Notes on Tropes Vs Women Part 2

In this second video, Anita Sarkeesian explores more contemporary versions of the damsel in distress, and the hybrids and trope cocktails that can be seen in many current games.

Surely the damsel in distress trope must be a thing of the past? No.  In fact, it's seen a resurgence in recent years.
List of games that use it:
Timesplitters 2 (2002)
The Bouncer (2001)
Rygar: The Legendary Adventure (2002)
Kingdom Hearts (2002)
Maximo: Ghosts to Glory (2002)
Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (2002)
Resident Evil 4 (2005)
Red Steel (2006)
Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)
Prince of Persia (2005)
Devil May Cry 4 (2008)
Splatterhouse (2010)
Prototype (2009)
Star Wars Force Unleashed 2 (2010)
Alan Wake (2010)
Hitman Absolution (2012)
The Void (2009)
Child of Eden (2011)
Max Payne 3 (2012)
Asura's Wrath (2012)
Deadlight (2012)

These are just the tip of the iceberg. The damsel in distress is a plot device which allows the player to act out crude, unsophisticated male power fantasies.  However, the damsel in distress is not always a totally one dimensional character, they can be likeable and well written, such as in Psychonauts (2005)
However, the additional character development of these damsels makes their disempowerment all the more frustrating.

The more sassy damsel in distress may attempt to escape on their own or attack their captor, but inevitably their efforts prove futile, for example Hitman Absolution (2012) & Star Wars Force Unleashed 2 (2010)
Sometimes, they may help the protagonist, or kick the bad guy when he's down, but these are mainly symbolic gestures that feature after the danger is over or the game is ending such as Ico (2001) or Double Dragon Neon (2012).
These token gestures of pseudo empowerment don't offer meaningful change to the trope, and many seem to be thrown in at the last minute to excuse their continual reliance on the trope.

Periodically  developers may attempt to create a more fleshed out bond between the damsel and the protagonist such as The Darkness (2007) and Ico (2001).
Female vulnerability is used to trigger an emotional reaction in male players and provide them with the motivation to play the game. Women are reduced to victimhood. Romance and intimacy blossoms from or hinges upon the damsel's disempowerment. This reinforces the notion that damsels are desirable because of their powerlessness.
It perpetuates paternalistic belief that power imbalance is normal and expected.

What's more insidious is that in the past decade, as game companies have been looking for ways to stand out in a crowded market, they are trying to make their games as dark and edgy as possible, at the expense of the featured damsel who inevitably suffers more. They dress up the damsel in distress with other cliches and create hybrids of the trope, for example the disposable damsel, the mercy killing damsel and the woman in the fridge.

The woman in the fridge was a term coined in the later 1990's by Gail Simone, a comic book writer, where the women are brutalised and murdered to move on the male's story arc. The term originates from a Green Lantern comic (issue 54, 1994) where he finds his girlfriend murdered and stuffed inside his fridge.
Women suffer gruesome deaths to provide a shock value to the games. The Max Payne series and the God of War series both use this. The protagonist's wife and daughter die or suffer, thus providing the male protagonist with the narrative for the game, the revenge mission.
Reversals of this are non existent.
Examples of the dead wife and kidnapped daughter :
Kane and Lynch: Dead Men (2007)
Prototype 2 (2012)
Inversion (2012)
Asura's Wrath (2012)
Dishonoured (2012)
This type of game then serves a double whammy of motives to the protagonist/player: the revenge mission for the murdered wife, and the desire to save the damsel in distress.

Another variation is the damsel in the fridge - where the hero's sweetheart has been murdered, but her soul is trapped, which can be traced back to the arcade game Ghosts and Ghouls, and is featured in these games:
MediEvil 2
The Darkness 2 (2012)
Shadows of the Damned (2011)
Dante's Inferno (2010)
Castlevania (2010)

These games are part of the larger trend of gruesome ends for female characters.
Exploiting sensationalised images of brutalised women - enough to fool gamers into thinking that the games are emotionally sophisticated.
Depictions of violence against women = images of women being victimised linked to their gender or sexuality.
Exempt from this are women characters in combat and fighting games because they appear to have a more level playing field.

The damsel doesn't always have to be rescued, and sometimes the hero fails, or in a plot twist, it turns out that she's been dead the whole time. For example Dead Space (2008) Infamous (2009) Hotline Miami (2012) Godfather: The Game (2006) Deadlight (2012). In Bionic Commando (2009), not only is she dead,  but she turns out to be his bionic arm.

Another extreme and gruesome trend is the damsel and the mercy killing, where the damsel is murdered for her own good. The only option left is for the hero to put her out of her misery, which can be traced to Splatterhouse when the hero must kill his possessed girlfriend.
Castlevania: Lament of Innocence (2003) the protagonist must kill her to gain the power needed to defeat the villain.
Breath of Fire 4 (2000) the female has been turned into a monster and begs to be killed.
Gears of War 2 (2008) his wife has been starved and beaten into a catatonic state and so he shoots her.
A particularly bad example of the damsel being killed by the protagonist occurs in Grand Theft Auto 3, where she is shot by the protagonist because she begins to talk about girly things, such as her hair and nails, in an annoying manner. She is deliberately written to be annoying to the player as to justify her murder, and she becomes the pun of a deeply misogynistic joke.

In Duke Nukem Forever (2011) the overtly sexualised women beg to be killed by the protagonist.
In Borderlands 2 (2012) Angel asks the players to murder her to stop the villain.
Alone in the Dark (2008) gives the player a choice between killing the damsel or letting satan kill her.

In Prey (2006) the kidnapped girlfriend has been hideously mutilated and fused with a monster, and you must fight her whilst she screams for help. She then begs to be killed, and you cannot advance in the game until you shoot her in the face. These women subordinate themselves and submissively accept their grisly fates, often begging the protagonist to perform violence on them - giving the player and the male hero complete power.  These euthanised damsels are part of a larger trend in games narratives where the protagonists are forced to fight their own loved ones, such as God of War: Ghost of Sparta (2010) Shadows of the Damned (2011) and Ninja Gaiden 3 (2012). Violence is therefore used against women as a way to bring them back to their senses, and framed as an altruistic act performed by the protagonist to help the female character out.

These gaming plot devices and tropes cannot be divorced from the larger cultural context of the real world. Research consistently shows that people buy into the myth that women are to blame for violence perpetrated against them, and that they somehow ask for it. These games do not explicitly condone violence, but they do trivialise and exploit female suffering to raise the emotional stakes for the player.

However, it should not be seen as some kind of male gaming conspiracy that all women are being designed like this for this reason, it is possible that many designers and developers just don't see the underlying message. Many are backed into a corner, as in many games violence is the only meaningful mechanic in which to complete a game.

Regressive attitudes and harmful gender stereotypes are maintained and perpetuated unintentionally in this way. Obviously, these games do not automatically make the people who play them sexist, as media is not consumed in a monkey see, monkey do fashion. It is much more subtle and complex, but narratives do have a cultivation effect that helps to shape cultural attitudes and reinforce dominant gender stereotypes.

Despite these damsels being the motivation for the protagonist's mission, this does not mean that the stories are about women, these are still definitely male centred stories. And in these games, often the female's death is far more significant than her life. She is merely a symbol of an artificial feminine ideal. Unjustly taken from the male hero, she is simply his possession, and the subtext of these narratives is actually not about the female and her suffering, it is about the male's weakness or guilt stemming from his failure to live up to his socially prescribed patriarchal duty to protect his wife and child. So the perceived loss of masculinity therefore becomes the driving force for his quest, in which he is attempting to regain his masculinity by exerting dominance or control through violence. This also harms men, as it limits the responses men are allowed to have in difficult situations involving tragedy and loss.

The problem is not that females die or suffer, death is an integral part of life and of storytelling, but it is how they are written and framed. Some indie games such as Dear Esther (2012) Passage (2007) and To the Moon (2011) are more innovative, contemplative and nuanced in their depictions of these issues, but they are still the exception to the rule.  


Feminist Frequency. 2013. Damsel in Distress: Part 2 - Tropes Vs Women in Video Games [online] [Accessed 21st October 2013] Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toa_vH6xGqs