There But For the Grace of Gex...

"That's a weird way to spell Yume Ni-.." 
Shut up.  
"So is the Yume Nikki article just canceled now or...?"
It's still coming.  I thought this was just a little more important, okay?

I'd like to revisit a previous topic for a moment.  A few articles back I tried to untangle just what makes feminist game criticism so terrifying to some gamers.  The conclusion I came to was that it's primarily a fear of the unknown, of not knowing what shape games would take if the issues raised by feminist game critics were addressed, but I realize now that I was somewhat remiss.  I didn't actually do anything to allay that fear.  I did exactly what the critics I was criticizing do and pointed out a problem without actually working out a meaningful solution.  So let's dig a little deeper, here.

As I said in that previous article, it's overwhelmingly clear that a change needs to take place.  Game stories have grown too reliant on lazy, sexist stereotypes in characterizing female characters, and they're finding it harder and harder to get away with it.  However, I think the reality of what this means is a lot less severe than people might be picturing.   It gets built up as this massive sea change that's going to completely reverse what we think about game narrative...but it really isn't.  How do I know?  Because this has happened before!  Games evolve to reflect changing societal values all the time.  It's nothing new.  And if you don't believe me, just ask Gex.

 (Insert any line from any Austin Powers movie here)

If you've never heard of Gex, you're actually my target audience here because it probably means you're too young to remember him.  Gex the Gecko rose to B-List gaming popularity in an era when mascot platformers were the hot genre.  Every company wanted to make a Mario or Sonic of their own, but Gex was a little different.  Gex didn't just have "attitude," he was cynical.  He was ironic.  His games took the form of movie and television genre parodies, which he'd bounce and slurp his way through while making snarky comments in the vein of Mystery Sci-...eh...Rifftrax.  (Gotta remember the audience, here.)  Today, the idea of a character speaking and cracking jokes during gameplay is taken as a matter of course, but it was fairly revolutionary when Gex did it all the way back in 1996.

The reason I bring up Gex is that I was thinking about Gex 2 last night, as I do approximately every 45 minutes, and I remembered something a little...off about that game, so I went to YouTube to pull up some gameplay footage and jog my memory.

Here's what I found.  (If your browser doesn't allow timestamp links, it starts at about 36:15.)

I don't even...

I want you to drink this level in.  Just drink it.  Chug it so hard it sprays down your face and neck.  This is a real thing that got sold for money in stores.  What you're seeing here is apparently supposed to be a parody of Kung-fu movies, but instead it's just jokes about Chinese food, samurai (!?), and laundromats.  Also you're collecting kabuki masks as you fight...Chinese...dragons...and...Good lord!  I barely even know what to say.  This was actually considered an acceptable thing to make as recently as 1998. 

And the thing is, this isn't an isolated incident, either.  Late-90s video games had this weird obsession with using absurdly racist caricatures of Asian people for...comedy?  I'm not even talking about vague politics of cultural appropriation here.  Some of this was straight-up war propaganda levels of Not Okay.  Seriously, I feel like I should put one of those Looney Tunes racism warnings in front of this entire blog post now.

"What you're about to see was not okay then

and it's not okay now."

But the point of this post is not to just gawk in horror at all this nonsense.  (Okay, it partly is, because JESUS CHRIST!)  My point is that I want you to compare this with games today.  Do you see anything like this in modern games?

"Yes."

...

...Okay, yes, but not as much and not as flagrantly is the point I'm trying to make.  Society evolved and we realized this kind of thing was just lazy and gross, and so games changed with it.  But ask yourself, are games any different?  Are games any less for not indulging in these gross, lazy stereotypes and instead writing interesting and unique Asian characters who are legitimately awesome?  No!  Of course not!  Awesome things are great and now we have more of them!

My ultimate point is that the abandonment of sexist tropes and gender stereotyping in video game storytelling could be just as painless.  Games are better for having originality and creating deep and interesting characters.  Games are better for not being...the things I've posted above.  Games are better for not being allowed to rely on stereotypes to create their cast and world.

I love Gex 2, but if it ever got a remake I'd like to see that kung-fu level get a face-lift.  Drop the lazy stereotype humor and make it an actual, honest-to-god parody of kung-fu flicks like its supposed to be in the first place!  The game would be better.  The joke would work better.  WHY ARE YOU COLLECTING KABUKI MASKS IN A CHINESE-THEMED ST-....

 "We get it."

Okay, I'm sorry.

Look, some day we're going to look back on modern games' treatment of women the same way we look back on that Gex 2 stage today.  It's not a look of hatred or even derision, just a look of relief that we finally got over that cultural barrier.  And the games we'll have then will be even more rad than the games we have today, and we won't feel like we've lost anything in the transition.  Hell, most of us won't even realize there was a transition.  All we'll have seen was a slow progression of games improving, and leaving old hangups by the wayside as a natural extension of that growth.

So yeah, that's the future we're looking at.  That's the future people have been so afraid of.  Doesn't sound so scary to me.