There comes a point in every quarantine where you get so bored, you have no more excuses to stop putting off that book, tv show or game you've been vaguely interested in. For me, it was playing the rest of the trilogy of new Tomb Raider games. Justin and I played Rise of the Tomb Raider many years ago, and to be honest with you, I don't remember a thing about it. Then came the pandemic, after playing every Far Cry game I could find on the PS4, I finished GTA 5 for the first time (more on that in another blog shortly) then Celeste, followed by LOU Part 2, and FF7 remake...I found myself running out of options and bit the bullet by downloading Shadow of the Tomb Raider. To be fair, I came into this game with a big chip on my shoulder, I am one of 5 women on the planet who doesn't feel empowered by Lara's less chesty redesign and darker story tone. By admitting this am I in danger of losing my Intersectional Feminist Club Card? Probably, but I also can't keep lying to myself.
Throughout my play through I just kept making the same observation: this game isn't fun. Like, okay, is it graphically a better game? Yeah. Are the mechanics more fluid and more realistic? No debate here. But does that make a fun game? well...Fun is objective. I personally can tell you I had more fun figuring out shitty polygon puzzles and watching badly animated cutscenes than watching this younger Lara Croft inserting herself as a white savior in an indigenous tribe.
I often see media differently than most, I fixate on the details of something rather small and find nuance in things most people overlook, I can't fault the new games for not seeing the small aspects of why I loved the old Lara but, without them the games feel hollow to me. Original Lara was cheesy. I mean this as a good thing. She was pure 90s, silly and full of cool one liners. She did gymnastics in age old artifacts for no reason than it's fucking rad to do a handstand off a old ass statute and dive into water below. She wore sunglasses inside caves while fighting dinosaurs. She wore shorts in the middle of an arctic snow storm. And she did it all in a full face of makeup. That shit was cartoonish and fun as hell.
So it got me thinking, why don't we have heroines who are like this anymore? Is it so wrong to have a silly over the top hero à la Duke Nukem? Duke has been a beloved character for years and hasn't changed his macho persona much to fit modern trends. Why is it that Lara had to change into a super serious, no titty ass bland lead? I already hear people furiously typing a response that Lara wasn't realistic, she was over sexed and BAD FOR WOMEN!! While I can't convince my fellow ladies that their feelings are wrong nor do I want them to stop enjoying a game if they feel a connection to, I do ask you simply to consider why men are allowed to have their large, muscle bound power fantasy leads when we have to settle for total redesigns that require women to be more covered up, wear less makeup and do things the way their male counterparts would. So like yeah, if I was actually in the middle of a muddy jungle running around in tombs wearing a full face of makeup is a really dumb idea, but I also don't play games to match reality 1 for 1.
Recently there was an article that came out revealing that women are now playing more games than men for the first since such things have been recorded. This is so cash money for us, ladies, and this should have game companies thinking about how to provide more games for us. But it really isn't. Ain't that wild to anyone else? Based on this knowledge we should be seeing a lot more lady leads, and a variety of personalities, body types and skin colors. So why is it we are being fed the same stoic, serious, smart protag again and again? Now, don't get me wrong, I do enjoy strong, conservatively dressed characters - Aloy of HZD is one of my all time favorite characters in modern media. What i am saying is there are multiple ways to create women leads. There is always room for all. By changing Lara to be less humorous, more cutthroat (anyone else think the mini challenge of killing defenseless forest creatures for just a small amount of XP is kinda cruel?) is frankly just a boring move. Boobs are not your enemy, they are just flesh balls that feel pretty cool. Sexy characters do note drain me of my agency or brainwash me to patriarchy, it's what we do with them that matters. Is DOA boob physics unnecessary? Yeah, and to be honest I do feel alienated by it. But the idea itself of women fighting in bikinis on a beach alone isn't inherently bad.
Ragging on media without a solution isn't a vibe. I started to think constructively, is there a way to connect the two fandoms, old Lara fans with the modern era of gaming? Well I'm just a dreamer but heck, I have time today so here's my attempt:
How would I direct the new TR games? Allow them to embrace the 90s ultra cool cheese. Let's battle dinosaurs. Let Lara have her cool witty one liners. Let her go full Bayonetta with a stylized shooting style. Games made with a sense of humor isn't a bad thing. Games that don't put their mains through intense pain to further the plot are not any less of a form of art. You can have an engaging story while injecting some unrealistic gameplay into it. Let woman gamers see all types of leads, allow them to dream, allow them to laugh at how silly it all is. There is nothing wrong with not being a serious girlboss.
I'm not advocating all women leads be oversexed, humorous power fantasies, not at all. That would be boring too. I just want diversity, and Lara was a perfect vessel to shake up modern games with a little bit of light hearted fun. I guess this is an overall larger issue with society as a whole. I remember in like 2013 i went to E3 in a Lara croft cosplay (I didn't know cosplay was taboo at E3) and I saw a cute Disney games setup and took a photo with it, I remember the woman in charge of the Disney setup yelled at me that my body was "not on brand for the Disney company!" and although we already got the photo that was just for my personal memories, I quickly walked away. That moment often plays in my mind, over and over. I wished I would have stood up to her, asked her why a small cleavage line on my chest (this was pre implants btw) offended her. Maybe I would have learned something about my own people. As I said above, I often hyper focus on the little details, and miss the bigger picture the mass majority sees plainly. Maybe I would have seen it from her perspective...Or better still, we would come to a mutual respect than a her vs. me mentality.
No series is without it's problems, TR as a whole suffers from having a rich white woman hunting indigenous artifacts for her own gain. So yeah, that's a yikes. How can we fix this core element of a franchise? Consider this - every OG TR fan that I've met all tell the same story and that's their reaction to the first time they encountered a T Rex - it was wild, unexpected, scary and fun at all the same time. Why not have Lara go on more of these adventures than that of disturbing peaceful marginalized civilizations? Let Lara battle the Loch Ness monster while underwater with only a harpoon as her means of combat, let Lara track a Bigfoot in the trees in a stealth mission. The artifacts Lara could collect in my version could be a tooth of the Loch Ness, a claw of the Bigfoot - proving to the rest of the scientific world in the game that these things exist and require study.
While battling dangerous creatures is fun, let's round out this headcannon game of mine. I have a soft spot for the complex and peaceful puzzles of the OG series. It was a nice breather of pace from the high energy battles. I remember getting out a paper and pen to help map out or solve some of the box pushing rubix cubes like puzzles, and it's something I really treasure about that time of my life. I really felt like I was on a difficult adventure discovering solutions, it made me feel smart, in control, powerful. For a young girl growing up in the 90s I didn't often feel powerful, represented or listened to. While a possibly unintentional side effect of the game's design, it's affected me positively nonetheless and I want other women to feel this way too. The newer games do have puzzles, perhaps puzzles as a medium of difficulty are a thing of the past since walkthroughs exist but I'd really like to see more of a empassis of puzzles and exploring for the sake of exploring rather than killing random men in my way of a golden whatever.
Embracing what made a series stand out and over the top isn't a bad thing, it's charming and unique through the right lense. The new series pushed away from what made Lara so captivating, the sense of never knowing what was ahead of you, and leaned into the most basic elements of the game by adding more combat. Updating older game elements is sometimes necessary, like removing the artifact hunting and white savior complex but that doesn't mean every element has to go, heck Lara doesn't even wear bright blue shirts anymore. What's up with that?
I guess if any developer is reading this by chance, it's that I hope you find this message to be encouraging to get weird with it. We are in a time of remakes, reboots and sequels that all are starting to look the same. While this might sound demotivating, I hope it challenges you to change, even a little. Add a dog for no reason other than it's cute, add colorful flowers instead of just going with shades of green and brown in your jungle level. Let's experiment and try new ways of telling stories. After all, Why did you first fall in love with video games? Was it for the realistic grittiness or was it because of the sense of wonder and endless possibilities you felt deep in your gut? Games have the power to tell stories in outer space, far off in the future and play with the past. Let's not forget that sense of imagination.
XOXO
Stephanie