She’s a piece of cheesecake, all right. And among cultural pundits, this is the prevailing wisdom about why young men so loved Tomb Raider when it debuted in 1996. Teenage boys are horny; teenage boys like to ogle hot women; Tomb Raider allowed them to drool over Croft for hours on end. This dismal equation, as the theory goes, also explains the subsequent explosion of games with hot-chick characters, from Bloodrayne to the undulating mass of Tecmo’s Dead or Alive vixens. Once again, the basest urges of young men had coarsened society — right?
I beg to differ. I think young boy gamers loved Lara for reasons that were considerably stranger. They weren’t just ogling her: They were identifying with her. Playing the role of a hot, sexy woman in peril — surrounded by violence on all sides — was, unexpectedly, a totally electric experience for young guys.
I am not merely pulling this argument out of my butt. I’m basing it on a famous piece of film theory: the “Final Girl” concept of slasher movies.
The author makes an interesting argument, although I’d be hesistant to agree with it completely. The psychology of gaming is a fascinating subject, but one that I think tends to overanalyze. The success of Tomb Raider, at least the first one or two games in the series, had less to do with the bosom of it’s heroine than with the simple fact that these were great games. They were chock full of action, adventure, and challenging puzzles; it was everything that made Indiana Jones great, translated into a video game (and much better than any of the games actually based on Indiana Jones).
But while Tomb Raider may not be the best example, there are others which are more applicable:
The sexuality of young men, Clover concluded, is profoundly weirder than you’d imagine.
Of course, in today’s gaming world, the idea that young men secretly crave to be hot, imperiled virtual women doesn’t seem as unusual as it might have in 1998. After all, half the women in online worlds are played by young guys who’ve actively chosen their virtual gender.
It’s one thing when you pick up a game off the shelf where the main character is a female; it’s another when you actively choose the gender of the character you’re playing to be opposite yours. The latter speaks to something far more interesting, in my opinion.
To be sure, a good portion of the motivation it probably straightforward titillation; it’s simply nicer to have a scantily clad female on the screen than a rugged looking marine or barbarian. I don’t think that tells the whole story though, and it does say something about the underlying psychology of the male mind. While I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that it’s expressive of some gender identity issues on the part of the males choosing them, I think perhaps there is some version of the “Final Girl” phenomenon playing out in these virtual realms. The what and why of it is difficult to guess at without more data; but that it happens at all is an interesting observation in of itself.
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