Whose Body? Whose Choices? Whose Culture?

A series of mini-articles.

Posing

Posing to me feels like perhaps the most time worn element in video games, and frequently the most problematic because what it is about is entirely related to coding. What a female body is supposed to look like, what the proportions are, how they are supposed to play themselves, and just a general lack of agency that is a result of subjugation, implied or literal. It’s why the fantasy genre in video games is simultaneously a boon for creativity but also the virtual antithesis for reasonable design, frequently with a call of reasoning being, “it’s just games, I can get away with it, they’re just games.” It’s this in-between space where video games are simultaneously pushing against sexist and racist normativity while also having to fight tooth and nail to actually get some gosh darn critical discourse. So many video games continue to focus on cinema and its associated coding for game worlds, while many of the great games of the past decade virtually abandon it or largely use it to present a world rather than construct a narrative (or are at least, generally removed from dialogue). Those that do seem consumed with dialog also seem frequently entirely unconcerned with it, as if they are themselves abandoning the idea of there being a connection between the cinematic and play elements at all.

In a similar way, this has happened for females in video games as well, where females are sexy and entirely unconcerned with it, or somewhat more recently, have attempted to simply abandon typical female traits. Both of these however do not strike me as the ownership of femininity in games, but rather, in most cases, males simply not having a reasonable idea of how to approach female sexuality without it being cartoonishly evocative of different stereotypes (e.g., the butch female or the ridiculously eroticized). I see this as a modern failure largely because its goal seems to be the abandonment of femininity altogether, and that this somehow equalizes the field, when in reality it is simply a masking for a male coding of traditionally feminine values (or, just as commonly, an outright deletion of those values entirely). In a lot of ways it’s dis-empowering, yet it’s quite a bit more insidious since it’s not nearly so obvious and you can’t simply point to a stupid boob window dress to start a discourse about it.

Taro writes quirky characters, but to call them well-written is… I mean, I guess by game standards maybe? I find Taro’s female characters to typically be representative of a female character with what would normally be considered to be dominant personalities. But the personalities themselves are still extremely flat and one-dimensional. If we are talking characters in games, characters like those in Valkyrie Profile or VA-11 Hall-A strike me as being well-written (in that they strike me as characters, with conflicts and lives, goals and worries, interests and pursuits). Even then, I don’t consider those characters to be of a quality that necessarily expands upon the narrative potential in video games. They are well-written, but there’s still a long way to go to reach beyond that. I think experiential games have progressed much further, with the likes of Rez, Journey, Papers, Please and LSD. Those are games that expose ideas through play, while RPGs and other traditional game genres still largely approach their narratives through a filmic lens, which has significant disadvantages in a world in which a player interacts with the narrative. Games that come closer to using that filmic lens well tend to also be games that more closely follow filmic prescriptions, such as being linear or having definite time limits. But this sort of thing doesn’t work for many games in which the gameplay often overtakes it, such as the writing in a game like The Last of Us or God of War 2018. For however potent it may be, it’s difficult to write a cinematic game because games are not inherently cinematic. It’s why a game like Mario tends to work much better with little or no story at all, than when it tries to justify action and other silly needs via the creation of a MacGuffin by means of Princess Peach (which also has the inherent problem of damseling and literally making her into an object – she’s not a character at all at this point, reduced to that of a goalpost at the end of the game).

Taro ultimately strikes me as a writer who writes characters in a manner similar to the film Crash, perhaps best explained by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I don’t think there’s a single human being in Crash. Instead you have arguments and propaganda violently bumping into each other, impressed with their own quirkiness. (“Hey look, I’m a black carjacker who resents being stereotyped.”) But more than a bad film, Crash, which won an Oscar (!), is the apotheosis of a kind of unthinking, incurious, nihilistic, multiculturalism.

Similarly, when I read Taro’s writing, I cannot help but find the characters, such as they are, to be ciphers for ideas that present a shell but refuse to ever actually crack open the egg. In this sense, Taro’s characters are impenetrable, but only because they themselves exist as instances of ideas never to be examined.

I’ve often thought that the reason for fetishistic designs showing up is often a result of the society they come out of, and (merely a hypothesis) that sexual repression is actually what triggers it. The otaku culture emerged as a counter-culture to an extremely sexually repressive society, and I see sexuality expressed similarly in many Korean designs (please note, when I mention design here, I am referring specifically to game design, and game design specific to the art). That said, Korean designs often take a more even approach to their design, with even male designers typically making their males as waif-y and seemingly intentionally attractive to female aesthetics more often. Is there a difference in the sexual repression between Japan and Korea as it relates to and has affected game design, is it something else, or did design simply mature differently, such that in spite of the frequently sexual appearance of females in games, the sexual appearance of males is often included in games of Korean origin? I am curious because in many ways I see artists like Jiyun Chae and Hyung Tae-Kim as having very similar sensibilities in the mirroring of their styles between males and females, but I see this as a common trend in Korean game art, whereas this doesn’t seem to be the case with Japanese game art. Regardless, I feel as though I’m missing some context (or maybe I’m wrong about the sexual repression thing entirely). Even when reading blogs like neojaponisme, I find the evolution in design to be difficult to place relative to styles that seem close design-wise (big eyes, exaggerated proportions, etc.), yet are extremely separate culturally.