Gender and Crackdown

The same Crackdown 2 demo I played at E3 came out on Xbox LIVE (and presumably PSN) last night. I highly recommend getting skills for kills. In honor of the new Crackdown, I thought I'd post something I wrote about the first one late last year.

The game design course I took where I helped create Vision by Proxy was taught by a feminist. I don't mean "feminist" as in "men and women are equal," I mean it like, "men mistreat and undermine women, who must constantly fight an uphill battle for equality" type feminist. I may feel differently because I'm a man, but I'm not of the opinion that the world is out to get women. But, that's not the purpose of this post. Anyway, she made us read a bunch of papers about games and women and about how gaming is a boy's club and that 90%+ of developers are men and that 90%+ of games are designed for men. I'm not saying this isn't true, I just don't see how it's a problem. So, we had to write a blog post (ugh, b-word) about a game that either stereotyping women, overly sexualizing women, or being made for women. So, looking to my favorite girl gamer, my sister, I decided to write about her favorite game, Crackdown. Below is exactly what I wrote, but edited for typos. Just remember that I did this for a class, so I wrote it as quickly as possible and wrote just enough for a passing grade.

To be honest, I don't really know a whole lot of women who play "hardcore" video games. I mean, my mom's been known to play Solitaire on her iPhone for hours, but I'm talking about games made for gamers. My little sister is actually the only woman I know who owns and Xbox 360, which has to be the most testosterone-laden console of the big 3 right now. She even has her own $50/year Xbox LIVE Gold membership (which she mostly uses for Netflix streaming). So, what kind of Xbox games does she own? Well, she has Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, staples on any 360 collection, but she doesn't play them very often. She tends to play a good amount of Fable II and Tiger Woods PGA Tour '10 (not that she likes real-life golf), but I'd have to say that her favorite game has to be Crackdown. This game is all about non-stop shooting, kicking, and blowing up faceless gang members, so why is it so appealing to her (and I'm just going to assume that she's not just some weirdo and that there are other women who enjoy this game)?

Crackdown definitely requires those quick reflexes and spatial abilities that Fron and friends say are tough for women to master. However, unlike your typical Haloz, Crackdown has a very intuitive (so nothing like GTA) lock-on system that I'm sure eases that difficulty. In fact, I'd probably have to say that it has the best lock-on system I've seen in a sandbox game. Throw in the fact that explosive rounds have huge splash damage, and the difficulties of aiming are greatly reduced. There's also the added bonus that you can kill people with melee attacks that easily lock-on to the nearest enemy. It's a lot easier for my sister to use this method, and I find that she uses it far more than guns and explosives combined.

Jenkins says women like to explore games at their own, gradual pace. I would say that Crackdown epitomizes that in its genre. It's a sandbox game, a genre popularized by the Grand Theft Auto series. These games are built around exploration. Crackdown does separate itself in this regard, however, by not really even having missions. Unlike other sandbox games where you're free to do anything until you start a linear mission, Crackdown just has three gangs in its city who's leaders you must kill. These leaders are placed in strategic parts of the city and have a lot of gang members protecting them, but you never have to tell the game, "Okay, now I'm going to try to kill this leader." You just go do it. In fact, you can get through half of that leader's health, and then just leave if you want and try to go kill someone else. When you come back, he'll still have half of his health gone. You really do beat the game at your pace, in (almost) whatever order you want.

One aspect of the game that does go completely against what women typically look for is the existence of a story. Laurel says women typically enjoy deep stories, rich character, strong values, and all that other stuff that makes them think The Notebook is better than Die Hard (which it's not). Crackdown has none of these things. The story is pretty much non-existent, it's just, "Go kill these bad guys, agent," and "Skill for kills, agent. Skills for kills." You play as a nameless, faceless agent who is easily replaced, has no dialogue, and is quite literally a tool for a totalitarian government. It's easier to identify with Pac-Man and the Weighted Companion Cube than The Agent (You can even change what your Agent looks like each time you play the game, so there's precisely zero importance placed on identifying with your character) . As the "story" goes, when you die, another one of you is just cloned and sent to keep on cleaning up the city. I think many women who grew up with Super Mario Bros. aren't used to video games telling compelling stories, so that expectation is forgone from the beginning. In the absence of story, all that is expected is tight, responsive control in a virtual playground. Like Super Mario Bros., the physics and rules of Crackdown's Pacific City are quickly and easily understood. Character progression is streamlined and fully automated, and the game can easily be played in short bursts. For women who don't play a lot of action games, accessibility is key, and Crackdown is about as accessible as they come, even more so than Mario's 3D iterations.

Just about the entire game is full of those dangerous and contested spaces that Fullerton et al. say women don't typically enjoy. I think the big difference here between Crackdown and other vertical sandbox games like [Prototype] and Spider-Man 2 is that you never really die. Or rather, you die all the time, but you're never really punished for it, just inconvenienced. When you die in Crackdown, you just respawn as a whole new agent at a checkpoint of your choosing (a checkpoint simply being a spot on the map, not a spot of progress) and the world is exactly as you left it. If you had taken off half of a boss's health and killed half of his guards before you died, it'll be just like that when you come back. I feel like this aspect is key for getting women into hardcore games, and you're starting to see it more and more. Even some of the most critically acclaimed games of the past few years, like Bioshock and Fable II, use this philosophy. While this kind of reward-without-punishment system can be frustrating to people like me who feel that beating a game like this on the hardest difficulty means nothing, it's almost a must-have for my sister. I understand why developers would want to do this, too. Beside the fact that it'll appeal to more people, these developers spend years working on these games and they want you to finish it. They're not making revenue a quarter at a time anymore. But I digress. A significant event that helped both of us discover how important trivial deaths are to her is when I got her to play [Prototype].

Like Crackdown, [Prototype] is a vertical sandbox game where you play as a superhuman defeating large numbers of inferior foes. [Prototype]'s Alex Mercer is even more agile than The Agent in that he is capable of running up walls and gliding over long distances. The game even has a more fleshed-out story, and the primary form of attack is via melee. The problem is that when my sister got to the Time Square boss 3/4 through the game, she became frustrated. It's a long boss fight, to say the least, and when she died merely seconds from defeating it and was forced to start all over, that's when she called it quits. She enjoyed the game for the most part, but the penalty of death was so frustrating for her that she hasn't picked it back up since then.

I'm not really sure whether or not Crackdown was in any way designed for women, but I would probably guess that it wasn't. While you can choose from several character-models to play with, they are all overly-macho men. The game does have a nice, kinda cartoony art style, but I'm betting that was used to make the game stand out in a crowded genre (games with guns). While I doubt many women picked the game up themselves out of curiosity (my sister never would have played it if I hadn't encouraged her to), I do think it lays down a nice foundation for a game that can be enjoyed by both sexes.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (2007). The Hegemony of Play. In Situated Play: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association 2007 Conference. Tokyo, Japan. 1-10.

Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (2007). A Game Of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space. In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia. 1-11.

Jenkins, H. (2004). Game design as narrative architecture. The Game Design Reader, 670-686.

Laurel, B. (2001). Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

--Chilly P