Feminine Voice of Reason

Pacific Rim hit theaters just a little while back and made over thirty-seven million dollars during its opening weekend. It is an action-packed film, and for a movie about large robots fighting off hulking monsters, it has a surprising amount of story. If you haven’t heard already, Pacific Rim has a woman of color as a main character but, sadly, the film still does not pass the Bechdel Test. There is another female robot pilot, but she has almost no screen time and very few lines, and in the background only a few women can be picked out of the crowds of the main setting. But there is one familiar female voice that graces the screen, that of Ellen McLain as the voice of robot Gipsy Danger.

There has been a rise in the use of fictional computer voices, artificial intelligences, and virtual intelligences in recent years, accompanying the rise in science fiction’s popularity.  Voice actresses, such as Ellen McLain, portray voices that are mechanized, concise, educated, informative, and helpful. And it is almost always feminine. This can most prevalently be seen in the realm of video games, where science fiction and computer advancements have always been part of popular game design. For female-voiced AIs, video games and movies are their domain.

GLaDOS from Portal, voiced by Ellen McLain

Ellen McLain, most recently voicing the computer of the main robot from Pacific Rim, is most well known for her voice work in the Portal franchise. While McLain’s GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) from Portal may be one of the best-known AI/VI voices from video games, the line goes on. From the popular Halo series the AI Cortana (voiced by Jen Taylor) assists and informs the player, but also evolved to be more sexualized as the series and graphics allowed it to. From Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 there comes EDI (voiced by Tricia Helfer), a female voiced AI that chooses a provocative robotic female body to integrate with.  Going farther back, before the turn of the century, there was the intense computer SHODAN (voiced by Terri Brosius) from the System Shock series. Some of the most memorable computer programs from the last few generation of game consoles have been vocalized as feminine.

SHODAN from System Shock, voiced by Terri Brosius

Why is this?  With the recent backlash at the video game community for its lack of strong female characters, it is interesting to see that many of the ‘fake’ people or minds in video games are portrayed as or performed as female.  Artificial intelligences are not true people, but the prevalence to refer to GLaDOs as ‘she’ instead of ‘it’ remains.  These computers contain a mixture of stereotypically gendered traits, from the feminine gracefulness to the masculine lack of emotion. But these computer programs share a lot of traits with successful women in the workplace; they are effective, hard working, confident, knowledgeable, and self-reliant. Given this there is still, in most cases, no realistic middle ground; these AIs are either helpful, following orders as an artificial assistant, or they are cruel, manipulative and against the player character.

The evolution of Cortana's appearance.

Sadly, it seems that video games create more female voiced or bodied avatars when they make them out of metal instead of bone.  This trend is changing as reimagined classic female characters reemerge and new characters are created, but video games still have a long way to go in character equality. Fully-fledged female characters in video games are still hard to come by, but these exaggerated, objectified feminine computer programs are actually very well known and persistent.  Video games have a bad reputation of objectifying women and organizing female characters by tropes. While characters such as GLaDOS and SHODAN are loved, these AI characters are not doing video games any favors towards more realistic interpretations of women.  While these AIs may be viewed as intelligent women, some are sexualized without choice or representation. While Halo’s AI Cortana started off as blocky graphics back in 2001, her most recent rendition depicts her as a seductive and naked digitized woman. Mass Effect’s EDI implants her own consciousness into the empty robotic shell of a metal femme fatale.  It is noted throughout the game that EDI has chosen to inhabit an attractive form.  With their attractive bodies they are also mostly void of emotion but brimming with information and assistance.

The use of feminine-voiced computers has allowed video games and movies to give us some beloved characters, but there is a clear split between those that use it to represent a creation of intellect, or a creation meant to objectify the female form. It is interesting to note that the helpful female AIs are usually given attractive female forms, while those who are independent and usually malicious are abstract voices. 

As the realm of science fiction expands, computer graphics increase, and stories continue to be written, it will be interesting to see how the artificial and real women of video games and movies are represented. AI characters are a wonderful addition to science fiction and allow for great story expansion. Yet these artificial female representations do not create a pass for appropriate objectification, especially if the AI is the only slight version of female representation in the film or game.  When a high-budget summer release such as Pacific Rim can still fall short of the Bechdel test, and video games are still under fire for their lack of strong female characters, certain changes have already been called for. Adding to those, a change in the way mechanical humanoids are used, in some but not all cases, to exploit the female form and emphasize stereotypical feminine traits. 

Fake Geek Girls, Fake Geek Problems

It is difficult to have a valid discussion on a concept that is so hotly debated. The idea of the Fake Geek Girl exists in a multitude of discussions. Do they exist at all? Does the idea of a Fake Geek Girl have a spectrum? Is one a Fake Geek Girl to the complete exclusion of being an actual geek?  Does the debate of the Fake Geek Girl expand to booth babes, or even just a geek culture naïf? What stressors over the last few years of the geek and gaming community has led to the explosion of negative energy towards the communities female participants?  When the first postings about the Fake Geek Girl hit the Internet it ushered in a flood of reactions both condemning the idea and expanding upon it.

The Fake Geek Girl has a vague definition. Articles by CNN, The Atlantic, and Forbes (several times) contributors explain that FGGs are “pretty girls pretending to be geeks for attention”. One article even drew the FGG infiltration as parallel to the Communist sleeper agent uncertainty of the 1950s. Jokes are cracked and comics and advertisements are drawn about how these FGGs are here to prey on the male geeks as unfeeling huntresses. These comics or short films, while made in jest as a manner to dismiss the FGG, can actually get across some important points. One short film has a humorous depiction of the FGG as a murderer. In it, the detective makes a comment stating that: “Maybe there is no fake geek girl. Maybe it is just a product of the deeply rooted sexism of geek culture. Maybe she is just a manifestation of the insecurities about the opposite sex”.  This is the only somewhat serious part of the film, and it is quickly laughed off and forgotten. Yet, Dr. Andrea Letamendi, who writes for The Mary Sue, explains that this may be the case as well as several other factors.

Pulp Scifi style seems perfect for the silly idea.

Dr. Letamendi explains the situation on both sides: why the male geek population reacted to viciously, and why the female geek population reacted so defensively. She lays it out in three very clear lines. Geeks are afraid of imposters and false infiltrators because: 1) There is a false notion of limited resources within the community, 2) The community has a misinterpreted sense of ownership, and 3) There is resentment for the change that ‘geek’ culture is undergoing. These negative ideas are supported by the fact that, every once in a blue moon, there is a girl just looking to get some attention in a skimpy cosplay, there are still booth babes in many conventions, and fledgling geeks are not given enough positive reinforcement to pursue the culture before being turned away.

Dr. Letamendi also states that female ‘geeks’ become defensive at the idea of the FGG because of long-seated “insults, indignities, and demeaning messages from other members of the comics community”.  She brings up the subtle ways in which female members of the community are belittled, stating the use of microaggressions, to plant a disparaging seed in the female geek’s mind. She also elaborates on the ways women are made to feel invisible within the community, as well as pointing out that female geeks are constantly told that they cannot keep up intellectually with their male counterparts.

There may be a little more to it though.  The introduction of the idea of the FGG to the popular community mindset led to the creation of a new wall.  This barrier, arbitrary in its subject or depth, has to be hurdled every time a female geek wants to participate in the community’s conversations. Every time the wall is faced, the qualifications to be an ‘authentic geek’ changes. Many of the articles about FGGs written by females who consider themselves part of the community start their articles with their geek justifications; a list of how and why they can be considered part of the community. They have to prove themselves, establish their geek credentials, in fear of not being taken seriously.

The itching idea of attractive female non-geeks invading the geek-space for attention without an actual interest in the geek subset of cultural material has been growing for a while. Bans on the use of Booth Babes (another term for a promotional model), female models hired to attract attention to products and product tables at conventions, has been on the scene for a while.  But for them it is different, while they may be at the con for the attention, they are also there for the money, for them it is a job. But the main worry is that this condescending attitude towards ‘pretty invaders’ is now being applied to attractive female geek community members who have, for a long time, felt like a part of the community and are now faced with requests of justification.

-K.

Where are All the (Real/Important) Women?

While we discuss how women are portraying the games, how they are over sexualized  or how they perpetuate the homemaker stereotype, we cannot go on without recognizing another way in which women are commonly portrayed. As nonexistent. As pieces of the background. I read a journal article recently, a bit outdate, that brought up an interesting examination of video games back when they were young. In the findings of her 1998 examination of female characters in video games, Tracy Dietz found that the “most common portrayal of women was actually the complete absence of women at all”.  After reading this, I wonder how true it rings to the games of today. Over 14 years later and still I play games where not a single female plays an important role, or any role. I went through the entirety of Black Ops and only saw two women at the beginning of the game, one of who dances for the enjoyment of those in the bar, the other in her nightdress. The first one runs away, the second gets shot. Dennis Scimeca, writer for Control Magazine, noticed the same trend:

“In many of those games women are simply not present. I can’t think of a single woman character from any of my Call of Duty or Battlefield games. If there are any women characters in the Resistance or Killzone franchises, I certainly can’t remember them. There are no female avatars in Brink because the team over at Splash Damagedidn’t want to budget the time and money to create a female model and then make female versions of all the clothing items in the game’s very deep customization system. Women were optional.”

Women were optional, they opted out.

I know Scimeca’s making the statement to make the impact, but when I think about the Brink developers now, I don’t know about you all, but I’m pretty sure women are not ‘optional’.

Back in 2009, LiveScience posted an article detailing how video games lack the correct ratio of female and minority characters.  While the ratio of Latino characters to Latino players was also no sufficient “video games showed a far greater imbalance for females, who made up just 15 percent of video game characters.” So if there are less females than there should be, and the majority of the few women shown are shown as unimportant or as sex objects, can we really count these few female characters as women? How can we as players decided between what counts as a woman and what is a representation of the female form? A fully fledged character, or just a sexy husk?

So how do we get more women in games? It is possible that as the number of women creating games increases the number of women in games will increase, but it should not rest upon that. Male developers live in the same world as female developers; women still hold important political and corporate positions, women are still in the military, still great athletes, and still great scholars. So why is it that this part of real life, of half of the population, is not being emulated in games. The stereotypes may work as token characters, but not as whole real women.  The ideas such as the Damsel in Distress or the Sexy Villainess should be recognized as a game mechanics, but not as fully fledged thought-provoking women.

-K.

For the Dietz journal:

Dietz, Tracy L.

1998    An Examination of Violence and Gender Role Portrayals in Video Games: Implications for Gender Socialization and Aggressive Behavior. Sex Roles. 38 (518): 425-442.