A Question Of (Player’s) Choice Or Questionable (Design) Choices?
How Dishonored 2 Perpetuates Violence Against Women.
Tags: #femalecharacters #videogames #dishonored #dishonored2 #tropesinvideogames #ArkaneStudios
Videogames consistently fail to represent women and gender minorities. For example, one study on the 33 most popular Nintendo and Sega games highlighted how 41% of games featured not a single female character (Dietz, 1998). Similarly, William and colleagues (2009) highlighted how across 5,000 human videogame characters in 150 games, less than 15% were women. They further highlight that when looking specifically at lead characters, women are even more screwed as less than 11% of videogames feature a female protagonist as opposed to almost 90% featuring a male lead. This is in line with Waddell and colleagues (2014) who highlighted that across 318 characters from four prominent MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) with identifiable gender, only 18% were female while 82% were male. More recently, a study on 145 Kickstarter-funded games seems slightly less grim as 46% of games either had a sole female protagonist (9%) or gave players at least the option (37%) to choose a female lead (Borges Lima, 2018). Yet, when exclusively looking into sole options for protagonists, this still means that there is a 1:2 to 1:3 ratio of female to male protagonists.
Regardless of whether women exist within videogames, when they do appear, as we have illustrated elsewhere, female characters are often reduced to background roles, objects of pleasure, damsels in distress, or subordinates to the male lead (e.g. Dietz, 1998; Dill et al., 2008; Voorhees, 2016; Stang, 2017). While the prevalence of problematic female characters has been decreasing since its height in the 1990s, traditionally male-oriented genres still prominently feature female characters which are reduced to background objects and/or are subjected to violence and abuse (Lynch et al 2016). For example, the Grand Theft Auto series (Rockstar Games) essentially reduces women to submissive sex workers or strippers whose sole purpose is to be a degraded object of sexual desire to the male protagonist. The Last of Us franchise (Naughty Dog) continuously either strips women of their agency or kills them off, especially if they are somehow useful. As a result, because such games “are firmly embedded within everyday ideologies of gender, power and privilege” (Braithwaite, 2014: 707), they amplify and (re)produce misogynistic practices rooted within male-dominated cultural stereotypes and hegemonic masculinity (Parrot and Zeichner, 2008; Brehm, 2013, see also Connell, 1995). In other words, because of the gaming industry’s sexist game culture women get marginalised or are subjected to covert and overt forms of violence against women.
Another game which has received severe criticism for its representation (or rather the lack thereof) of female characters is Arkane Studios’ (2012) Dishonored. In Dishonored, women are either killed, kidnapped, maids, or sex workers. For example, Empress Jessamine Kaldwin is violently slaughtered by an assassin while her daughter Emily gets kidnapped within the first few minutes of the game. The remaining women encountered are essentially all maids or sex-workers with the occasional witch or mistress sprinkled in. To add to this, in her series on ‘Women as Background Decorations’ (e.g. Sarkeesian 2014a, 2014b), Anita Sarkeesian highlights how Dishonored – among other games – capitalises on women being subjected to extreme forms of (sexual) violence. As such, Dishonored perpetuates very harmful notions of male violence against women and girls.
According to Arkane Studios’ co-creative director Harvey Smith it was exactly this criticism put forth by Sarkeesian which led to Arkane Studios reevaluating their choices and bringing about more interesting and rich female roles (Engadget, 2017). Indeed, because of the first game’s criticism, Dishonored 2 (Arkane Studios, 2016) made Emily Kaldwin one potential protagonist – and some may argue the true lead. While these improvements are being welcomed, in a game where players make moral choices, it can be contested whether the implementation of a female playable protagonist and an increase in female characters is actually countering violence against women:
Stereotypes as far as the eye can see
Dishonored’s main selling point is its versatility in style of play. Players that enjoy stealth can try for the ghost achievement, remaining (mostly) unseen by any NPC, while players that prefer shooting and action can play the game with high levels of chaos. A player’s individual chaos level as well as their personal choices while interacting with NPCs can change how the story plays out. What a player does or does not do affects conversation options as well as overheard dialogue between NPCs. As such, our observations on the game’s treatment of women will be general statements and not go into every possible iteration or playthrough and are based mainly on our knowledge of the game.
Dishonored 2 begins with the tutorial which can only be played as Emily. (This is a big hint that the player should choose Emily to finish out the rest of the game.) In Dishonored, the player has Corvo Attano, an assassin, as their only option to avenge Jessamine’s death while searching for the damsel’d Emily. In the opening sequence of the sequel, however, the throne is stolen by Delilah Copperspoon, Jessamine’s half-sister and leader of a coven of witches. Delilah and her co-conspirators must be defeated before the player can finish the game. The player does have the option to damsel Emily again, choosing to play through the game as her father Corvo. Narratively, this is a poor choice; the game was designed to be Emily’s story by the creators who could not take William Faulkner’s advice to “kill their darlings”. Hence, Corvo is a playable character in a sequel made with the intention to alter their treatment of women in the first game, with no thought as to how adding a male protagonist would alter interactions between the female antagonists and the player. Since a man attacking and killing women is always problematic and perpetuates violence against women, we will focus on the supposedly new-and-improved women of Dishonored 2 by playing as Emily.
Due to the reliance on the player’s choices, Emily is the only character that has the chance to be morally ambiguous. If played with high chaos, she becomes a tyrant. This is the only high chaos result affecting a character that does not clearly end in the disempowerment of a woman. But, becoming the hated monarch of an entire empire after murdering the majority of your competition is not the empowerment we here at Daughters and Dead Press are hoping to foster. On the other hand, playing with low chaos will result in Emily becoming the beloved, fair ruler of a prosperous thriving empire. As the lead character, but mostly because she is an empress, Emily cannot be disempowered. While this is a more of a happenstance of the mechanics of storytelling than any conscious choice on behalf of the game’s creators, a woman surviving to the end of their game is still a rarity that should be celebrated; (even if she turns into an evil tyrant).
Not all the women of Dishonored 2 get such happy endings, unfortunately. Delilah embodies the resentful woman trope. She does show up in The Brigmore Witches and Knife of Dunwall, but if you have not played the previous game’s DLCs, Delilah’s entrance into the sequel is lackluster at best. She starts one of the main antagonist groups, the coven of witches, and builds up a group of Karnaca’s wealthy and powerful, men and women, into conspirators against Emily’s throne similar to the big bads in Dishonored – though, in truth, they are more plot device reasons to complete missions than anything else.
Despite there being a deliberate choice on behalf of the creators to have more women of diverse backgrounds and capabilities in the game, casting half of them as villains - which need to be defeated in some fashion or outright killed - is perhaps the exact opposite of what they intended to do. Players with high chaos ratings will constantly be confronted by Delilah at the end of each mission, requiring the player to kill her several times. This is very firmly the opposite of violence against women, and neither morality nor magical powers negates the fact that the player is responsible for several violent act against the same woman.
Those taking the low chaos route, though, will end the game with Delilah trapped a fantasy reality in one of her paintings. Though she is not aware of her fate, striping her of all agency has a cringingly similar flavour as sending your wife off to an asylum because of her “hysteria” and shacking up with the much younger governess to your not-that-young children. Delilah may be the evil aunt (or evil half-sister of your dead lover) that tried to kill you, but trapping her in a painting is the game’s alternative to physical violence. However, the question of ‘is it psychological torture because you don’t know you have been imprisoned in a fake world or is it the morally good choice’ still lingers long after the player has finished the game.
Delilah has, justifiable, reasons for being evil, and her character leaves no doubt for the player that she is the antagonist; once you retrieve her soul, it will alternate between begging to be reunited with her body and insulting the player character when The Heart is activated. As a product of an affair between the Emperor and a maid – ahem, power imbalance anyone – cast out because of her half-sister(Jessaime)'s lies, which ends with her mother dead in a debtor’s prison, it is no surprise that Delilah becomes a tough, independent, resentful woman. Ultimately, though, she falls victim to her own quest for control, driven mad by the need to become stronger and gain more power, which is nothing more than the creators’ taking the easy route and turning Delilah into the trope of the ‘mad woman’.
Breanna Ashworth, Delilah’s friend and fellow witch, and possible lover, was likewise given a Victorian treatment in her character’s handling by the creators. Breanna was drawn to Delilah after running away from an arranged marriage to a man three times her age. In the long run, though, all of this is missable flavour text. Breanna’s character is little more than a plot token, unless you read every collectible and spy on the NPCs’ conversations. For the unobservant player, Breanna must be killed, high chaos, or disabled, low chaos, by removing her magical abilities. This is possibly the more disturbing of the two, as once she loses her connection to the Void, she will tell the player to leave her, ‘she is no longer any threat’; playing back into her role as a witch – without magical power women are no danger to anyone.
Meagan Foster, your chauffeur, is the ultimate intersectionality cast, that at the end of the day, does not need to be female at all. She is a disabled black, lesbian or bisexual woman, but nothing about that changes who she is to you – aka, your very own personal boat-taxi. In a low chaos run, you discover that she was part of the team of assassins that killed Jessamine, mirroring the betrayal that Samuel committed against Corvo – accidentally copying the script from the first game or running out of plot ideas? In fact, Meagan could be Samuel and nothing would change. The player then gets the choice whether they want to kill her as a result of finding out about Meagan’s past. What is probably most disturbing, if the player does not find out about her involvement with the empress’ assassination, they can essentially kill her off because why not commit another unnecessary Femicide along the way after she has ‘outlived her usefulness’. If this was Samuel, this would still be a disturbing character choice for Corvo or Emily, but as a woman, this takes on a whole different light.
The one small shining ray of hope is Dr. Alexandria Hypatia. She strives to help the miners in Karnaca, developing the Addermire serum, and casting her as the only morally good character in the main cast. Though her character brings up a lot of questions related to gender stereotyping, caring for and healing others, the incorporation of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde trope twists her into something dark and, ultimately, turns her inclusion in the narrative into another plot device. After testing her serums on herself, Dr. Hypatia develops a sinister alter ego, Grim Alex. The Duke, Delilah’s right-hand man, uses Grim Alex to spread unease across the Empire by killing enemies to Emily’s reign, under the pseudonym, the Crown Killer. The existence of the Crown Killer is what Delilah uses to sway others to her right to rule. Had Dr. Hypatia existed in the game solely as a struggling doctor, held against her will, she would still have been damsel’d but without the women-as-insane stereotyping flavour. In low chaos, Dr. Hypatia can be cured of this alter ego, though she then supplies little in the way of narrative or aid. Alternatively, in high chaos, she is killed; once again causing the player to commit violence against women.
As an honorable mention, Alexi Mayhew, Emily’s friend and a captain of the Watch, is brutally slain within the opening cutscene. She is not a servant nor whore, as she might have been in Dishonored (one), but is opening the game with such a violent attack against a female guard really necessary? In short, no. She’s introduced as a capable guard, then killed for what reason? She gives you a sword, I suppose.
Conclusion
For all of the good the creators tried to do in response to the criticism of their first game, Dishonored 2, they did succeed in increasing the gender ratio of the game. There are five male characters we could have claimed as main cast to the five women we talked about here. That’s 1:1; that’s great! Another excellent aspect to the game is the option of choice. It allows players to have vastly different playthroughs and also increases the game's replayability. However, taking a closer look at both these positive features does come with severely problematic side-effects: If the choices you can make always rely on inflicting violence against women to a lesser or greater extent, then it is questionable whether there is actually much choice given to players to begin with. When choosing to go for low chaos, women, apart from Emily, are rendered powerless one way or another: Delilah is trapped in an eternal mind-prison doomed to be psychologically tortured; Breanna - without her powers - loses all agency by reducing her capabilities to witchcraft because clearly a women without powers is weak and therefore no threat; Meagan doesn’t do much to begin with and is simply the intersectionality token so people can’t complain again that there weren’t any women of colour in the game, yet all she does is being a glorified chauffeur - which simply plays into the trope that women of colour can’t be the protagonist; Dr Hypatia may not be rendered powerless per se but at the end of the game, her relevance beyond being a plot device is questionable to say the least.
When choosing high chaos the situation becomes even worse: all women, apart from Emily, die violent deaths - for Delilah this even happens numerous times. This only becomes more problematic when considering that this can happen at the hands of Corvo, a man. There is an actual version of this game where as a man you can deliberately violently kill a lot of women. Set aside that there is no narrative value to having Corvo be playable to begin with, evidently, Arkane Studios conveniently forgot to maybe take a second and think about the wider implications of violence against women this would have when deciding to make Corvo playable again. Regardless, whatever their reasoning behind this choice, they clearly failed to actually engage with the criticism the first instalment of the game received along with wider criticisms of the – often sexist and misogynist – videogame industry.
Did Arkane Studios take some of the criticism of the first game? Sure, they did and they tried...something. Yet, it seems as if the original male characters were simply replaced by female ones without considering the implications the game mechanics now have. In particular, regardless of who the player chooses as their character, women are ultimately rendered powerless or violently killed. So, the only ‘moral dilemma’ players really have is whether they want to ‘choose’ a more or less violent path to enact violence against women. As such, violence against women does not become a choice at all but an inevitable outcome regardless of player’s pathways. The game then does not become a question of player’s choices but instead simply highlights a lot of questionable design choices.
With the news that a third game is in development (possibly?), we can only hope the creators improve upon their narrative and mechanical choices. The volume of female characters is, truly, welcomed, but the mere presence of women does not save a game from perpetuating sexism, misogyny and violence. If anything, as Dishonored 2 has shown, if game mechanics are not taken into account, it can do more harm than initially intended. Given that Harvey Smith was very receptive to criticism, there is a chance improvements for the third instalment will be a positive step towards reducing hostile female stereotypes and possibly empowering more than one woman at a time.
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Image Source
Arkane Studios [@ArkaneStudios] (2020). "Celebrate #Arkane20 with #Dishonored and #Prey wallpapers! You can download them at https://bit.ly/3gDSXJL." 31 May, https://twitter.com/ArkaneStudios/status/1267138832509669377?s=20