Girlie Vampires Don't Suck - Part 1

So I'm writing this paper for a conference entitled “He Walks Again: The Digital Translation of the Man’s Vampire in Legacy of Kain”. (Side note: is it a rule somewhere that all papers need a subordinated title with a colon? I think there must be.)

The basic thrust of this paper is that video games that reproduce the vampire image are tending to create a certain kind of vampire. At the same time, TV, books, and movies (at least, culture-dominant ones) are producing a completely different kind of vampire. My argument is that these two vampires represent the two gendered audiences, and that the fact that they're being reproduced this way points to audience control over the chain of cultural production (contra certain Marxist theorists who insist on "producer" as the essential link in the chain), and that audiences are creating both content and meaning through their choices.

First the kinds of vampires.

The most powerful hegemonic vampire image at this moment is the Twilight vampire, also reproduced with some variations in The Vampire Diaries and True Blood inheriting a lot from such fang-less vampire tales as Angel. These are the most obvious examples, but a range of knockoff titles are propagating in the market and each producing essentially the Stephanie Meyer vampire. (Aside: I'll give True Blood a nod for breaking away from the crowd slightly with the comically oversexed characters, though I'd say that the Sookie Stackhouse vampires are enjoyed by audiences more for the ways in which they're like the Stephanie Meyer vampires than for how they're like the Anne Rice vampires). This vampire doesn't really like drinking blood, makes a big deal about having "a soul" and feelings, is usually conflicted about even being a vampire, and doesn't want to harm women: in fact, he's really only interested in being their bodyguard and having lots of emotionally fulfilling sex with them. This vampire is the prototypical Gothic Romance anti-hero; the Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights; the noble savage tamed by a woman's love (or sex, such as the case may be). Though Heathcliff may be a poor example now that I think about it... there's none of Heathcliff's rugged personage in the wan Edward Cullen.

Then there's the video game vampire, epitomized I'll say in Kain from Legacy of Kain, but also reproduced with variation in Castlevania, Vampire Savior, Bloodrayne, and in allegorical ways in Devil May Cry. Contrary to the Stephanie Meyer vampire, the video game vampire is practically sexless. Gone is the psychic and sexual mystique of the repulsing/alluring predator; replaced, it seems, by a somewhat stoic figure that boasts of no ties to anything... save, in some cases, revenge. In fact, the contrast of personalities between Kain and Edward Cullen or Angel is pretty stark: Kain loves being a vampire, loves drinking blood and killing people, loves doing violence to anyone and everyone, has a very clear sense of identity and where he's going in life, and is completely liberated from any kind of sexual tension, much less "affection", and very much less affection for a mortal.

The questions that arise from this comparison in my paper involve how the desires of each audience - the female audience determining the (re)presentation of the Twilight vampire, and the male audience determining the (re)presentation of the austere Legacy of Kain vampire - is reflected in the kind of vampire image they choose to consume. What does it say about the female audience that they want a reformed monster, defanged and practically groveling for sexual attention? (Related: what does it say that in these stories the woman rejects the perfectly acceptable non-monster to get to the sexually mysterious former-monster?) And what does it say about the male audience that their vampire is completely independent and perfectly happy as they are? Also, why the surprising lack of sexual energy from vampire images that males choose to consume?

Further, is it significant that in Legacy of Kain the vampire is you, but in Twilight the vampire is the other?

Bioware and the Politics of "Nature"

It occurred to me recently that Bioware's role playing games give an interesting insight into American culture that may not be immediately apparent from the brief discussion of their creative choices about possible sexual orientations. In fact, the sexual orientation discussion is of such social potency that I think highlighting it (at least in the terms we talk about the issue in popular discourse) sort of obscures a broader and to me more interesting revelation there.

What I mean to say is that whether or not the male Col. Shepard in Mass Effect 2 can have a male partner, or whether or not the female Shepard can be romantically involved with Miranda (why is the most attractive woman always off limits for Bioware?), the question could reveal something about what makes a character a politically "safe" choice to be bisexual in a mass market game, but combined with the nature of the game it also reveals much about what Bioware thinks about "Nature"... and perhaps about where American culture places human agency. I say that because it occurs to me that no matter what choices you make, Miranda is never going to become romantically involved with a female Shepard (and, of course, male Shepard has no male options at all), suggesting that in that facet at least her character is completely stable. Are we to believe that Miranda, a hard-edged, swashbuckling heroine from the libertine future is an absolute 0 on the Kinsey Scale? In contemporary culture, I was under the impression that it was fashionable to imagine that nobody was strictly a 0, no matter what they said to the contrary (in fact, protestations to the contrary tend to make the score go up, right?).

So Bioware presents us with a sprawling, nonlinear RPG and a woman, Miranda, who is 100% straight no matter what you say to her or do for her. Does this mean that Bioware is suggesting that her sexuality is completely stable? And if her sexuality is stable - if she is just born completely straight with no power over it, and no environmental changes are going to alter that sexuality - to what extent is Bioware reflecting American attitudes about "nature" here? That is, in our culture have we fallen on the "nature" side of the nature vs. nurture debate?

And if we have, who wins the political argument over "human nature"? On the one hand, the political left would seem to win a victory for sexual orientation activism if we've settled on "born that way" as the cause of completely immutable sexual orientations. At the same time, the political right would seem to win a victory for a range of issues from law and order to education to foreign policy: if sexual orientation is "just so" and immutable, how many other qualities from criminality to aptitude are similarly immutable and not worth engaging?

What RPGs like Bioware's Mass Effect and Dragon Age reflect for me though is a kind of fatalism that interacts with human agency in an interesting way that I think mirrors how American culture deals with destiny. In the modern RPG, from Mass Effect to World of Warcraft, there seems to be a kind of "punctuated equilibrium" - to borrow a term from evolutionary biology - wherein there is a field of possible realities anchored to a handful of absolutes.

I'll probably write another post about that...

Mass Effect 2: Hoes Before Bros?

I've begun playing Mass Effect 2, which in most cases is a stunning visual accomplishment (though there are times when one can see, especially in the initial space battle, that shortcuts have been taken). It's a space-based RPG, for those not familiar with the series, and it has many of the elements of a traditional swords and sorcery type RPG, only blended in interesting ways with, I'd say, a first person shooter like Halo. It's produced by Bioware, the same company that produced the highly enjoyable RPG Dragon Age: Origins. And it's the fact that it was produced by Bioware that makes me wonder about a certain creative choice.


I tend to play through an RPG once (or mostly once), then search for guides on Google for how to do all the things I missed. For a game like Mass Effect or DA:O, the "things I've missed" category can be pretty large considering the sheer scope of possibilities within the game: the "field of play", so to speak, is large enough for thousands of unique trajectories through the game space. In reading through guides and other players' experiences in Mass Effect, I of course came across one or two Romance Guides (always popular topics in an RPG of this kind). There are a range of possible romantic interactions in the game but what struck me was which were available and which were not.

The first Mass Effect was surrounded (I'm not sure how seriously) by a banal controversy over a lesbian "sex" scene within the game. I say "sex" because it was really just two women kissing then rolling over, and I say "banal" because because the shock factor of seeing two women kiss wore off long, long ago. Nevertheless, controversy arose around such salacious content, or was generated by Bioware to boost sales. Following up on the success of such controversy, in the sequel one now has the possibility of two different lesbian relationships to choose from, along with a range of inter-species type couplings that may seem transgressive if we ever meet aliens but just seem sort of funny now.



What I wonder though, considering they doubled up on the saucy lesbian action, is what made Bioware choose not to include a male-male option? I wonder because such an option did exist in Dragon Age: Origins, which would seem to provide precedent. Though same-sex relationships were a point of interest in discussions of DA:O, I didn't get the impression that there was any of the overwrought controversy surrounding it. Further, the game seems to have been received well by the gaming market, belying a stereotype that the largely male gaming audience is necessarily averse to the presentation of such things, or that they require only fantastical lesbianism. So what could lead to the exclusion from Mass Effect 2 of any male-male option, even though the female-female options are expanded?

Perhaps the audiences for ME and DA:O don't overlap as much as I imagine. There may be a kind of barrier between the swords and sorcery crowd and the space-RPG/FPS crowd. That's not really something I can attest to, but one thing that occurs to me is that perhaps DA:O wasn't as bold as it seems at first glance. Sure, a male main character could become romantically involved with a male secondary character, Zevran... But I wonder if this isn't still a safe choice on some level. Zevran, an elf reminiscent of Raul Julia in the Addam's Family, seems like he could be seen as an effete and purposely woman-like character and thus "safe" for male romantic interaction. He's not typically masculine like Alistair, and he's not technically human. Could he occupy some non-human feminized space, which makes him less jarring as a bisexual character?

The New DRM...

The surest way to keep your game (or any software) from being Captain Hook'd off the internet seems to be to make the game 15 gigs big. Why invest in DRM if you can just bloat the file size to such a state that no one will want to steal it?

Perhaps it's like making a TV so large that no one will be able to swipe it from the display.