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LARA CROFT: THE FRAIL PSYCHOPATH by Mr Biffo

17/11/2015

14 Comments

 
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In an early trailer for Rise of the Tomb Raider we found a Lara Croft seemingly troubled enough by the events of the previous game that she had ended up in therapy.

Wracked with PTSD over her own brushes with death, she justified her killing spree as a necessity to survive.

By the time we get to Rise of the Tomb Raider proper, any reluctance she might've had to put herself through it all again is gone. Admittedly, if you're going to be wanky and needlessly over-thoughtful about it all, repeating patterns of destructive behaviour is something we all do, until we find the strength to break that cycle, or hit rock bottom. 

NECESSITY
But there's no sign of that ever happening with the Tomb Raider series. The necessity of being a video game character means that Lara Croft has to kill, for ever, without end... yet in Rise of the Tomb Raider there's a glee to Lara's murdering. It's not a necessity; when she kills, she she seems unhinged. It's ugly, brutal.

It's a mixed message.


The sense we get in the cut-scenes, and with the shivering, grunting, bruised and battered Lara we see outside of her killing spree, is someone who's vulnerable, a victim. The game throws her off of cliffs, collapses buildings on top of her, blows her up... and those are just the things she survives. She's tortured by the game, and there's a disconnect between the character you play as, and the character you watch in scripted sequences.

​But then, Lara Croft has always been a mix of contradictions - wanting us to believe one thing, while presenting us with something wholly other.

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REMEMBER THE 90s?
Back in the 90s, Lara Croft was a feminist icon, we were told. Despite being created by men, despite having massive, triangular boobies, and wearing a pair of shorts so tiny that they left no polygon to the imagination, we were told that she was the embodiment of "girl power".

She appeared on the cover of The Face magazine, and in Loaded pin-ups, in bikinis blowing kisses... she traded on her sexuality, and was strong, smart, and deadly. 


There was no conflict within that version of Lara Croft. She shot at tigers and dinosaurs, and the occasional human opponent, and never stopped to consider what it meant. Her more primitive design - by necessity of the technology at hand - rendered her iconic. We never needed to go deeper.

Though it's questionable as to whether she was iconic in a feminist sense, through her simplicity, she seemed comfortable with her sexuality. Flirtatious almost. Plus she was badass.

BROKE
Certainly, Tomb Raider broke ground in terms of putting a female action hero front and centre of a video game, and it had more than a few female fans, but I always struggled with the idea that Lara Croft represented whatever "girl power" was meant to be. It felt like publisher Eidos was trying to have their cake and eat it; present male gamers with a sexy girl character, while assuring female gamers that she was a strong female role model.

With hindsight, it's pretty clear what was going on, and now we're told - once again - that Lara Croft is a feminist icon... though this time, she really is a feminist icon, not like the fake one she was before...

Apparently.


These days, Lara is written by a woman, wears long trousers, and conceals her modesty beneath sweaters and puffy jackets, and goes to see a therapist. She's got a clearly outlined motivation for her adventures (though some of her video game-style actions start to muddy the waters), and is - so we're told repeatedly - damaged by them, physically and emotionally.

​I'm all for characters who have some depth, so why does the new version of Lara sit even more uncomfortably with me than her previous incarnation?

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NOT A WOMAN
Obviously, I'm not a woman and never have been. No... really.

I may have an abundance of sisters, daughters and nieces, but I can't speak from a woman's perspective. I'm pretty sure I treat women as equally as I can... with the caveat that all of us have our own relationship with gender that can influence us in ways we don't consciously realise. 


Lara's creator Toby Gard wanted to exploit that. He told Critical Path that he wanted players to feel protective towards Lara: "That sense of protection is something that I didn't think people had capitalized on in games before."

​Is that what we want from female characters in games? I certainly feel protective towards the idea of Lara Croft as a character who's a female role model, but the Lara in Rise of the Tomb Raider isn't one that I'd ever want my daughter's aspiring to.

Weirdly, the previous Lara never gave me any issue on that front, other than a sense of "Pull the other one" with regard to her being a 'riot grrrrl', or whatever they wanted us to believe. 


​Ultimately, I think it boils down to the disconnect with story and action.

There's a great moment in Austin Powers where it suddenly cuts away from the main story, following the death of a henchman beneath a steamroller, to witness the impact on his family. It deliberately draws attention to the mindless slaughter in most action movies.

Likewise that moment in Kevin Smith's Clerk's where they discuss how many innocent contractors died when the Death Star blew up. There's a reason that doesn't happen in the Star Wars films. Because it would be ludicrous, and introduce a level of emotional heft that would blot out everything else that's going on. 

Rise of the Tomb Raider does the same thing, but without the virtue of being a knockabout comedy. Rise of the Tomb Raider is almost jaw-clenchingly serious and heavy, with a main character who is painfully, visibly, vulnerable to her environment. The violence is - oddly - more brutal than I can remember seeing in a game, because they've tried to make it feel real.

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SPACED OUT
Space Invaders never wanted us to think about the effect of being blown up, and never revelled in the grisly deaths of its antagonists. Most games don't. 

I think most gamers play games in a state of dissociation, and the second you try to pull them out of that, video games get weird.

In Rise of the Tomb Raider we see how much it hurts when Lara falls off a mountain. Thus, it makes it all the more absurd when - thirty seconds later - she's diving between points of cover, and swinging her pickaxe into her opponents' brains, and stabbing them in the throat, like nothing happened.

On the one hand it wants us to revel in this being a video game, while on the other almost feeling ashamed of it. It aspires to give us a rounded, cinematic character, but that isn't what video games need, or demand. Quite the opposite. 


Rise gives us a Lara Croft who is simultaneously frail and psychotic. Somehow, the character is now more bland and lacking in personality than ever.

UNDERCUT
There's never a moment where she undercuts the action, like Duke Nukem or a Nathan Drake. Instead, she draws your attention to how absurd it all is.


This is a video game, not a movie, where the story is controlled and linear. The only way this approach would've worked better for me was to have a version of the game where Lara Croft doesn't kill anyone. Put more of a focus on the sublime platforming, and non-lethal takedowns, and we'd buy her PTSD at being shot at. Give us a Lara who won't kill.

That's a female role-model we can all aspire to... rather than one who does everything that male video game characters do... but then whinges about it, and who shivers when she's cold.

But then... maybe a Lara who doesn't kill men isn't what they want for a feminist icon. Unfortunately, th
ere's no other way to reconcile the demands and events of a video game with how a real person - female or otherwise - would feel about them.

I feel that making Lara more real damages her as a video game character, and as a strong female role model. They say that you should never meet your heroes, and in Rise of the Tomb Raider we really get to meet Lara. Sadly, seeing her as a real person reduces her as an icon, and weakens her as a character.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
REVIEW: RISE OF THE TOMB RAIDER (Xbox One)
HALO 5: A HOLLOW VICTORY by Mr Biffo
SCAREMONGERING: DOES THE GAMES INDUSTRY BRING IT UPON ITSELF? by Mr Biffo

14 Comments
Superbeast 37
17/11/2015 11:52:47 am

As I said yesterday, I'd like Lara to be a psychopath at all times. Someone morally ambiguous or even outright immoral. I loved the part in the first game where a guy is trapped under rubble begging for help and I popped him in the head and Lara said "go to hell" or something similar.

Cold blooded murder/revenge is great and female characters have already done it in many a movie.

Some of my favorite experiences were when I went on a journey with a reprehensible character and where together we committed some pretty repulsive acts. I enjoyed the feeling of discomfort and also the consistency between gameplay and narrative.

Why do we always have to be the squeaky clean hero who at worst commits a few grey area acts that were ultimately for the best?

I think breaking from that traditional will be even harder with a female or some kind of minority character as the online mob demand that representations of such groups are always overwhelming positive.

Making the Lara of the cutscenes consistent with the Lara in the gameplay would have caused too much of a political backlash against them.

Ultimately politics interfering with art compromises the experience.

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Insert username here
17/11/2015 06:10:41 pm

I agree that moral ambiguity in gaming should ever allowed, and that minority characters should be allowed to be morally ambiguous or even outright bad (because, you know, they're people, and people can be those things) preferably as long as it's not obviously coming from a place of hate, but I do disagree on the last point. There's an argument that most if not all art that represents societies is in a way inherently political, even when it's not meant to be.

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Insert username here
17/11/2015 06:13:15 pm

Should "be allowed", not "ever allowed".

Col
17/11/2015 12:04:22 pm

"Obviously, I'm not a woman and never have been."
I'd like to call as my first witness Ms Loopy Lisa : )

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Mr Biffo
17/11/2015 12:15:25 pm

Hah! I nearly... nearly... mentioned that. It was in my head that somebody would flag it up.

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Ben
17/11/2015 12:38:15 pm

"I think most gamers play games in a state of dissociation, and the second you try to pull them out of that, video games get weird."

That slice of wisdom is bang on the money; you've really nailed why, as I get older, I find violent games (and specifically those that try to give meaning and context to their violence and reflect its impact on the characters psychology through their internal 'struggle') increasingly distasteful; it gets harder and harder to maintain that necessary state of disassociation of which you speak. I'm not saying that any developer has, as yet, successfully made me care (or made me a gibbering wreck) about the virtual bloodletting on screen, but the fact that there is an increasing emphasis on trying to make me feel that trauma or empathise with your bog standard, ten a penny psychotic avatar is troubling. I don't want to know what it 'feels' like (or some terrible game writer’s crass interpretation of how it might feel) to kill someone, I don't want to feel tortured, troubled or conflicted by my actions in a game, none of these things enhance my experience or improve the gameplay, and the increasingly visceral, realistic depiction of violence in games, compounded by all that earnest contextualisation and attempted 'weight', achieve little more than to suck the fun out of the situation and break that disassociation, reminding me that, actually, I do find all this pretty distasteful.

"It's just a game" says everyone that chooses not to see the issue of violence or the narrative justification of ludicrously violent acts in the medium, but what troubles me is that the aesthetic of violence that is almost completely ubiquitous in games is precisely an aesthetic choice made to appease the market and the marketeers. It bothers me a lot, but I guess my problem might not exclusively be the violence per se, so much as what the prevalence of a violent aesthetic says about the audience, and the question of whether or not I really fit that mould any more.

Sigh.

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Steve McNarrativedisconnect
17/11/2015 02:09:07 pm

Part of the issue is that simulating ballistics is easy compared to simulating behaviour or meaningful interaction with the world (though not easy is an absolute sense, obviously). Even harder is making the latter fun or require some element of skill rather than just judgement or trial and error. The trouble is that shooting stuff or hitting stuff makes for an easy and obvious gameplay mechanic. Taking that out and trying to make an adventure with a narrative means you're either bound by the point-and-click format (which I actually happen to love), the Gone Home "wander and explore" format (or maybe Sunset's "wander and do chores" format). All interesting, but some find them disengaging without action, and they do lend themselves to a more ponderous gameplay pace (again, I like that, but accept it's an acquired taste).

There is an issue with shooting or punching being the only means of acting on other people in games, but for the most part any other way of interacting is just choosing the right dialogue, which is rarely meow than trial and error (though Deus Ex 3's trickier branching conversations were good). Other than that, the only game to really attempt human interaction by way of actual skill-based game mechanics are probably the last few minigame-driven Leisure Suit Larry titles, which is hardy an advert for the medium....

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Ben
17/11/2015 03:45:17 pm

yes, but what dictates that simulating ballistics or any other form of interaction for that matter has to be dressed up in a veneer of ultra violence? It's absolutely a choice, the prevailing, omnipresent choice in which the medium revels.

I love action games, I love twitchy gameplay, but adjusting an analogue stick, positioning a cursor on a screen and pushing a button to make something happen doesn't have to translate into a guy shooting/stabbing another guy in as savage a way as possible, hell, it doesn't have to involve people or weapons at all, but it so often does that it has really come to define this medium and is quite reasonably hugely off-putting for an awful lot of people. I have yet to hear a convincing argument as to why a violent skin makes a game better.

As far as creating meaningful human interaction in games, it's really not something that I think games can achieve without sacrificing so much of what makes them games, nor do I see the merits in doing so; there are far stronger mediums for conveying and communicating the human experience, it's not what I look to games for.

Steve McNarrativedissonance
17/11/2015 06:59:56 pm

@Ben: I don't disagree with you there. Seems like pressing the action button in the average action game these days launches into a 30-second disembowelment animation. I like Assassin's Creed, but I have to admit that some of those animations are close to Manhunt in their savagery, though it's easy to miss it as you play since you're you're focusing on swooping to the next thug. It's funny that nobody recognises that this might not look great to people who aren't basically used (desensitised to an extent?) to that imagery. That said, I'm not saying violent games shouldn't exist, as adults should be allowed to play what they like,though with kids, parents should maybe try actually parenting when little Johnny demands the game with the age rating that's twice his age.

Ben
17/11/2015 07:37:29 pm

I have no problem with gameplay being presented in the context of violence as a choice amongst many, I am not above a bit of violent entertainment; I do take issue with the fact that it had become the defacto, go to aesthetic choice in the vast majority of instances. It's not only ugly, distasteful and a poor representation of the medium but also lazy and utterly devoid of imagination and I suspect the result of publisher meetings involving extensive research, graphs and spreadsheets detailing what sells best and to whom.

Like I say, maybe that's what the audience wants and I've just outgrown the demographic, but I think it's a creatively limiting mindset that's holding the medium back.

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Kelvin Green link
17/11/2015 09:40:51 pm

Wise words Biffo, but I do wonder if a more pacific Lara Croft would have drawn criticism as playing to gender stereotypes?

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Granthon J
18/11/2015 12:03:10 pm

What I kind of get from this is an approach in which your character takes physical damage from wounds, but also takes psychological damage through wounding others.

Possibly interesting, but does it fit in Tomb Raider? Probably not.

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Steve McNarrativedissonance
19/11/2015 08:32:54 pm

This is something I'm told that Spec Ops: The Line does well. I really must get round to it. Finishing Tomb Raider was next on my list (yes, I'm very behind, so it's lucky the new generation is so disappointing thus far), but Spec Ops might jump up.

I got a bit into Tomb Raider, but the failure to really convincingly merge vulnerable Lara with terrifyingly proficient weapons expert Lara bothered me at the time. To me the TR Legacy/Anniversary/Underworld story worked better. It was still Lara as a superhero more than a real person, but that disconnect wasn't an issue as a result.

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DeathHamster1
20/11/2015 10:34:39 pm

Games can't do drama, and yet they are fixated on it. This is why we end up with soap opera, annoying endings and angst when really we should just be blasting the shit out of something.

Lara herself, meanwhile, is what happens when a misogynist tries to create a feminist icon.

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