through the lens of horror? This is certainly not so in Japan, which seems to have a cultural youth-fetish. Anime contains a plethora of young female protagonists, and the majority of girls in video games are probably found in Japanese RPG's, such as the aforementioned Phantom Brave.

Contrast that to games like the GTA series, bestsellers in North America. What can I say, we prefer our women hookers.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: jordiNYC
http://www.myspace.com/dont/spam/me/please/jordinyc
The best games, imho, actually make the PC INTO a little girl. Well, a child anyway.

Any time you're presented with something new, something radically new that you haven't seen before, like going from 2d scrollers to your first FPS, your first platformer, your first game with real physics (not precoreographed flippity flops), or even a lush or complex or sophisticated setting or set of circumstances, or a new type of experience that hasn't even been defined yet.

That sense of wonder is something an actual kid would experience. I know it's what keeps me addicted, more than any bouncy boobs.

Now a little girl as opposed to a little boy? Well, in the Zelda games (1999's Ocarina and onward), you play as a little boy, then as a teen/adult, then have to go back and forth between the two. Doing that with a girl PC would have an interesting response. Or is that a feature of that Alice game? Forgive my horribly bad ADHD (or whatever the damned acronym is).

And please forgive me for sounding like a total dick, but I get frustrated that my entire gender is being condescended upon for our sexual drive. Yes, it sucks ass that the world is so exclusively male based, how women are objectified no matter what genre or media you find them in, but this isn't something aliens implanted in everyone's heads and created this culture of misogyny. I'm not saying sexism is right, but I feel like when people analyze sexism, they always forget that the world we live in is only a result, a symptom of human instinct (sexual, and otherwise). Maybe we need to examine the core of humanity to understand how screwed up it is.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Draven

Alright, let me think here...

You can play parts of Resident Evil 4 as the little girl, but she does flirt with the main character so I guess that doesn't count as totally non-sexualized.

You have Momo in Xenogears but she's not technically human so we'll skip her too.

Alice was still pretty young in American's Mcgee (which was mentioned in the article), but having played through that game multiple times, I have trouble recalling any part of the game that really sexualized her, but again, not really a "little" girl so let's move on.

Ah-ha! What about the Clocktower series? The vast majority of the time you are a small underage girl trying not to be brutally murdered. Don't recall any sexuality there, but not a lot of empowerment either. To be fair though this article doesn't really deal with empowerment so I think it's valid.

I think it's a little unfair to point to this one demographic and ask why there aren't a lot of games made involving main characters from this group. How many games revolve specifically around old men for example (The upcoming Metal Gear game being an exception)? Main characters, in movies, books, video games are generally healthy young adults of either gender and as such isn't really a gender issue.

I'm curious what this writer will think of Rule of Rose.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: VFD

The author of this article would do well to check out Tecmo's Fatal Frame series (a.k.a. Project Zero). The series features playable "little girl" characters, in a context in which they make complete sense, at the heart of the action, in control of their own destiny, empowered and not hyper-sexualised. I think it's pretty close to what you're looking for - in some respects, at least. Great games, too!

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Bonnie Ruberg
http://www.heroine-sheik.com
VFD: "The author of this article would do well to check out Tecmo's Fatal Frame series (a.k.a. Project Zero)."
I'm definitely familiar with the series, but I wouldn't consider the girls of Fatal Frame to be, well, little girls. They seem to me to be at least teenagers, and though they're dimuitive, they're cute clothes, pretty faces, and even their submissive statures can't help but sexualize them--at least to my gaze .

Draven: "You can play parts of Resident Evil 4 as the little girl."
Again, I wouldn't consider Ashley a little girl. She is, if I recollect correctly, actually supposed to be in college (!), and her chest size and short skirt are more than once the subject of some fmv dialogue. By little girl, I mean pre-teens, or at least pre-sexual (in a socially normative sense).

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Scott Jon Siegel
http://www.numberless.net/blog
Yea, Ashley was supposed to be 18 years old in RE4 -- definitely not a little girl -- and she was most definitely sexualized as well, as demonstrated by my favorite single comic ever [http://chugworth.com/comic.php?id=159]. -sj

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: 5p.

How old is the heroine of "Rule of Rose" supposed to be, anyway?

Although the question of sexualization sort of raises issues with that game, too...

...And, to flog a dead horse, the characters in the "Shrine Maiden" series of shmups are mostly young girls of indeterminate age, quite de-sexualized (except by fandom); their primary common thread, going by in-game conversation, is a broad capricious streak. Even the magical battles in the series are the equivalent of "touch rugby" - no permanent harm accrues to the characters. IIRC, the creator of the series has come out on record saying that he chose not to include playable male characters because that would disrupt the "playful" atmosphere of the series.

Whether this is actually a more sexist approach is left to the reader to decide.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Mark
http://frontal-lobe.net
Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie. If you look for sexuality in anything, then of course you're going to find it. There's plenty of pandering, but reading any of your gender-related articles I can't help but wonder how many successful counterexamples you've skipped over just because the female lead has a nice butt, and came to the conclusion that the only reason a guy would play as her would be to look at that butt. As much as I enjoy your articles, and the inevitable discussions that follow, I often get a sense that you're holding games to an unrealistic standard. Believe it or not, most people prefer to have attractive characters in any medium.

Moving on to a more direct issue, I think it is this same oversensitivity to sexuality that is a part of the problem. There's a storytelling value to a little girl main character and you're seeing a lot more games made with more artistic stories in mind. However, with all the hysteria over games corrupting the youth of the nation, with "Games as porn" bills floating around, with ratings being retroactively changed because players can replace character textures with nipples - what publisher would risk funding a game where you control a little girl? What developer, however sincere his intentions, would risk becoming known as the maker of the "pedophilia simulator," because a glitch or mod could be exploited for I don't even want to know what ends? Even if there's no way to do it, do you reallly think that just the idea wouldn't be capitalized on by some grandstanding politician looking to prey on the fears of his would-be constituency? Remember how Old Man Thompson thought there were genitals in The Sims.

With the current political climate, you couldn't make a game like that in 3D, as it would be far too detailed, far too easy to modify. And the only way to make it in 2D is to put it on a handheld - which is not where developers go when they want to make something of literary value (which, at this point, is the only real way to put a girl in a game in more of a capacity than choosing your gender at the start of a game of Pokemon). You could get away with it with a boy, 'cause everybody knows boys play video games, and you could do it with an infant, since an infant is rarely under the player's control. You could use cheerful and cartoony visuals to get away with it, but that also dampens the literary value. An established series - a surefire hit - could get away with it, but at the expense of marginalizing the established hero.

A title like this is too radical for a publisher beset on all sides by budgets spiraling out of control, for whom a single bad word (outside of a review) in the mainstream press could spell disaster. It's not their fault - they are attempting to work with razor-thin profit margins amid a maelstrom of political controversy; can you really blame them for not wanting to push the envelope any further? For not wanting to stand out? As always, then, we must turn to the indie scene - freeware or not - to provide us with the trend-bucking the business needs. Off the top of my head I could think of this little gem [http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3130176], but I'm sure there's others out there.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Itamar

I have to agree with Mark on his comments about Bonnie's articles.

Bonnie, time and time again you insist in shoving your views on sex and game protagonists down our throats. I think this is the third article you're stating the same principle points.
Stop trying to fit a round world into your square view and whining about how poor the representaion of women (and girls) is in our games. We get it already!

I've been playing PC games for almost 20 years, and I've never played (that I recall) an old man or a pre-teen boy (depending on what you take Paperboy's protagonist's age to be), not to mention an old woman or young girl. In fact, the only boy I have played in recent years is Raz in Psychonauts.
So where is your evidence when talking about lots of little boy protagonists? or old males?

A lot of games' protagoninsts are supposed to be role models, or characters that the players could aspire to be; Heck, I wouldn't mind being a powerful, handsome, bionicaly improved "man that saves the world", but it seems to me that fewer people would like to portray themselves as old men or little girls.

To call American McGee's Alice's disturbed, dark, knife wielding, curve-less figured Alice a "sexy teen" is beyond ridiculous.

I understand you view the world through a lens that magnifies sex and sexuality, but please try to look around it, or, if you can't, stop repeating the same mantra in every arrticle you write for the Escapist.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Lake Desire
http://www.lake-desire.com/newgameplus
Some of you are being condencending in your tone towards Bonnie.

As for young male protagonists, I can think of a few I played as a youngster: young Link, DK, Ness, Tails. But males aren't marginalized or underrepresented in games based on their gender.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Bob_Arctor

I have never played as one young or old. In traditional western "chose your charecter" RPGs you can chose your gender and age, but it's never over 65 or under 18 or whatever. For a good reason, children are children. And old people are too old to kill monsters as well as young people.

Unless you like RPGs where you hamper yourself with arthritus (untreatable in middle earth) or from being not fully developed mentally or physically as a child.

I suppose if games were less about combat then it would make sense to have other kinds of protagonists.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Shadow

I just thought perhaps this link I found would relate:

A view from Rizado daSilva about Sex in Gaming
http://www.alwaysblack.com/blackbox/sexingaming.html

Since the Escapist features so many articles that Bonnie has written about this subject, I thought I'd throw this out.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: CRM

Certainly one of the reasons no North American game developer would consider a pre-teen girl protagonist for a mainstream game is that the slightest sexual innuendo, even if the girl is not the target, would have those developers instantly branded as the ultimate evil: corrupting the youths of America, and sued by half the states. It's just not worth the legal and public relations risk. It's like testing drugs on pregnant women: better for the companies involved to just have nothing to do with it, even if the results might be ultimately beneficial.

My personal opinion is that if a game could capture some of the magic of Chihiro, the heroine of Miyazaki's movie "Spirited Away", in an adventure format we'd all be the better off for it. That's the character that came immediately to mind reading your article.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Steve Meretzky
http://www.floodg.com
This discussion brings me back to a project we were pitching to THQ, back when I worked for GameFX, a THQ-owned studio. The game was a platformer for the PS3 (which at the time was still a year or so from launching). There were two main characters and you could control one or the other at your discretion, a la Banjo and Kazooie. One character was a budding mad scientist, inventing time machines, interdimensional portals, rocket shoes, and so on. He was perhaps 12. The other character was his younger sister, tomboy-ish, perhaps 10. The boy had the gadgets, the girl the brawn, and you'd choose whichever one would help you get past the current obstacle. Together, they would adventure across space and time (a dinosuar-era level, a level set in school but with time frozen, etc.)

The feedback from THQ was that no player ever wants to play a character younger than themselves. This was Unchangeable Conventional Wisdom requiring no proof. So we kept making the characters older and older until they were well-advanced into their teens, but THQ ultimately
killed the project anyway.

I've always distrusted conventional wisdom, having seen it proved wrong so often over the years. After all, who remembers that prior to Tomb Raider it was conventional wisdom that male gamers wouldn't want to play any female PC, not no way, no no how? I think if the characters are right for the setting and the story, and the gameplay is solid, the audience will follow.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Sakura

Firts of all I want to say:
I really enjoy your articles Bonnie, keep up the good work!

Second:
To does that don't feel like reading Bonnies articles, then don't, you are allowed to skip them. In the same way that I choose to skip other kinds of articles that don't suit my taste. But for that reason I don't go whining: "Stop writing over-glorifying articles about your boy dreams, or about some big great male genius..."

Third:
I agree about the oversexualized female character, this is something that has disturbed me many times when I play games, and I see how your solution about little girls may solve the problem, or why not introduzing a nun!
I think overall female characters should be more de-sexualized and male characters more sexualized, in the true sense sexualization is not entirely wrong, it's just that right now the scales are a bit off. And considering that in many games female characters are just a few.... it makes it even more boring...
ne thing that I'm actually surprised of is why haven't all the fantasy games forexample introduced genderles characters, or hermaphrodites? It beats me...