Each of these heroic women seems a good role model candidate, especially in comparison to the damsels discussed above. Yet even such seemingly empowered female characters come with ambiguous implications. While their presence does speak to certain pro-gender equality ideals - more representation of capable women in games, more opportunities to play as women - their submissive relationship to interactivity puts them once again at the mercy of male gamers.
Men, as the ones most often holding the controllers, exercise control over playable female characters, redistributing the power balance in favor of the male. And while there's something innately sadistic about this interaction, there's also something highly voyeuristic. Male gamers often claim to enjoy playing as women, not because they are interested in stepping into their shoes, but because it gives them a chance to stare at attractive female characters. Granted, women gamers could be said to be doing the same thing when they play as men, but given the less-sexualized depiction of males in games, and the significantly smaller percentage of women holding the controllers, the implications of such a phenomenon would be almost negligible. The fact remains: Onscreen women, however brave in-game, are simultaneously performers for their primarily male audience.
Weak women, strong women; damsels, heroines. Both choices are questionable at best. So what route is left for truly empowered female characters? To be less than women, but also more than women. Female monsters, though certainly rarer than their male counterparts, have appeared in a number of survival horror series, such as Silent Hill, whose hellish demons have always included recognizably feminine ones.
The ghosts of Fatal Frame II are more or less equally male and female.
Who could forget the terrifying sight of the Woman in the Box, well, crawling out of a box? Resident Evil confronted the issue of monstrous women with the introduction of Lisa Trevor, once a lonely little girl but now an invincible, chain swinging creature, in the Gamecube remake of the original series title. The idea lived on, finding its way into Resident Evil 4 as a handful of pitchfork-wielding female enemies dispersed among the zombie-like townspeople.
The dichotomy of damsels versus heroines is one constantly debated by feminists, in and outside of the gaming world. The issue of women monsters, on the other hand, is discussed far less frequently. In dealing with monsters, the question is no longer one of activeness or passivity, but of self and other. In some ways, women monsters in survival horror represent a new type of gender equality. They have been stripped of the cultural niceties normally associated with the feminine, and can be fought and killed with as little hesitation as men. At the same time, in most video games, female enemies appear much less frequently than do male.
Should we be pushing for equal representation as the gaming other in the same way we push for equal representation as the gaming self? Why do only men get to be the bad guys? We still have to keep in mind that most gamers are male. Do we really want to provide more women for them to hunt down and kill? Of course it looks bad, but in the end, is it really any worse than killing men? These issues, while important, remain relatively unexplored. Like many questions of gender equality, they have no easy answers.
The Implications of Fear: Intimacy and the Uncanny
The questions above ask again and again: What "should be" in video games? As both game analysts and members of a larger gaming community, we often get caught up in these questions. Yet, once we move beyond the topic of what "should be" in video games we can begin to constructively talk about games for what they already are - giving ourselves the best possible chance to understand the culture around us. What can we learn from the representation of women monsters in survival horror, as it stands? Perhaps the easiest way to broach the subject is through the very heart of the genre itself: fear. Everything in a horror game, which has been created with the main purpose of frightening the gamer, can be illuminated with the question: What makes this scary?
