The SCUMM Manifesto

bahahahorel:

So, did someone say Portal and feminism?

I’m neither intellectual enough to write this academically nor creative enough to relate this in a fic, so here is some semi-organized brainspawn.

For the purposes of this post, if I refer to men as group disparagingly I’m talking about them as extensions and symbolic representations of the patriarchy, not as individuals. I don’t hate men.

Also, I do not agree with the tenets of second wave feminism. While my history of feminism 101 course was a formative part of my youth, I’ve since learned much about feminism that I try to apply to my own politics and opinions. So, connecting Portal to second wave feminism is not a wholesale endorsement of it.

Caroline. She’s a white, probably middle-class woman who is in her youth in the 50’s and 60’s. She has a career that is typically gendered (secretary), and the little canon information we have about her seems to show us that she is accommodating and hardworking (“Yes, sir, Mr. Johnson!), as a woman in her position would be expected to be. But as people much more analytically inclined than I am have pointed out here, Caroline actually uses her situation to her advantage, and occupies one of Aperture Science’s most influential roles.

So  she is the perfect person with which to begin this allegory for second wave feminism.

She is not a doting housewife, but she is doing “women’s work”, and she is using her “””submissive””” position to influence the world in significant ways.

But then, suddenly, she is given power  when she is used to create GLaDOS.

In order to keep the historically oppressed women GLaDOS from starting a riot dispensing neurotoxin, the scientists (mostly represented by men in Lab Ratt and Doug’s art) hook her up to some cores.

The cores are supposed to suppress her personality by forcing her to adopt traits that are not native to her.

They ingrain these traits that are not hers into her in order to make her behave and submit. They try to shape and mold her personality into something it is not.

Let’s take a look at these cores.

There is morality core, because (white) women are supposed to be good and kind.

There is curiosity core, who is childlike because women are supposed to be childish (which feeds into paternal patriarchal feelings).

There is cake core, which literally just reads off recipes, because do I even have to explain?

And there is anger core, because women are irrational and overemotional.

The men in Caroline’s life perceive that she has power and have to stop her from using it by making her believe that she has to be these things she is not and forcing the traits on her.

Note that this power she has is now explicit overt power, rather than the power she managed to get by being close to Cave. That is the power that threatens men.

So Caroline goes from “knowing her place” as a woman to having power and threatening men, to being silenced by having a formulaic femininity thrust upon her with the cores.

And sexism cuts both ways! The cores that destroy Wheatley, that corrupt him, are traditionally “masculine” traits: macho bravado, factual rationale, and intrepid pioneerism. The expectations of masculinity destroy the “male” core.  

It isn’t a perfect metaphor. It isn’t a perfect feminist narrative. But there are definitely traces of feminism in the story and characters that are important because media matters.

This is not a definitive essay post, it is the beginning of a conversation. I haven’t even mentioned the power of having a (possibly disabled) woman of color as the hero of a game, or what it could mean that she strips GLaDOS of the expectations that the men have put on her. I haven’t matched up the dates to feminist movements. I haven’t talked about how the narrative surrounding two fully fleshed out women is feminist. But Portal is undoubtedly a feminist game.

As I am about to do some writing on Portal 1/2, this is a relevant introduction.

(Let’s also mention just very briefly the absolutely incendiary Freudianism of a name like “Cave Johnson”)

(Source: roboticor)

riskylengths:

Holy Crap, Eliza Gauger is writing videogame deconstruction. 

It is of course, awesome. Especially since she’s focusing on the one online game I actually play. 

Her metaphor of the Pyro as what it’s like to play as a female in the world of online gaming is brilliant. And it almost makes the idea of playing Pyro a conscious act of insurgency/rebellion/rejection/protest if you know why you’re doing it. 

Which makes me think of this statement by Flavia Dzodan of Red Light Politics when she was rightfully pissed off at Western Feminism:

To the point that I even considered ditching the label altogether. And if that happened, I would use a new label that pretty much sums up my politics: Flame-throwerism. Wherein I set feminism on fire and with its ashes I fill my cats’ kitty litter box and let them pee on it. That’s how angry I’ve been at feminism this week. Kitty litter levels of outrage.

I can draw no distinct connection to the two that really works, I guess, but adopting the Pyro as some sort of figure for feminist insurgency just seems to make me smile. 

As a side note, I’ve managed to never be on crappy servers where women are sexually harassed. The ones that were shitty and had a lot of homophobic or racist harassment going on seemed to be devoid of women, looking at Eliza’s article, they probably weren’t, just that the women didn’t speak up so as to avoid the same harassment. 

And I have always made it a point to speak up when I’ve heard harassment. Though I’ve never got around to buying a mic, so usually it’s just in text. One of my favorite days of playing though was a professed gay male griefing a ranting homophobe so bad until the homophobe left the server. The vocal majority of the server was in support of the gay male, and not the homophobe. It’s nice to know these communities do exist in online gaming, but it’d sure be better if that level of tolerance and support were the norm. 

{EDIT: On some level, I know the idea of griefing the homophobe was wrong, however thee was something uplifting about the support for the griefing, the idea that someone was standing up to him, and that at that moment everyone else was essentially standing up, too, that made it seem the right thing to do.}

(Source: thescummmanifesto)

[continued from part 1: The Oasis of the Real]

PART II

The team lineup.  From left to right: Pyro, Engineer, Spy, Heavy Weapons Guy, Sniper, Scout, Soldier, Demoman, and Medic.
 
 

The TF2 team members are, each of them, individual archetypes of “classical” masculinity.

The Heavy is the good-natured and huggable bear (protective; physically massive), the Medic is the aloof intellectual (professorial; teutonic), the Spy is the sleazy Eurotrash Lothario (seductive; manipulative), the Scout is the hyperactive teenager (shallow bravado masking youthful self-doubt), the Sniper is the easygoing outdoorsman (rugged; distant), the Demoman is the “damaged goods” drunkard^[6] (as symbolized by his eyepatch and slouching shape), Engineer is the cornfed and capable All-American Dad (friendly; mechanically-minded), and Soldier is the aging army man (strict; blustery).

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PART I

The first time I found a Team Fortress 2 thread on 4chan’s yaoi board ^[1], I was amazed.

Spy and Sniper on a couch, by Kob.

As an online multiplayer-only, plotless, mindlessly-violent first-person-shooter, I had assumed that the female fanbase would be limited; confined mostly to diehard first-person-shooter (FPS) enthusiasts, a subset of games with few female devotees.  Fewer in number than female WoW players, or Harry Potter readers, certainly. Despite this, the vast majority of the TF2 fanart posters—and artists—seemed to be women. Weirder still, not all of them even played the game, and very few of them played the game regularly.  This was stunning.  It was as if I had happened upon a cargo cult—imagine someone showing up to a Star Trek convention with exquisite Spock fan art and a beautiful costume, having never watched the show.

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