Dear Player: Gender and Love in 'Life is Strange' and 'Firewatch'

What if we had games where women couldn’t be visually objectified, or ones which encouraged players not to dominate their environment but instead put empathy into practice? Well the good news is we have some, a variety in fact. I could talk here about Journey or Undertale, both of which adopt androgynous main characters to allow as many players as possible relate to their protagonists, and both involve key mechanics which promote co-operation and communication over competition and paper-thin stereotypes. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would mean to handle gender well in games. A lot of valid ink has been spilt over deconstructing how games perform gender poorly, but here I want to discuss positive and critical ways to handle gender and build to an analysis of how two games in particular contribute insights into how we might better think about player entitlement and responsibility – in a word, how to play with respect.

But first let’s consider this question – if we have an understanding of how gender is often done wrong, how is it done well? There are many answers and avenues: Bethesda games offer opportunities to determine the way you express and play gender – even making wry satire of conservative atompunk America in fallout; queer games like LIM have you play as non-binary genders where expression is not limited to two options; Nina Freeman’s games present heartfelt personal experiences in engrossing and often humorous vignettes; while Dragon Age tackles issues of race and gender inequality head on through varied representation and critical dialogue.

A game doing gender ‘well’ might eliminate gender difference, or leave as much as possible to player choice, or represent all genders as equally complex and well-rounded, or could make informed comments on – or representations of – diversity. All are sound and interesting strategies for all game design, whether or not gender is a central thematic issue in the game.

Recently there has been a spate of incredibly rich narrative games. While major early indi games like Braid and Dear Esther were masterpieces, they often used an absent woman to motivate a male protagonist, and you get this trope a lot, sometimes called fridging – a lost lover or daughter being important only insofar as they offer an object for the man to dwell on in often self-absorbed melancholy. This style is already being commented on in other games such as Child of Light in which you play a dead princess fighting to free the kingdom and cure your father’s depression. More generally the queer games movement is generating twine games that weave together huge varieties of motivations and identities in ways which avoid labels and conservative conventions. Game spaces can do unique things with narratives and this is being increasingly mobilised to question gender stereotypes – subverting or inverting gender tropes, modes of intimate interaction (consider Robert Lang’s Rinse and Repeat), and even ideas about flow and mastery in games.

To clarify terms, here are the definitions I’ll be using:

Flow is the ambivalent outcome of both gambling and meditation. It’s the condition of losing our sense of separate identity, being in-synch with the game/world, dissolving into it that can both be a radical critique of the self, but also inhibit critical thought (going with the flow doesn’t always challenge the status-quo)
Mastery is the expectation that over time the player will come to be fully fluent with the game, both the idea of ‘beating’ the game and the idea that a game is a challenge in the first instance. Progress, levelling-up, unlocking gear and liberating settlements are all part of this. Flow often works in tandem with it, but it can also involve stepping back form a game in order to manipulate it. However, while mastery can be positive in the way that it fosters skills, educates and confers empowerment to the player, it also set’s problematic precedents of entitlement (we will inherit the earth) and plays on a central opposition between player and environment where everything is the enemy and the player is expected to conquer.

The two games I want to focus on as embodying new kinds of direction in mainstream games, use aspects of all these challenges to established game design, but in very different ways. Firewatch and Life Is Strange both subvert traditional femininities and masculinities, propose new forms of affective intimacy, and also question the position of the player and their relationship to the game in terms of flow and mastery.

Life is Strange is an episodic time-travel game from Dontnod Entertainment, but it’s a break from their previous title’s use of memory and ‘time-travel’ as a puzzle mechanic. Instead it focuses on the relevance of time to relationships, and its capacity to act as both a metaphor and a means of making an argument about mastery.

At first glance the game reads as a magic realist teen drama influenced by Donny Darko. Its ubiquitous teen-speak, while at times unsuccessful, is an attempt to make the game and player feel immersed in a time, a world and a nostalgia and to allow the young women at the centre of the story to represent themselves through their own cultural ephemera. While this can come across as kitsch, the game revels in it self-consciously as soon as one of the characters says ‘go fuck your selfie’, and this adoption of kitsch adds to its queer pop-appropriating identity, centring as it does around the lives of queer women.

The core plot follows your character’s attempt to save her friends and enemies with the fore-knowledge of an impending apocalypse. Fortunately, you have two core skills, and neither of them is marksmanship, super-strength or a bikini (none of which would offer much defence against the tornado you face). No, you’re a photographer who can rewind time – and you are strong and you are flawed and you are sincere and you are human and your world is fascinating.

Your character works with the equally well-rounded Cloe to both try and understand what’s happening, and save Cloe’s missing girlfriend. Your relationship with Cloe depends on how you play, and can be more, or less, platonic – but it is always intimate and complex. One of the things this game does better than any other game I’ve come across (speaking as someone who’s bisexual), is bi/pansexuality. At no point is your relationship definitively prescribed or categorised. You care for each other and in rich variety of ways love each other. It side-steps cliché and makes queer sexuality both touching and incidental. It performs love without labels, and I think it’s beautiful. There are choices, but no tick-boxes, and so it reflects deeply on the idea that identity is performative, in the way that Judith Butler would argue gender is performative: something we do and become through doing rather than something we’re necessarily born to be.

Intimacy in this game also broaches other subjects such as empathy and mental health. This is a very tactile intimacy, we reach out in-game to rewind time, which blurs and crumples like analogue film, we form attachments through recognising other people’s experiences, and picking through fragile ephemera. One character we see suffering physical pain we relieve by rewinding time – we see another human, and alter our plans to intersect with their happiness. In a crucial encounter you discover fluoxetine at Cloe’s house, which is left for us as part of the world to naturally encounter – no labels or stigma come with it, but for those with personal experience of clinical depression, this can be richly signifying object: it’s an anti-depressant. In a key moment we grapple with a deeply affective encounter with suicide which can result in the loss of a major character in the first act: this risk taking elevates our attachment and involvement in this game to keen emotional highs and lows.

Moreover, we can get to intimately understand ourselves. We can take time out to rest – to sit on a bench while our character reflects on recent events and the soundtrack takes over. While the camera plays a montage of shots of us, we are given the time to dwell on the moral weight of our actions and the complexities of our relationships. The game’s central mechanic could even be read as a metaphor for anxiety – we constantly re-wind time looking for a perfect solution, but we are confronted with the fact that there isn’t one

Here the game plays intricately with flow and mastery in various ways. Firstly, it’s coherent world and photographic aesthetic sucks us in and thematically ties its personal and philosophical concerns together – we can take time to meditate, but we can also reflect on and interrogate our actions and responsibilities deeply. This is a world where we feel deeply present.

Secondly both offers flow as reward, and also points to the illusion of flow and mastery. In various sections we can overcome obstacles through time travel – we repeat a sequence of events again and again, obsessing over them, and in the end we play through them in quick succession to achieve our end. We have, in Cloe’s words, Superpowers – but they don’t feel like them, especially when they’re taken away from us at moments to have us grapple with the uncertainty of our world. By showing the effort we put into flow, it shows us nothing is easy, and raises interesting opportunities for empathy with people who live with anxiety.

Thirdly, responsibility is opposed to mastery. We are both forced to repeat and disrupt flow-engaging experiences, but even with all the information we have, there are no perfect solutions. If in Walking Dead we might lose a quicktime event and feel cheated, here we know all the options, and have to commit ethically grey actions all the same. Moreover, unlike narrative games like the Walking Dead which try and hide their linearity, LiS foregrounds it and asks us to question what guilt might be in a pre-determined world. The player feels deeply responsible for the world, and has to make huge sacrifices. Moreover, Ego is displaced in this game, and domination is replaced with empathy. Throughout the game we are even presented with the realisation that we cannot win, but we are also given the option to damn the world that is pitted against us.

Firewatch also critiques gender, and questions our understanding of flow and mastery, but in very different ways. Firewatch, was developed by Campo Santo, a studio formed from developers working at Telltale, and it inherits a sophistication in the way it plays with dialogue and vulnerability from The Walking Dead. This is also a game about reflection and intimacy, but at first glance it could hardly be more different. This is a first-person narrative game set in an isolated wilderness. We see almost no-one, and our sense of being alone is as palpable as our fully modelled body. The central plot is also fascinating for the way that it actually dwells on the banal instead of the magic realist - your superpowers aren’t time-travel, they’re a compass – but this is both as metaphorically rich and interestingly disempowering and empowering as the core elements of Life is Strange.

Firewatch opens with dialogue choices where we learn that we are running away from our problems, our wife has early-onset dementia and we’re struggling to cope – we decide to have time to ourselves as a scout watching for fires, while grappling with the selfishness and intractability of the choices we’ve made. Throughout the game we deal with a conspiracy that has a human tragedy at its heart that reflects our own inner demons, and the main mechanics involve navigation of an almost-empty forest using an in-world map, and communication through a walky-talky with the other main character.

Even at its opening, the game makes it clear that it wants to question masculinity and deal with gender intelligently. Its preface is brutally honest, as well as sweet and well-rounded. It pokes fun at hyper-masculinity where we choose how our wife draws our portrait – either as a faux weight-lifter or a male lingerie model. Not only does it subvert gender roles, but it’s also one of the few mainstream games to really use full male nudity for more than a crude joke. Going forwards, the ideas of sensitivity and vulnerability are central to the way this game frames masculinity.

The standard of voice-acting and dialogue in this game is exceptional, and our distant companion, Delilah, is a complex, confident and witty person independent of the player. Our relationship can again be more or less platonic, and the device of the wedding ring on our finger (only visible when interacting with certain objects) reflects our character’s inner state after a certain number of days it no longer appears on our finger. What’s especially interesting about this relationship though, is its asymmetry.

Sight plays a key role here: we never see Delilah, and there is never an opportunity for the player to physically objectify her. Reciprocally, Delilah cannot always see us, and never up close, and a lot of humour is generated from the discrepancy between what we see and what we say. Our relationship is through sound, and also touch – we use our left hand to depress the trigger and cycle dialogue options as if we were physically holding the walkie-talkie. Sound and touch at the expense of sight – we only see distant shadows and masked people, and even these infrequently. We might even say, in the Foucaultian tradition, that the traditionally masculine sense of sight is downplayed in favour of senses often associated with the feminine (Julia Kristeva, Louise Bourgeois and others would be interesting to consider here).

This also makes for a two-way means of interacting with the world very different to traditional dialogue trees in narrative games. We share information by describing things, while worrying that an external threat is observing us – dialogue happens in the world and in real-time as we walk. What we can see feeds in to what we say to a person in the same time as us, but a different place, and vice versa, moments of insecurity result from what Delilah can see and we cannot as well as moments of hilarity. Our relationship is a complex exchange, and a complex balance where no party has full control or understanding of the other, and the imperfect translation of experience is a key theme.

Empathy in this game is fostered by trying to understand that people see the world differently, whether that be the conspiracy we might fall into, or the forever distant campers who read us as an enemy without ever knowing us. We watch the sunset while talking to Delilah – we watch the same sun set – but do we share the sunset?

In this game mastery is replaced with vulnerability, isolation and negotiation, while the flow we get from nature and narrative are disrupted by the interjections of distant characters, and twists and turns in the plot. This game stages escapism and flow as important but partial, and in the end we must return to confront the world we tried to leave behind. We learn, and reflect, and grow a little but there will always be smoke in this forest, parts we cannot see. What Firewatch suggests is a sensitivity to difference as well as humility, and an understanding that communication is fraught with obstacles and things unsaid.

As a final thought to end on, we might compare this pair with Braid and Dear Esther. Where Braid’s rewind mechanic was a blunt metaphor for loss and regret over a failed relationship, LiS offers rewind as a way of foregrounding complex relationships and mental states unfolding. Where Dear Esther had the male protagonist essentially talking to themselves about a car accident while wandering along a track, Firewatch doesn’t take its melancholy too seriously and involves an actual exchange which avoids reducing one character to the reading of the other. These are definitely games I would be happy to say do gender ‘well’.

Merlin Seller

Lecturer

Games Art and Design

Norwich University of the Arts

|Game Studies Blog|

Dear Player: Gender and Love in 'Life is Strange' and 'Firewatch'