“No one wants to be a woman," cartoonist and noted misogynist Dave Sim once said in one of his many screeds on the inferiority of the female gender. Judging by most video games, you'd think he was right.
Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable. Maybe that's why I felt so shocked when I played Left Behind, the newest chapter of the award-winning survival game The Last of Us.
“I don't understand how this is even happening,” I said over and over again.
I was playing as Ellie, a 14-year-old girl who must venture out alone into a post-apocalyptic world of monsters and murderers armed with nothing but a pocket knife, desperately trying to find medicine for her badly injured friend Joel. But if battling mercenaries and zombies as a teenage girl weren't interesting enough, the half of the game with no combat at all is more compelling. After flashing back in time, you spend your time walking around a mall with your best friend Riley, talking, playing games and trying to repair your friendship after a falling out.
It's difficult enough to find a game where a woman is the main character. Finding one where you play as a woman and have positive, meaningful interactions with other women? It's like spotting a goddamn unicorn.
I've spent my entire life playing videogames, and Left Behind is the most emotionally powerful experience I've ever had in the medium – and not just because it let me play as a girl. After all, I've played as girls before. In a real way, in my real life, I've been playing as a girl all this time.
There weren’t many female characters when I started playing games back in the ’80s, either. Most of them were damsels in distress, like Princess Peach and Zelda, women created to be dangled at the end of levels like 8-bit carrots. But Samus Aran, the armored hero of Metroid, was different. A predecessor of sorts to the countless female gamers who hide their gender online to avoid abuse, the robo-suited Samus was presumed to be male by most players until the twist ending, when she took off her helmet and revealed that she was female.
Samus seemed, to me, like the perfect woman: Cloaked in her genderless robotic exoskeleton, she could be defined by what she did, rather than what she looked like. Like Samus wearing the robot suit, I found that videogames allowed me to become a person who did things but usually only if I was willing to shed my gender. It’s the price of admission, the coin you pay to cross the river.
Female characters who actually look like women, however, have a much harder time getting their own games, or existing at all. One study found that two-thirds of all videogame box art featured no female characters and when they did appear, they were sexualized more than 60 percent of the time. Such are the two exciting possibilities for most female characters: be titillating to men, or don't exist at all.
Not even Samus was immune. At the end of Metroid, players who finish the game quickly enough get a “reward”: a shot of Samus wearing a bikini. One moment, she is literally you the hero, and the next, as soon as she is identified as female, she’s an object whose scantily clad pin-ups are getting handed out like party favors.
Better, I thought, to stay in the armor.
I originally started playing video games because my older brother played them, and like a lot of younger siblings, I wanted to do what my brother did. After all, it was so much cooler than “girl stuff.” Most toys and games conveyed the same message: Boys got action figures, not dolls. Boys got to have watergun fights, not play dress-up. Much like their videogame counterparts, boys got to do things, and I wanted to do things too. But I couldn't just pick and chose what I wanted from one column or the other.
After all, "girly" wasn't a neutral descriptor; it was an accusation and one that I was always presumed guilty of. If I wanted to be powerful, capable or respected, I couldn't let anyone hang it on me. I needed armor. So I learned to dismiss and condescend to "girly" things, to avoid them, just the like guys around me.
But rejecting female culture didn't make me stronger, it made me weaker. It gave me fewer choices, and ultimately denied me my full humanity—just to claw a little bit higher in a system of stereotypes that told me I was less of a person simply because of the way I'd been born.
I didn't have a lot of close female friends growing up, or for most of my life. I didn't have a Riley. I didn't think I could. That's the danger of gender stereotypes: instead of describing the people they claim to represent, they dictate and police it. Instead of telling us who we are or who we can be, they tell us who we have to be. They put us in boxes, and they make us smaller.
“I don't understand how this is even happening,” I said over and over again as I played Left Behind.
As Ellie, I got to do all the things I wanted to do growing up: play videogames, read comics, have water gun fights. But somehow – somehow! – Ellie got to do the “girl stuff” too: have a female best friend, tell her secrets, hang out at the mall and take silly pictures together in a photobooth.
Instead of this making her weak and foolish, as the mystical scrolls of gender norms had foretold, Ellie became a warrior. She was still a girl, but one capable of creeping up behind a grown man trying to kill her and shivving him in the neck. She got to be both vulnerable and dangerous, scared and brave, weak and strong. She got to be human.
Left Behind affected me, profoundly, not just by letting me be a girl, but by finally letting me be a human too.
We don't just need more women in videogames – we need more women who don't fit in boxes. Left Behind isn't remarkable just because it meets a quota. Ellie and Riley aren't just concepts or good intentions. They're people: fully-realized, quirky, funny, dangerous girls. Ellie isn't there for anyone – to inspire, titillate or motivate them. Ellie there because she's herself, and for once, that's reason enough.
Female characters are often treated as satellites, man-made objects built to orbit male stars so frequently and uniformly that you'd think the arrangement was written into the source code of the universe. That's part of what makes Left Behind so special: Here, Ellie is the sun, the lightbulb that the rest of the universe rotates around. And she shines.
When Left Behind ended, I cried like a girl. And also like a girl, I took out my switchblade and methodically killed every last motherfucker in the game. I didn't have to choose between the two. It hurt, almost, like something inside of me was breaking. I think it was the lie – the big one, the one I bought so many years ago, the box I wore like armor and the one that kept me small.
Ellie was too big for it, and so am I.
