Life is Strange, Mass Effect, Gal Pals, and Why Video Games Aren’t Quite as Gay as You Think
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In 2007, video game studio Bioware was heavily promoting their upcoming XBox 360 exclusive, Mass Effect, in which players would create and customize their avatar, futuristic commando Commander Shepard. One of the factoids that was allowed to dribble out about the upcoming open-world space opera was that it would include *gasp* lesbian sex! This was, of course, covered with the level of maturity and subtlety that the mainstream press has traditionally had for video games — that is, with the understanding that video games are, in fact, a tool to corrupt young minds into sodomy and murder. (We can leave aside, for the moment at least, the effort by a significant portion of the gaming community to convince us all that the latter accusation is correct.) Kevin McCullough, conservative blogger, summed it up in perhaps the most hyperbolic description of video game content ever posted to the Interwebs:
It’s called “Mass Effect” and it allows its players… to engage in the most realistic sex acts ever conceived. One can custom design the shape, form, bodies, race, hair style, breast size of the images they wish to “engage” and then watch in crystal clear, LCD, 54 inch screen, HD clarity as the video game “persons” hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of…
…And because of the digital chip age in which we live — “Mass Effect” can be customized to sodomize whatever, whoever, however, the game player wishes.
With it’s “over the net” capabilities virtual orgasmic rape is just the push of a button away.
Of course, as any Mass Effect player knows, the game in fact offers players a choice of very limited customization options limited to the face and hair of their protagonist, and the option of what in any just world would be a PG/E10+ rated lovemaking scene of the kind that makes us think of Jack and Rose hiding in the cargo section of the Titanic, only with less breasts. Fast forward to 2015; the original Mass Effect trilogy has finished, and Commander Shepard has the option to ride off into the — well, into the exploding galaxy of one of three colors with someone of the same sex. After the first game, Mass Effect’s continuation of same-sex romance options for female characters and eventual introduction of male same-sex romance in Mass Effect 3 provoked minimal controversy. Bioware’s Dragon Age series had same-sex liasons for male and female protagonists in all three of its major installments to this date, and when Square-Enix and Dontnod Entertainment released Life is Strange, an episodic adventure game which is pretty much about lesbian romance, outrage even from conservative pundits (other than GamerGate, who constantly rage at everything) was pretty much crickets. So have we reached victory for gay representation in games? I’m afraid not, and I’m going to explain why by explaining how both Mass Effect and Life is Strange fuck up their representations of women who are attracted to women. Full disclosure: I’m a huge fan of both series, with the exception of how they ended; my issues with Mass Effect’s ending have only minimal relevance to my analysis here, but my issues with Life is Strange’s pretty much define the issue at hand. Please be aware that there are spoilers for both game series beyond this point. Also be aware that there is content discussed from both games, and present in links, that involve the topics of rape and suicide.
The Male Gaze & Video Games
Laura Mulvey’s 1975 academic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” pretty much changed how feminists look at film, and also proved forever that Alfred Hitchcock was a fucking creep — much like, notably, the photography teacher in Life is Strange, Mr. Jefferson, who also loves framing women in ways that emphasize that he has power over them and that they are objects for him to consume and dominate, even after he has, in Hitchcock’s case, moved on to some new actress to order around, or in Mr. Jefferson’s, buried them in a shallow grave in the town junkyard. Mulvey, primarily using analysis of Hitchcock films, argued that Hollywood cinema overwhelmingly showed women through a “male gaze” — that is, through the eyes of a man looking at a woman he wants to see as a sex object. If you’ll forgive some academic jargon for a moment:
Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.
Sounds a little bit like the quarter-baked ramblings of Mr. McCullough, above, doesn’t it? But in fact, when applied to video games with female avatars, taking male gaze theory into account makes a lot of sense. In a movie, the “gaze” is determined by the cameraman. So, in Mulvey’s essay, she accuses Hitchcock and his cameramen of “scopophilic eroticism,” which is a very complex term for framing women from sexy angles so the audience is constantly “checking them out,” so to speak. (Despite the quotation marks, “checking them out” is my summation, not Mulvey’s.) In a video game, the player has a lot more control — but the control isn’t complete. When you are, for instance, creating Commander Shepard at the beginning of each Mass Effect game, you can certainly rotate the camera around his or her body to get a look at that space commando ass. It’d be easy to say that that’s simply the player’s choice — that the game gives you a camera, and you use it the way you want. But it’s a bit more complex than that.
Games have differing levels of “choice,” and where those choices are placed say a lot about the game designer’s priorities. For instance, every Bioware game offers the player control over the gender, race, and (to a greater or lesser extent) name of their avatar in the game world, which demonstrates that Bioware wants players to feel as if they, themselves are represented in the game. (This says something about the choice not to offer same-sex romance options for male characters in Mass Effect until the third game, and about Bioware’s relationship to gay and bisexual male gamers — but that’s a topic for a different essay.) Life is Strange, conversely, doesn’t let you customize your avatar at all — but you get to make an enormous amount of decisions about how she lives her life. Arguably, your control over Max Caulfield’s day to day life is significantly greater than your control over Shepard’s, which is sometimes limited to “feed fish/let fish starve” and “shoot that dude first or that other dude first.” The game’s interface also offers choices which are cinematographic in nature — that is, how is the game’s camera positioned? And this is where we come back to Mulvey.
Anyone who’s ever been to the seedier side of the Internets knows that there is a cottage industry of computer-generated pornography producers. Using programs like Poser, you literally can create the sort of sexual fantasy cornucopia that Kevin McCullough absurdly accused Mass Effect of offering. In a game, you don’t have the kind of freedom to control the camera, or the objects on screen, that you do in Poser or other 3D modeling programs, and it’s a game design decision exactly how much freedom you do have. In World of Warcraft, you are absolutely free to angle the camera to look up your player character’s skirt, although what is beneath it is neither modeled nor rendered. In both Mass Effect and Life is Strange, the camera is locked to much more restrictive angles — when you’re on a mission where combat may take place as Shepard, you’re stuck behind her and her squad, because the game is a third-person shooter. You have to be able to aim your gun. (That, of course, has militaristic implications which are again, outside the scope of this post.) When you’re on Shepard’s ship or in other “safe” areas, you can rotate the camera more freely, but you can still only zoom in and out to a certain extent, and there are some angles — including the naughty ones — that you just can’t do. You can change what Shepard wears, but you can’t make her go on missions in her underwear. And as far as Max goes, the camera always works like it does in “safe” locations in Mass Effect — you can rotate the camera to see Max from different angles, but there are some angles you can’t take. You have no control whatsoever over what Max wears.
That’s when the player controls the camera. Of course, both Mass Effect and Life is Strange are to a significant extent what in the old days of the 1990s the industry called “interactive movies” — they’re composed of a lot of cutscenes. These cutscenes essentially turn us into movie viewers who periodically make decisions on behalf of our avatar. When Max is trying to decide, in an intimate moment, whether to move in and kiss her long-lost friend Chloe, the camera is framed as the developer chose — not as the player does:
Getting back to the first Mass Effect and its allegedly “pornographic” lesbian love scene, there’s no camera control there. This is what it looks like:
The only choices that the player makes that influence this scene are Shepard’s face shape, hair color, and skin color. The rest is all up to the game’s “director.”
The point that I’m making here is that the male gaze manifests in games because we spend plenty of time watching pre-staged scenes in games. Something that many frustrated Mass Effect players notice is that while Commander Shepard equips an arsenal of player’s selected weapons before each mission, but in cutscenes where she’s fighting, she is almost always using the Avenger assault rifle — a weapon which, first, is one of the weakest in the game, and second, in the first and second games many Shepards aren’t even trained in how to use. Games aren’t so different from movies that we can’t apply Mulvey’s theory to understand how male fantasy is projected, and female, same-sex desire is erased, from Mass Effect and Life is Strange.
Queer Girls Must Die
In the first Mass Effect, the only “same-sex” romance option, Liara T’soni, is not “biologically” female, but rather comes from the asari species, who can perform either the male or the female role in sexual intercourse (although, perhaps thankfully, the game’s choice to keep the sex scenes PG-13 leaves the exact method through which this takes place to the imagination), because I sometimes imagine it actually works a bit like in Galaxy Quest:
But Liara’s emphasis on dialogue on how she isn’t really female in the human sense makes her less of what she might have been — perhaps a metaphor for a trans person, although really gaming doesn’t need any more of those — and more of an excuse for the same-sex romance to not really be same-sex, not because of Liara’s anatomy but because as an asari she presumably doesn’t see gender, any more than a member of our species would understand gzrnkg, an extremely important social construct with biological implications that the ibglarian species I invented just now has. (We even meet a character who self-describes as Liara’s “father” at one point, while still using the “she” pronoun to refer to herself and appearing female by human standards.)
Of course, we’re not supposed to think that homophobia exists in Shepard’s world — yet it takes Kaiden, one of the two possible male paramours for a male Shepard, until Mass Effect 3 to figure out that he’s into men. Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, played as male Shepard, present a very Captain Kirk sort of galaxy, in which blue space babes (asari) as well as traditionally attractive human ladies in your immediate chain of command (Gunnery Sergeant Ashley Williams, who remains straight-identified and off-limits to female Shepards for the entire series) want to jump your bone. In Mass Effect 2, the only same-sex romance option at all in the base game is the ship psychologist, Kelly, who is presented as… promiscuous, shall we say, and interested in sleeping with anyone and anything. Mass Effect 2 does add romance options that likely do not cater to the male gaze — again, only for female Commander Shepards — in the form of terminally ill Thane, a sexy assassin-frog-man straight out of a romance novel, and Garrus, the rogue cop from the first game who is basically a literal space bird and thus unlikely to factor into the physical parts of most people’s erotic fantasies.
Downloadable content allows Shepard to continue her romance with Liara, if she started it in the first game, and in Mass Effect 3, a female Shepard can reunite with Liara as a member of her crew, but also (again, creepily, given that she’s in her chain of command) romance Samantha Traynor, a ship communications officer. In either case, slightly-more-graphic-than-before sex scenes are offered, and player fantasies may or may not be fulfilled. In the game’s conclusion, Shepard can discuss the future with his or her chosen romantic partner — whether to have children (if the partner is opposite-sex and human) or adopt (Shepard and Liara suggest adopting a krogan, an aggressive frog-like being). But none of that matters, because in the vast majority of endings to the game, Shepard and possibly a large number of her crew perish saving the galaxy. By itself, this isn’t a huge problem — but it does mean that there’s no happy romantic ending for Shepard as a lesbian, any more than there is for Shepard as a straight man. Shepard and Liara never adopt that krogan baby, in all likelihood.
As I said, by itself the fact that Shepard doesn’t live to have a happy domestic life with any of her partners doesn’t represent anything more than the designers’ choice to have, well, a bit of a downer ending to the series, which has been debated more than enough and which this article is definitely not going to get into. But what about Max and Chloe? When we read Mass Effect and Life is Strange together, we see that in both of them, the road to a morally just life with a same sex partner is paved in blood. The only ending to Mass Effect 3 in which Shepard even potentially survives is the “red” ending, which involves the destruction of synthetic life — that is, Shepard’s ship computer EDI as well as the geth, a species of machines that can best be described as “really, really, really nice Cylons.” For Shepard to live and reunite with her partner, she has to commit genocide. Again, this part of the ending has been heavily debated in the fandom, with some arguing that EDI and the geth would gladly sacrifice their existence for the benefits of that ending (it, unlike the other two, involves a permanent end to the series villains, the Reapers). But the point is that the only way Mass Effect’s sapphic love story ends happily is if a bunch of people die. And Life is Strange is the same, with even less ambiguity. Here’s the final choice:
The justification the game provides is this: Chloe Price is fated to die. Max’s time-travel power — whose source is never provided or even hinted at — is fundamentally harmful to her and to the fabric of time and space, and so like so many Doctor Who episodes, Max must return to that “fixed point” in time — the girls’ bathroom where she prevented her classmate Nathan from killing Chloe with a concealed pistol. I don’t have to remind readers how many “tragic lesbian” tropes this plays into — the idea that girls who love girls have to die is overplayed and has an actively harmful effect on the psyches of non-straight women who have to be exposed to the tropes, over and over and over again. But, unlike in films where lesbians just die, in both these games, they can survive — over the blood of thousands, or in the case of Mass Effect, billions.
Assuming Direct Control: Gal Pals are Expendable
Actress Kristen Stewart’s sexuality was long debated in the tabloids; when she was sighted on what many folks thought was an obviously romantic outing with Alicia Cargyle, who lived with her at the time, tabloid headlines used terms like “gal pals” to describe their relationship. This minimization of sexuality when it occurs between females is one of the two avenues through which male gaze happens in Mass Effect and Life is Strange. Mulvey wrote extensively about Hitchcock’s films engaging in voyeurism — something the famed director never denied. Mulvey also pointed out that when a “subjective” shot — that is, a shot that is from the point of view of a character — appears in a film, the viewer doesn’t necessarily identify with that character, so much as take pleasure in momentarily imagining being them. Jessica Janiuk wrote an important essay, headlined with an image of Commander Shepard herself, about how this ability to identify with a protagonist like this was crucial to her as a transgender woman, and since I’m citing 1970s feminist writings let me be clear that I’m a transgender woman myself and not doing the whole “transsexuals infiltrating female bodies/spaces” thing. But while the numbers of female gamers are growing rapidly, the numbers of female players of Mass Effect may not be as high: only 18 percent of players (who participated in Bioware’s admittedly limited data collection) played a female Commander Shepard. This means that there are a great deal of men playing Mass Effect, and certainly some of those playing female Shepard are male (anecdotally, I know women who choose to play male avatars either out of attraction or to avoid exposure to issues of sexism which may occur in the game, even from non-player characters). So, when we see a shot from the point of view of female Shepard or Max, we may not be experiencing the pleasure of being Shepard, so much as the pleasure of controlling her. Think Kilgrave in Jessica Jones — or, again, the villain of Life is Strange, Mr. Jefferson, who I’ll get to in a moment.
Sexual pleasure in choice-based narrative games like these is generally presented in a very masculine, pursuit-and-gatekeeping sort of way — which is certainly the case in Mass Effect, where Shepard must complete certain errands for potential lovers before romance is a possibility, but refreshingly not the case in Life is Strange, where the option to “kiss Chloe” will show up no matter what choices the player makes. But ultimately, when we do kiss our chosen paramour in the game, we are simultaneously being Shepard or Max, and consuming or controlling Shepard or Max. I think that ultimately, the factor of control — of living out a fantasy of arranging particular sexual encounters — dominates both games’ narratives. The experience of playing each game is very different for someone who identifies with Max or Shepard, versus someone who seeks to control Max or Shepard — and gender has a lot to do with that. Here’s where we need to bring in the villains of our respective franchises:
Both the Reapers, “an ancient race of sentient starships allegedly waiting in Dark Space,” and Mr. Jefferson are obsessed with control. The Reapers can control anyone who spends long enough near them, and the villain of the first game, Saren, is an elite soldier whose mind has been twisted to believe that helping the Reapers will actually save the galaxy. The second game introduces an entire species (pictured above) known as the Collectors who have been genetically engineered to be controllable at any time by the Reaper known as Harbinger. In the final game, in lieu of a “boss fight” Shepard engages in a dialogue with the Illusive Man, head of the terrorist organization Cerberus and known to most players as “that guy who played the President on the West Wing but has glowing eyes now.”
Again, the Illusive Man is utterly convinced that obedience to the Reapers is the only solution — and neither his body, nor his mind, is his own. The “best” solution to both Saren and the Illusive Man is to help them regain enough agency to take their own lives before they harm others.
Mr. Jefferson doesn’t control minds, but he does paralyze girls with drugs, tie them up, and take them to — and let’s not mince words here — his rape dungeon, which he calls the “dark room,” the “only place where he can be [his] ‘selfie,’” as he puts it in his vicious mockery of Millenial parlance and of Max’s habit of taking self-portraits with her Polaroid camera. He’s also obsessed with commanding his students’ loyalty — one of his first direct actions toward Max is to prevent her from leaving his classroom until she’s promised to submit a photograph to a contest for him (she never does). Some of the students, like Max’s rival Victoria Chase, buy into Mr. Jefferson’s mystique fully. I think the player is meant to be taken in by him, although I will say that I found him skeevy and suspected him of some kind of improper behavior from very early on.
In any case, look at the picture above — it’s a subjective shot of Mr. Jefferson, standing over Max, after he has injected her with a paralyzing anesthetic and shot Chloe dead. (Max will save Chloe at least a couple more times in the subsequent episode.) For a female player of the game, or a male player who identifies with Max, this shot is one of outrage and fear — we are experiencing the feeling of having seen someone the character we identify with loves killed, and are realizing we’re on our way to the dungeon we discovered earlier in the episode. But as Mulvey points out, there’s a voyeuristic pleasure in watching women dominated, and not necessarily in the S&M sense. Take Mulvey’s description of the gender relations in Hitchcock’s Rear Window:
The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned on to the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanaiytically speaking). True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness — the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong. Hitchcock’s skilful use of identification processes and liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share his uneasy gaze. The audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegesis which parodies his own in the cinema. In his analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema. Jeffries [the protagonist of Rear Window, notice anything here?] is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen. As he watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image to the drama. His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so Iong as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their reationship is re-born erotically. He does not merely watch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful image, he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening her with punishment, and thus finally saves her. Lisa’s exhibitionism has already been established by her obsessive interest in dress and style, in being a passive image of visual perfection; Jeffries’voyeurism and activity have also been established through his work as a photo-journalist, a maker of stories and captor of images. However, his enforced inactivity, binding him to his seat as a spectator, puts him squarely in the phantasy position of the cinema audience.
Apart from the name, which cannot possibly be coincidental, the behavior of Rear Window’s protagonist parallels Mr. Jefferson’s in a number of ways. After capturing Max, Jefferson lectures her about his past victims ,especially Rachel Amber, the first one to go missing, who like Jeffries’ girlfriend, “had it coming” and was guilty, because of her insatiable sexual appetite. Rachel, apparently, complied with Jefferson’s efforts to photograph her, at least at the beginning, and may have had consensual sex with him. At one point, Jefferson even mentions digging up Rachel’s body after burying it to “get head” one last time — again, possibly a reference to Rear Window, which centers around Jeffries’ observation of his neighbor dismembering and burying his wife’s corpse after murdering her.
What kind of victim is Max? Max gets to choose — and in order to successfully escape the Dark Room (by getting Mr. Jefferson to place photographs, one of the means by which she travels through time, within her field of vision) she has to submit to his efforts to capture her (sexually-connoted) “innocence” to at least some degree. Max can always rewind and experience a new way of being sexually tortured by Jefferson — there isn’t even a need to load a saved game, thanks to Life is Strange’s time travel mechanic. After Max does escape the Dark Room and create a timeline in which she is reunited with Chloe, she is plunged back into a nightmare reality — one in which Jefferson is still in complete control. In that reality, she finds herself back in his classroom, where Jefferson invites her to come to his darkroom, to be his “partner”. All but one of the dialogue options Max is offered are some variety of “fuck you” — but the only response she can utter is one of compliance — she’d love to return to the Dark Room and to Jefferson’s control.
While the first four episodes of Life is Strange tell a low-key love story between two girls on the edge of their life’s beginning, with a bit of thriller mixed in, the final episode is essentially a direct manifestation of male gaze in its purest form, and the creators cannot have been unaware of this, given both the name of the antagonist and the fame of Mulvey’s essays — not to mention Jefferson’s obsession with framing his (always female) victims in passive, submissive poses. The game’s final choice then forces Max herself to take the role of killer — a role few people would actually want, but one that many gamers seek to experience on a regular basis. If Max chooses to allow Chloe to die, a montage shows Jefferson’s arrest, the discovery of Rachel Amber’s body, and the avoidance of the hurricane that threatened the town. If she chooses her love for Chloe over the town, every single resident of the town — nearly every character Max has met in the game — perishes. (This ending, Arthur Chu pointed out to me, is also a direct reference to Fight Club.)
The message of Life is Strange, and to a much lesser extent Mass Effect, is that girls are there to look at; that it might be fun to be one for a while, but that in the end, our lives are there to be arranged, to be displayed, and to be ended for entertainment. Even a “slice of life” game like Life is Strange effectively forces the player to make Max a murderer regardless of ending, and Mass Effect requires Shepard to choose between suicide and genocide, an action of which she is likely innocent up until that point. There are many games in which men die heroically in combat, or sacrifice themselves to save others; there are few games about women to begin with. That those that exist choose a framing so deeply entangled with the male gaze is worth note.
Gal Pals, Now and Forever?
Video games have become overwhelmingly political in the past year, as GamerGate harassment has forced many game companies to take sides. Ultimately, most have taken the “right” side — against harassment — and it’s tempting to take heart at the fact that, except for the aforementioned “consumer revolt,” public outrage or protest at the same-sex themes in Life is Strange was largely absent.
At the risk of sounding like a provocateur trying to start a moral panic, however, I want to suggest that the Hitchcock/Mulvey link here is important. Female-centric games constantly seem to center a Jeffries/Jefferson — or a Harbinger/Reaper — who claims ownership and dominion over the bodies of player characters. Are we, as players, more like Max and Shepard, or are we more like Jefferson or Harbinger, tourists in the bodies of our protagonists? Obviously, none of us are commandos like Shepard (I doubt many men playing male Shepard would claim to be able to replicate even a few of his combat abilities, or for that matter, his charisma). But most of us have been a Max Caulfield — and yet I have a creeping sensation that Jefferson is who we really are when we’re playing these games.
Releasing control.
Edited to add: I want to make sure to credit Arthur Chu, who I believe first made the suggestion of a link between LiS’s developers and Mr. Jefferson’s mindset.
2019 edit: I’ve interacted with and learned more about the devs, and I want to clarify I’m not attributing malice to them.
Eleanor is currently raising funds for her final gender confirmation surgery. If you’ve appreciated her articles here, you can help out at https://gogetfunding.com/ellies-final-trans-surgeries/
