Last week, I made a laundry-list of fighting game franchises that I would like to see return to the market. Primarily, I picked games that had an interesting aesthetic or had something to offer presentationally that the current crop of fighters don’t. I was focusing on style over substance, which is a little strange for me. A former roommate of mine (who might recognize this as the second time I’ve made reference to him in a week) once gave me a really hard time about the quality of the opening cinematics for Street Fighter IV. I replied that the story of Street Fighter IV wasn’t told in cheesy little half-cartoons, but that the narrative played out in the fractions of seconds between punches. Obviously, I was defensive. The story of Street Fighter IV, as presented by Street Fighter IV, is shit. Total shit. Herewith, the story of Ibuki:
Then it launches into the game. You fight some dudes for a while and then this happens:
Ibuki beats up Sakura and then battles a blue man-machine named Seth and then:
Look at the way this characters is depicted. She’s a boy-crazy ninja that goes to school and wears revealing clothing. These cut-scenes are characteristic of the whole genre’s views toward story, women and violence. As much as the excellent mechanics make this sort of thing easy to ignore, it’s a damn shame that we have to.
Violence, Hyper-Violence and Ultra-Violence
Video games notoriously come under fire for their depiction and frequent glorification of violence. It’s probably a fight that will rage on for ever and ever because violence makes for such compelling storytelling and action. It’s just too much fun to shoot an alien and watch it explode or run over a hooker or whatever. We’ll never come to a cultural consensus on what level of violence is appropriate in games. Fighting games in particular have an impossible task – the defining characteristic of all of these games is someone beating up someone else.
Violence: A lot of fighting games see it as a non-issue: just deliver the violence and leave it at that. I’m taking about your Street Fighters, your Tekkens, etc. As surprising at it sounds, this seems like the most responsible way violence is handled in these games: ignoring it.
Hyper-Violence: Some games try to dull the shocking nature of the violence by making the action surrounding it insane. Usually, the comedic or cartoony elements are exaggerated so the whole spectacle emphasizes more the action and less the violence. It basically turns the game into a Looney Toones cartoon. Consider the following:
No guts, no gore. Just crazy bullshit.
Ultra-Violence: And then there are those games that really emphasize the brutality of the fights. Usually, these games allow one character to actually kill another. I still don’t totally understand if these games are doing so with a sincere love of violence or if it’s intended satirically. Over-the-top skinnings, disembowelings, and beheadings could be good for a laugh but more often, it just comes off as horrifying. True to form, the video example I’m providing is form Mortal Kombat:
I watched all of these, and they’re all pretty gruesome, but I think Noob Siabot’s at 7:52 takes the cake.
I’m not campaigning for fighting games without violence. I’m not insane. Violence can be powerful in narratives and games and I just wish there was more substance to justify such violence. If there’s a good, character-driven reason Kano should rip Stryker’s heart out, tear his head off, jam the head in the heart-hole and then kick him in the face, I say “fine.” But the lack of context does a disservice to the violence, just as the violence does a disservice to those wishing to legitimize games in our culture.
Boobs. Boobs. Boobs. Boobs. Boobs. Boobs. Boobs. Boobs.
Then there’s the problem of depictions of women and sex; ne’er the two shall be separated. I suppose it is something that there are female characters in fighting games at all. The problem here is as it is in so many other mediums (comics, actions movies, video games in general), women are physical impossibilities who no traits other than those which make them sexy.
Female fighting game character are designed absurdly. A few examples from recent popular fighters:
Cammy – Street Fighter series
Morrigan – Darkstalkers series
Mai – King of Fighters series
Kitana – Mortal Kombat series
The common themes here are obvious. And these aren’t the raciest examples I could come up with – this is about par for the course. Male characters are never sexualized to this degree and female fighters are never characterized beyond what you see above. I can understand that these games have a hard time escaping the bonds of violence, but the bonds of sex? They seem to love it – none moreso than Dead or Alive.
The Dead or Alive series started out as a fighting series that largely featured busty women. I’ve been told that the combat in the games is really quite fluid and satisfying, but I simply cannot get past the designs of the characters, so I’ve never tried it for myself. So enamored with the shapely characters was the studio that they released a spin-off game called Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball. Guess what you do in that one? Because the market apparently wanted more babes but less game-play, they eventually produced a game simply called Dead or Alive: Paradise. I urge you to click on that link… but maybe not at work. Oh and yes, you are a pervert for spending any time on that website. But my point is this: how can any self-respecting man or woman continue to play games from this series? What do you tell your friends who don’t play DOA?
It all feeds into the idea that the game creators aren’t taking presentation seriously. Anyone that was concerned about the viability of a story or a universe or a set of characters would call shenanigans on this non-stop parade of T&A. I am a fan of fighting games, and I wish I could be proud of that fandom. As it stands, I just can’t.
That Girl is Poison
Meet Poison. She’ll be making her first ever appearance as a playable character next year in Capcom’s Street Fighter x Tekken (it’s pronounced “cross,” damn it!). She made her first appearance in the 1989 arcade machine Final Fight. She and Roxy were two street-thug characters that the players would have to beat up as they battled through the slums of Metro City. This is all well and good. But when the studio prepared the game for localization in America, the Japanese developers feared that American audiences wouldn’t want to beat up women. The solution? Turn those women into transvestites, obviously. This way, they wouldn’t offend women’s groups. I guess this was before GLAAD was paying attention to video games.
The character would make a few other appearances throughout the years, usually in the background somewhere. She serves as Hugo’s manager in Street Fighter III and generally provides a nice sense of continuity by simply showing up in various games. But now that she’s stepping out of the background and into the ring, Poison’s gender is once again called into question. In fact, here’s an interview with Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono on the subject of Poison conducted by EGM.
Capcom’s official stance on Poison’s gender is that they have no stance. But a Capcom rep is quick to jump into the interview to state that they are working with GLAAD to make sure they aren’t being offensive with the character and the other characters’ reactions to her. That sounds to me like he’s saying that she is a trans character, but the studio (for whatever reason) doesn’t want to embrace this unique aspect of the character. I have never played a fighting game with an LGBT character – why can’t I start with Poison? What does it mean that they feel the need to obscure the queerness of the only queer fighter they’ve ever designed?
It means that the genre is too juvenile to include any thematically challenging material. Which is really pretty disappointing. It’s 2011, isn’t it?
I don’t think it’s too much to ask that fighting games meet me halfway. I’d like to believe that this hobby is about more than gore, tits and homophobia. Well-made games will always have their balanced fighting systems to fall back on, but for once, I’d like the background to be substantive and mature. Perhaps the game can be more fun when I actually care about the character as a character and not as a set of moves and statistics.
I’ll be back next week to wrap up this month-long experiment. It’s been fun using fighting games specifically to discuss some trends in gaming in general. We had a nice back-and-forth last week about on-line play and DLC. Maybe someone can share a game that treats its female characters with some respect. For bonus points – anyone know of an LGTB character in a game? Other than Birdo, that is – not like Nintendo has stepped to this one either.
Week 1 (10/5) – Why it’s a problem
Week 2 (10/12) – Saturation and missing franchises (a return of the 1990s)
Week 3 (10/19) – Juvenile attitudes toward sex and violence and shitty, shitty stories
Week 4 (10/26) – Where I think there’s a TV series in the competitive scene
If anyone would like to play with me, I play Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, and Street Fighter III: Third Strike: On-line Edition on the PS3. My handle is SWF4815162342.
Wasn’t there something about DOA setting the jigglyness of its characters based on your age? I seem to remember Finn deciding to tell his Xbox that he was 100 for some reason. Am I making this up? It seems too stupid to be possible, but then, so does DOA paradise (I honestly don’t understand what you’d do while playing it–are you controlling the girls, or what?).
I was going to include that information about increasing the jiggliness of the breasts by setting your age, but I realized that I only had that anecdotal evidence – I don’t know if it’s real.
I believe the role of the player in DOA:Paradise is TAKING PICTURES of the girls. But I can’t really expose myself to that website for too long without feeling terrible.
So much refrencing.
I’d be interested to hear people’s opinions on the soul caliber games. There is some story there right? Some RPG elements under specific settings? Also what about the ninja gaiden games? They are essentially RPG fighting games right? How come you never played those games Patrick?
Hey Raylan. I don’t know much about the “Soul” series. I know that there’s some character customization, which is a step in the right direction, but there’s something about growth of characters that mucks with my idea of a competitive fighter. You know? Like If I can level up my hadokens and throw better fireballs, how does that make us even competitors when we square off one-on-one?
Ninja Gaiden – isn’t that more like GoW but with more complex combos? More than anything else, I want to be able to have a match with a friend who also plays the game. Ninja Gaiden is kind of a modern brawler: which is a kind of game that I really enjoy. Why haven’t I played those games yet….? There’s also a bunch of God of War I could still play – and Batman come to think of it.
Thinking on it some more Ninja Gaiden has some totally ridiculous objectification women in it.
http://ps2ps2.persiangig.com/image/ps3/Ninja_Gaiden_Sigma_5.jpg
But that’s more the fault of Japan than the US consumer market. As evidenced in the article US moralistic attitudes kept women out of violent games for the most part. Sexism in a different way perhaps. I think you got to hit/kill some women in streets of rage, but i digress. I think we can blame the giant tits/vapid women characters thing on Japan.
And there is progress in the industry more generally especially the further you get geographically from Japan. Eidos in England gave us Laura croft with her relatively small triangle breasts in TR1 is a strong and interesting protagonist from our youth. In fact the antagonist in that one was also a chick. Japan might even be doing it’s part with Jill, Clair, and even Ada. Although the voice acting makes it hard to tell how they are really trying to portray these women…
I don’t think sexism is endemic to just fighting games, I think it is pervasive in the entire fan-boy culture. I can’t think of a videogame, anime, sci-fi show/movie or comic where a female protagonist isn’t a total bombshell. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that a large portion of this fan base is indeed juvenile. However, as gaming becomes more respectable as a whole and as more women and adults start to play video games, I believe we’ll see this sexism of fan-boy culture die down.
I could be wrong though, just look at the NFL. Here you have your violence which takes place on the field interlaced with sex on the sidelines in the cheerleaders. Also, most Hollywood movies aren’t much better. It seems that perhaps sexism is just rampant in our media, which, sadly, really isn’t that big of a surprise.
That long-rumored naked Chun-Li cheat code raises an interesting point – Capcom didn’t start that rumor, the fans did. Someone was playing the game and so badly to see that character naked that they concocted a lie about discovering a code. And the following of 14-year old boys wanted it so badly that they sorta believed it. Clearly the audience is part of the problem.
It sucks that we generally have to compliment a work of art for not being sexist. Cultural norms suck.
The first video game system I ever had as a kid was N64, so I didn’t really grow up playing them. As a result, I was always self-conscious about being at parties, etc. where people were playing video games, just because I was so bad at them myself. Even the joy I derived from those few games that I thought I got good at on my own (Super Smash Bros.) was quickly ripped from me when I had my ass handed to me at the next middle-school birthday part I attended.
We didn’t go over to my cousins’ house very often, but I always looked forward to visiting them because they had a Super NES and all of the Mortal Kombat games — plus they were fairly unjudgemental adversaries, unlike the dickbags from school. I’d be lying if I said that most of the appeal of the Mortal Kombat games came from the extreme violence. I never experienced anything like it in movies, comic books, etc. as a kid, because my parents wouldn’t allow it. It was this transgressive thing that lived at my cousins’ house and for whatever sick reason, I looked forward to experiencing it each time we visited.
A couple months ago, I saw clips from the newest Mortal Kombat game (some of what you posted above) on the Daily Show. Maybe I’ve grown up and am turning into my parents in my old age, but the new finishing moves (like the Noob Siabot one you pointed out, which was on the Daily Show) are truly revolting. I was downright disturbed after seeing it and immediately YouTubed the old MK finishing moves for comparison.
Even though the original MK was controversial at its time for the fact that the characters actually kill one another, the low-quality 2D graphics make it incredibly stylized violence. I’m not sure why this is somehow better (I’m not convinced it is) — back then, it took a lot more imagination to believe that one character was actually doing a horrible, gruesome thing to his or her adversary. The fact that the majority of the violence was in my prepubescent mind (rather than onscreen) back then disturbs me a little bit, but the old game still feels more tame than what I’ve seen of the newest one.
I totally agree. Both with being thrilled by the violence as a kid and with the abstractions made necessary by shitty graphics making it more subversive. I also cannot tell whether I’ve grown up or the violence in the games is actually more gruesome. I think, as you suggest, that being presented with characters that look more or less real and have more or less realistic amounts of blood and bones makes the whole endeavor too serious. Back when Baraka would chop off a head in MKII, a single giant globule of blood would squirt out. I don’t know if that detail is particularly funny, but it all lends to the absurdity that allows me to keep a safe emotional distance from the material.
Also, back in those days, we were just impressed that a game would portray anything well. That it was a horrifying act of violence seemed only fitting. Time-line will be a little different for you, I’m sure, but I grew up watching Looney Toons and I remember Ren & Stimpy starting up. The severity of my cartoon violence was escalating at the perfect pace, so Mortal Kombat ended up being a delight. It’s embarrassing to me now how much that violence acted as a selling point for me as a kid.
Lawton, you ever play the God of War games? They either make an interesting point about ultra-violence in games or are full of shit. I may need to do a post committed to the series, and specifically the end of the third game.
The whole issue of satire is a funny one. Ren & Stimpy, Itchy & Scratchy, pretty much Tarantino’s whole oeuvre — I find it hilarious and fascinating, even though I probably should be just as nauseated by some of it (esp. certain scenes in Tarantino) as I am by the new MK. I haven’t really stopped to consider how much the transgressive, violent aspects of Inglorious Basterds draw me to the film.
I have not played the God of War games, but I’d be interested. I look forward to your post on them.