Tropes vs Samus Aran

I recently finished replaying Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (henceforth MP3). For the uninitiated, the player character in the Metroid games is sci-fi bounty hunter Samus Aran. Notably among video game protagonists, Samus is a woman, which came as quite a surprise to those who played the original Metroid in 1986. The surprise was aided by the manual referring to her using male pronouns. More importantly, however, Samus spends almost the entire game clad from head to toe in robotic powered armor.

However, if the player performs certain actions during the game, that armor will come off at the end. If the player collects 100% of the suit upgrades in MP3, the ending will include a short scene in which the Power Suit disappears and Samus is shown wearing her skintight blue "Zero Suit" (so named for its debut in Metroid: Zero Mission, a 2004 remake of the original Metroid). This is a classic example of "Women as Reward."

The embedded video was made by Anita Sarkeesian as part of her Tropes vs Women in Video Games series, in which she points out themes that she finds objectionable in video games' depictions of women. The Internet gaming community is completely incapable of discussing these videos in a productive manner. The dominant factions in play are the side consisting of frothing misogynists and the side who believe that Sarkeesian has said everything that needs to be said on the subject and that everyone else needs to sit down and shut up.

The Metroid games are the first example Sarkeesian uses in this video. In fact, the preview image contains a composite screenshot from the 1986 Metroid. Following a few more examples, she then defines the concept:

Women as Reward

When women (or more often women's bodies) are employed as rewards for player actions in video games. The trope frames female bodies as collectible, as tractable or as consumable, and positions women as status symbols designed to validate the masculinity of presumed straight male players.

 This deserves some unpacking.

• "women's bodies" - This allusion to the mind/body dichotomy carries with it the implication that games have come down on the wrong side. Presumably, a woman's disembodied mind would be a less sexist reward? Either way, it's important to keep in mind that whenever Sarkeesian talks about "women" or "women's bodies," she is of course referring to digital representations of those things: obviously, no actual women will be knocking on a gamer's door when he (pardon the generic male pronoun here, but "she" or "they" would be inappropriate given the context) completes a game. It's also worth taking under consideration exactly what qualities differentiate a digital representation of a woman from a digital representation of a woman's body.
• "for player actions in video games" - This cements the trope as one unique to interactive media. By definition, a film or novel cannot represent women in this manner.
• "presumed straight male players" - It is unquestionably true that players who find the character of Samus Aran sexually attractive will enjoy the 100% ending of MP3 more than those who do not. This portion of the game was made with male players in mind. (Sarkeesian ignores lesbian or bisexual female players, so I will as well.) Thus, the allegation here is that a male target audience is inherently suspect.

Now that we're past the definition, let's get into the meat of Sarkeesian's complaint:

The result of this incentive structure is that access to women's bodies, women's affection, or women's sexuality is reduced to a simple equation that guarantees delivery as long as the correct set of inputs are entered into the system. In this way, the Women as Reward trope helps foster a sense of entitlement where players are encouraged to view women as something they earned the right to by virtue of their gaming actions, skills, or accomplishments.

Sarkeesian doesn't make any concrete recommendations for game developers other than "stop doing this," though this is quite a consequential change when examined closely. Almost every element of a video game could be said to be a reward for player behavior. It's not unreasonable to say that Level 2 is a reward for completing Level 1. If your game contains a sexualized depiction of a woman in Level 2, congratulations! You can look forward to being featured in the next episode of Tropes vs Women in Video Games.

By the very nature of a video game as a computer program, everything in that program is fundamentally "a simple equation that guarantees delivery as long as the correct set of inputs are entered into the system." Computer programs are inherently deterministic and entirely predictable given sufficient knowledge of the system, unless the programmer went to extreme lengths such as using a true random number generator sourced from radioactive decay or cosmic ray interactions. What Sarkeesian is describing is the inevitable consequence of systematizing something to the extent necessary to represent it in a computer program. "Women's bodies, women's affection, or women's sexuality" are, in her view, utterly taboo subjects for video games, never to be systematized in an interactive medium.

Sarkeesian is advocating what amounts to a near-total ban on the depiction of sexualized women in video games, with a single exception. It seems to me that showing sexualized women in a game's opening cinematic would not qualify as an example of Women as Reward. Until that cinematic ends, the game is wholly non-interactive and indistinguishable from a film.

This is not to suggest that Sarkeesian objects to sexuality in games in general. I have seen nothing in her videos that leads me to believe that she would object to the depiction of gay male romance in a video game. Indeed, her video on "Women as Background Decoration" includes a tangent in which she explains why she's not concerned by depictions of male prostitutes in games. A hypothetical Sarkeesian-approved gaming landscape would be a very strange place indeed, especially for those who feel that game developers should put more effort into making more inclusive products. Being "inclusive" of everyone except straight men seems to me to be a rather unusual usage of the term. (Again, I am ignoring lesbians for the purpose of this monograph.) Of course, this is not a demand on my part that each individual game accommodate players of every gender and sexuality. Inclusivity should be measured as an industry-wide phenomenon; imagine watching a "chick flick" and concluding that movies were excluding the male audience!

In conclusion, it is my opinion that Sarkeesian paints with entirely too broad of a brush and that taking her conclusions seriously would be greatly detrimental to the health of the medium. Although it is true that players are entitled to the digital representations of women (or women's bodies, to use Sarkeesian's terminology) that they receive as rewards in games, this is a far cry from demonstrating that this (entirely justified) sense of entitlement constitutes a causal factor in the real-life behaviors Sarkeesian references, such as catcalling or other harassment. It seems that Sarkeesian doubts the ability of straight male gamers to distinguish between these digital representations and actual, living women. Ironically, she sometimes seems rather fuzzy on the distinction herself.

Rather than further viewing of Tropes vs Women in Video Games, I would recommend this video instead:

Long live the Zero Suit.