How Video Games Changed the World Page #9

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man and here we have a fellow

who has been experimenting with

PlayStation for only a few minutes.

Enter the slickly marketed

PlayStation,

positioned as the post-club,

post-spliff entertainment medium of choice,

bristling with trippy visuals

and incredible soundtracks.

PlayStation moved gaming on

and gaming was now something that

young adults did, not just men.

Lots of woman played Wipeout, lots of

women played early PlayStation games.

They understood there was something

powerful about putting a woman on screen.

Tomb Raider was the first game

I became obsessed with.

It was the only game at the time

where there was a woman involved,

and a woman with a couple of guns

shooting stuff and being really kick ass.

Partly inspired by the gutsy female

image of singer Neneh Cherry

and post-punk toon feminist

Tank Girl, Tomb Raider's Lara Croft

earns a place on our list for being

gaming's first true female icon.

This was the era of Loaded and FHM,

and Lara Croft somehow was the

virtual representation

of that whole idea,

she was a sexy Mario,

the sexy sonic.

There has been

so much discussion about

was she an object of female

empowerment

or an object of male titillation?

When I was ten years old playing

that game, that didn't matter to me,

all I saw was a woman where

previously I had only seen a man,

and that was huge for me.

Having ruled the late '90s,

brightening up trendy magazine covers

and appearing in irreverent

soft drinks ads,

the 2000s would be less kind to

Lara, despite, or perhaps because

of, being trained by the equally

unrealistic Angelina Jolie

in a pair of noisy but not very good

Hollywood action flicks.

Stop!

But then in 2013, Tomb Raider was

rebooted and re-imagined

with an increased emphasis on story

and Lara's character.

I have finally set out to

make my mark. To find adventure.

Another key difference - this time

the lead writer was female.

I didn't like the way she had been

adopted by the wider media

and over-sexualised, and I felt

that as a younger female gamer

I was being pushed

away from the franchise.

When I took on the role of helping

develop this new, younger Lara,

I really thought about what

myself as a gamer when I started out

would have liked and what the younger

me would have responded well to.

You can look at the journey

of video games

and mirror it with the journey

of Lara Croft as a character.

At the beginning she was a look,

because video games were

mostly about looks, and then as time

has gone on, Lara's creators

have made her more of a character,

more of a relatable person.

Similarly, all video games have been trying to

tell stories that are more human, more relatable.

The new Tomb Raider

reboot feeds into that.

What you have there is a character

who was once an avatar

and is now becoming a person.

This shift reflected a debate

about gaming's depiction of women

that was already well underway.

In many ways, games still seem

psychologically lodged

somewhere around 1978,

full of eye candy dolly birds

without much to say for themselves

and the voices questioning this

have been growing louder.

In 2012, when cultural critic

Anita Sarkeesian launched a

Kickstarter campaign to fund

a series of short films about female

stereotypes in games,

some male gamers reacted by bombarding

her with rape and death threats.

I don't believe video

gamers are sexist.

I don't believe most

games are sexist.

But also, you look at video games

and you can't deny that there are

things in there that are not

flattering to women and

make you roll your eyes and sigh, or

sometimes make you really angry.

I think it is not so much

gaming culture

that is unfriendly to women,

it is internet culture.

Even today, a huge number of games

still place you,

the player, in the shoes of a boring

cookie-cutter Caucasian

hetero dude with a dick and a gun,

and f*** all else of interest.

But there are some exceptions.

Mass Effect is a good

example of a mainstream video game,

one that many people buy, that does

include something other than

straight white men and for that

reason it has a very devoted

following among people who are not

necessarily straight white men.

In Mass Effect, your character is

basically bisexual by default,

you can fight with whoever you want

and pursue a relationship with

whoever you want and it is sad

that this is progressive but in a

video game of this size it is progressive.

I did not know you were such

an optimist.

You have that effect on people.

Meanwhile, back in the late 1990s,

those cool adult gamers were not content

to experiment with things like

female protagonists such as Lara Croft,

they wanted whole new

kinds of experience.

Games had become set in their ways,

there were too many predictable

platformers or metronomic fighting

games or by-the-book shoot-'em-ups.

What was required was an entirely

new kind of experiences,

a new kind of game.

And that is precisely what turned

up. Winning a bobble head.

PaRappa The Rapper is a game about

a musical dog

who learns the value of self belief

by rapping with a kung-fu onion

while you just press

buttons along with the beat.

PaRappa The Rapper was incredible.

Such a simple, really clever

use of the controller,

you had to hit the things

in sequence.

The first time I remember the

"boom-boom-ba, boom-boom-ba".

That very simple Simon says

kind of gameplay.

Simon sets the pace,

you follow right along.

Simon says style rhythm action games

began with the endearingly

advertised computer

smart arse Simon.

Simon has a brain,

you either do what Simon says

or else go down the drain.

PaRappa turned this basic concept

into a psychedelic

musical pop-up book.

The songs are...

they are so catchy and insane.

I often listen to

the onion man song.

The driving school one.

There's the one where they are all

waiting to go to the toilet.

There's the driving school one,

did I say that? Yes.

PaRappa The Rapper was appealing

because it made people like me

who have absolutely no musical

ability whatsoever

feel like they did.

That was a big

part of the appeal,

the fact that you

were pressing buttons in time.

There's no musical talent in that

whatsoever

but you felt that there was.

PaRappa The Rapper led to

games like Guitar Hero,

in which you use a simplified

push-button guitar to play along to

recognisable

hits from big-name acts.

Later games added far more

realistic instruments, meaning

players would generally

improve their skills,

however old they were, as you

can see from this charming footage.

The very latest rhythm games have

taken this to the logical

conclusion. You now connect a real

guitar directly to your console.

In fact, they are not

marketed as games any more

but bona fide

musical education tools.

Not a bad legacy for a cartoon dog

in a hat, although

PaRappa himself has been forgotten,

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