Something that constantly bothers me in mainstream game reviews is the apparent total lack of social and political commentary of the games themselves. In an era when gamers are trying to get games seen as legitimate literary objects, shouldn’t game developers and reviewers take games more seriously as social-political narratives in the broadest sense?
Clearly, it’s a complicated subject. Games are as much about the fun of playing, potential for replayability and gameplay dynamic as much as anything else. On the face of it game genres seem much more extreme than in novels, for instance. You can pick up a novel of any genre and generally not require any extra skills to decipher it. However a game genre – MMO, RTS, FPS – has it’s own modes of play that take some dedication to get into. So perhaps it’s not surprising how many reviews are uncritical of narratives, especially when that game revolves around the multi-player aspects.
With this said, I’ve not seen such a divide between great gameplay and appalling plot and narrative as I have in Starcraft 2. Starcraft 2’s position as the foremost pro-gamer RTS, if not professionally played computer game in the world, is all I really need to say about gameplay. The balance and flow is stellar and largely unmatched in any other RTS on the market.
The plot however. The plot of Starcraft 2 is one of the all-time most cliche-ridden, clearly sexist and border-line racist games I’ve played in a while. It’s a shame too – Warcraft 3 showed us Blizzard can write a great plot. Even from the outset, the one-man-alpha-male-cookie-cutter-testosterone resistance fighter that is Jim Raynor seems to be a cliche machine. The only women in the game are medics, a scientist (who makes a pass at our hero in a Diet Coke-esque moment, obviously), medivac pilots, a news reporter respectively. Oh and the ex-girlfriend who just needs a man to come save her. The one black person (a spectre) is a Jamaican (presumably from the accent and dreadlocks) with a penchant for blood sacrifice and witch-doctoring, brilliantly summed up by Rock Paper Shotgun. Your best friend is a beer chugging macho ex-marine fugative bar brawler with anger management problems and power armour the size of something… very big. You spend half the time smoking cigars, drinking whisky and offering Arnie-eqsue one-liners. Who writes this stuff?
Add in a few penis and sex jokes, an utterly predictable plot arc that ends up with Raynor confronting his ex-girlfriend who gets conveniently alien mind controlled (spoiler alert: no prizes for guessing the denouement) and you’ve got something that amounts to Twilight for boys. Only not as well written. For a multi-billion grossing company with tens of millions of users, I’m honestly shocked as a feminist, anti-racist and person who likes literature that this script got into a game that was nine years in development. The reports of admin-endorsed sexism previously on The Border House were sadly not a shock given the terrible way the game itself treats women. If games want to be taken seriously as works of fiction, this isn’t the way to do it.
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