I’m a person, you’re a person — Sophie Sampson. So here goes.
That Was Quick: Crystal Dynamics Responds On Tomb Raider Controversy. The trouble with Tomb Raider. I got some push-back for including Crystal Dynamics' 2012 Tomb Raider demo in a post about E3 marketing misses and mistakes.
Some readers/viewers see and hear the same potential pitfalls I do; others just look forward to a reboot that's reclaiming their interest in a storied but troubled franchise and question what others might find offensive (or at least off-pitch). Let me state clearly and up front: I do not yet know if I have a problem with this game. I have not played it. It won't be available for another year. Tomb Raider is not torture porn. No lie, Lara Croft takes a serious beating in the Tomb Raider reboot.
You get the sense that developer Crystal Dynamics has a library containing thousands of grunts, groans, cries, screams, and various types of panting and heavy breathing to fill out Lara’s screen time. Dialogue in the script likely contains far more vowels than consonants. Lara herself spends the early portion of the game — possibly a great deal more — suffering heavily, bashed and battered without pause.
She calls out for help that does not arrive. When evil men come for her, she runs like an expendable coed in some generic slasher flick. Not surprisingly, a lot of people don’t care for this sort of violence towards women, and they shouldn’t. I Will Not Be Lara Croft’s Protector « escort-mission. Back in November, I started and stopped writing a piece about much be-fooferawed use of the word “bitch” to describe it’s prominent female characters. I was uncomfortable with its frequency, and after charting a few other blog reactions, ranging from dismissive to furious, I still didn’t have a satisfying handle on why it bugged me so much- and whether or not it really mattered.
So I did the insane thing and pursued the opinion of an actual woman, Susan Arendt, Managing Editor for The Escapist. After a few tweets, she ended up sending me an incredibly detailed outline of the limitations of language in a T-rated title, and the kind of atmosphere that Rocksteady wanted to generate in their game, which happened to lead to the arguably too-frequent utterance of “bitch.” The entire message was deft and informative, but the best line of it came near the end when she wrote: If you ask me, the demo made it look kind of silly.
Take a look at what Crystal Dynamics is trying to do with Lara. You'll 'Want To Protect' The New, Less Curvy Lara Croft. SExpand I'm sorry...I don't like anything I JUST fucking read right now and now I'm two clicks away from punching people in the face, in fact I NEEDED this picture to calm me down so I wouldn't go on a rant.
Mmmmmm Okay, WHAT KIND OF FUCKING BULLSHIT IS THIS?! Seriously? FUCKING SERIOUSLY? So lets see...let's remove Lara from being fully badass to weak 'Whedon-flavored female hero' bullshit because you know...that's exactly what I want to see in Lara. "She's definitely the hero but— you're kind of like her helper," he said.
What? "The ability to see her as a human is even more enticing to me than the more sexualized version of yesteryear," he said. In the new Tomb Raider, Lara Croft will suffer. Try to Rape. :flips chair: "She is literally turned into a cornered animal," Rosenberg said. So fuck the FUCK off. Gender, Sex and Games: A New Lara Croft Hits An Old, Old Problem. The Two Deaths That Defined Tomb Raider. By Nathan Grayson on June 12th, 2012 at 6:00 pm.
Tomb Raider‘s demo made me realize something: it’d be a stretch to call what we do in games killing. I mean, yeah, we’re probably the only medium that can (and frequently does) tout multiple physics systems specifically capable of calculating the way bullet-perforated brain bits dance majestically through the air. But really, all we’re doing is knocking down hyper-detailed action figures. We pull the trigger or aim the bow or bury the shank in a fertile bed of neckflesh, and they go down. Then we move on to the next faceless thug, rinse our knives, and repeat. The Tomb Raider scene I sat in on during E3 really struck me because it didn’t let Lara cut people (or animals) down and then continue gleefully on her way. Does Tomb Raider's Lara Croft really have to be a survivor of a rape attempt? The Tomb Raider video game franchise, and its heroine Lara Croft, is 16 years, nine games, two films and at least one amusement park ride, old this year.
Although Lara was originally best known for the remarkable size of her breasts – and that's still probably the first thing to spring to mind about her – she's grown into an interesting character, with plenty of adventures under her belt. And at the recent E3 conference developers Crystal Dynamics revealed a new, gritty version of Lara Croft's history – one that sees her bloodied, bruised, badly wounded, and forced to fight for her life against mercenaries, one of whom tries to rape her before she blows his head off.
The inclusion of the attempted rape scene raises some difficult questions. If the scene is playable, what exactly happens should the player fail?