NOTE: As has been brought to light in the comments, there are major issues with this article. It would be inappropriate for me to make any changes to the original post at this point, but I would encourage you to read the comments which follow as well as my response, which attempts to address the concerns readers have expressed.
Comparisons between Valve’s Portal (2007) and DICE’s Mirror’s Edge (2008) are inevitable. Both are first-person platforming titles with innovative twists: Portal has you creating small warp portals to complete puzzles, while Mirror’s Edge has you traversing urban rooftops at high speeds. Both games also set themselves apart from the masses by having female, non-white protagonists. However, the ways these two games execute this aspect of their designs is quite different. While Portal has been critically praised in part as being subversively feminist, the same can’t really be said about Mirror’s Edge– and it has more to do with the presentation than anything else.
Portal has you controlling Chell, a woman of color in her mid-20s, who appears modestly dressed and quite ordinary looking, a refreshing change of pace from video games characters’ usual movie star looks. An entire article can be made (and has been made) on the ways the title’s feminine undertones subvert gaming conventions, like the way that Chell’s portal gun creates openings rather than pierces things, but that’s really beside the point. What really makes Chell distinct as a character in this case is that she really has no character: her name is never given in the course of the game; no verifiable background on her is provided, and it’s actually quite possible to go the entire game without actually noticing that you’re playing a woman, thanks to the first-person view.
Why is this progressive? Well, as much as video game theorists often try to pose games as narratives, video games are frequently about as character-driven as pinball. First-person titles in particular are known to dispense with developing their protagonists beyond a certain extent because the protagonist is merely an avatar; a proxy. It makes sense (lazy sense), then, for most game designers to unerringly default to what is “neutral:” in many cases, something white and male. Even as gamers grow accustomed to different races and ethnicities for their leading men, casting a woman in the lead protagonist’s chair, as in film, is always a conscious choice and a statement. So if we’re talking presentation, what is bold about Portal‘s Chell is that the game makes no effort to make any such statement. She is a matter-of-fact component of the game that Valve does not attempt to either justify or show off.
Contrast this with the recent Mirror’s Edge and how their female protagonist, Faith, is presented. First, the player is always aware of Faith and her gender: we hear her panting as she runs and grunt when she gets hurt; we see bits of her body out of the corner of her vision and can see her reflection in glass windows. We also hear her address other characters, and she serves as our narrator as well. None of this is bad, but for a title so overtly attempting to parrot Portal that it even commissioned a theme song with the same name, we already see significant divergence from the other’s approach. Then, there’s Faith herself: featured prominently in the flurry of promotional materials and emblazoned across the game’s box art, she is anything but the virtual easter egg that Chell is. She’s ‘the Female as Exotic:’ a character whose difference becomes part of the sales pitch. The lithe and pretty Asian-American Faith is cast by the game’s story as an individual alienated by society, who through a combination of poor life circumstances and innate athletic talent has taken up an illegal, high-risk occupation as a black market rooftop courier.
To her credit, there is something terribly en vogue about Faith. She is an Asian woman frontlining a game about parkour, thinking on your feet and seeking alternatives, all very much in sync with a Generation Y aesthetic. In the long run, however, the fact that Mirror’s Edge and its surrounding marketing call so much attention to her as female and non-white is not doing female, non-white protagonists many favors. One of the crowning moments of Portal is when a player has positioned two of their portals in such a way that they glimpse Chell in front of them. For many, it’s a real Metroid moment: just as Samus Aran seminally shocked players by only revealing her gender in the epilogue of her 1987 NES debut, these chance glimpses of Chell jolt the player into reevaluating their assumptions about their own gameplay experience. It’s a far cry from Mirror’s Edge‘s marketing blitz of Shiny, New, Different, which immediately couches the player in a very separate, and dare I say much safer, mentality.
Both games should certainly be acknowledged for choosing to go with female, non-white protagonists over the typical option. And Mirror’s Edge, if it succeeds in nothing else, does manage to inch along the positive trend which Portal brought to the fore in 2007. Still, the key is not imitation, but reflecting seriously on what is presented and how. Portal brought us something distinctive, while Mirror’s Edge, when it was all said and done, just gave us more of the same.
(For a closer look at the disparate marketing strategies of these two games, I refer you to this excellent article on GameSetWatch: If Looks Could Kill. Feel free to offer your own impressions about one or both games in the comments below!)
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Hey! Not a super educated feminist here, but I do sorta know my games. As long as you’re using Samus Aran as an example, can I advise that you have a look at “Metroid: Other M”?
Honestly I haven’t had a chance to play the game, and honestly after the reviews I never will. It goes something like this:
1) Back in the NES days, yeah, we found out she was a girl. But she was still a “bounty hunter” anyway, a big hunk of metal with a cannon for an arm and an impassive faceplate like Boba Fett (everyone’s other favorite bounty hunter). This persisted until around Metroid Fusion.
2) Metroid Fusion. Still a bounty hunter. But then… there was this guy. Adam. He… calls her up on the radio… and tells her what to do. And you get this creepy feeling, like you managed to make it through four or five games before now without some guy telling you what to do and now *there he is*.
3) Metroid Zero Mission. Great game! Reprise of Metroid 1. Except… 80% of the way through the game your ship gets shot down. Samus’ ship blows up. Her suit blows up. Everything that she owns blows up except for a weefle stungun and a form-fitting blue latex jumpsuit. Creepy feeling again, like if you were playing this game as Boba Fett you wouldn’t have had to spend the last act running around in the equivalent of your undies.
4) Metroid Other M. Just… read everyone’s reviews, but in short Samus gets reduced to a whimpering idiot who just can’t function without the over-the-radio manliness of… wait for it… Adam Malkovich. He’s back, and the creepy feeling from Fusion blossoms into something horrible.
I know this doesn’t change the original story. I know people can just remember the glory days and pretend Other M never happened. But, if you’re young enough that you don’t remember those older games, then Fusion and Zero Mission and Other M are all you have. For that person, that’s who Samus is, and it may be difficult for them to see her as an icon of empowerment when there’s always some loser in a hat giving her instructions over the phone.
So have a look! There might be something here worth talking about.
UZ(Quote) (Reply)
Hi Hi!
Maybe it will throw people off my comment by stating this but *shrug*: Mirror’s Edge is my favorite game of all time. All. Time.
Before I ever heard of what it was, the first thing that caught my attention was that the cover art had a female protagonist. I always give games that don’t clad their female protagonists in conan the barbarian style clothing a solid look and what I saw in ME was AWESOME (Mass Effect is cool too!)! See, my favorite sport is actually Parkour and the idea of this game appealed to me, so I tried it out and loved the mechanics and the gameplay and the achievement that rewards you for playing as a pacifist (which I love to challenge myself by doing in shooter rpgs like Fallout (3 and New Vegas) or Elder Scrolls (Oblivion and Skyrim)).
So, in other words, it was the feminist touch that caught my attention about the game, but it was the extremely appealing gameplay itself (which had nothing to do with her being female) that made me love the game as a game and not just a statement about women in games.
Portal I and II, on the other hand was the complete opposite. I just knew that it was a ‘good game’ with mechanics that emphasized problem-solving and ingenuity. It certainly wasn’t lacking in any of that but what really made the game worthwhile more then the puzzles or seeing that you are playing a female through mirrored portals was the decidedly female antagonist AI. The levels became less about the joy of puzzle-solving and more about the fun of finding easter eggs and getting more dialogue from Glados (cuz she’s funny!!) XD
So to sum up, Mirror’s Edge attracted me for the feminism and held me with the gameplay while Portal attracted me with the gameplay and held me with the feminism. Both, I think, are SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS devices that make me proud with the gaming industry. ^_^
DeathbyDD(Quote) (Reply)
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