Exquisite Corpses: Markedness, Gender, and Death in Video Games
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes gendered death animations in video games and the way games thematize death to remarginalize marked characters, including women. This project combines Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s work on the human subjection to death and Georges Bataille’s characterization of sacrifice to explore how death in games stages markedness. Markedness articulates how a culture treats normative identities as unproblematic while marking non-normative identities as deviant.
Chapter One characterizes play as a form of death-deferral, which culminates in the spectacle of player-character death. I argue that death in games can facilitate what Hegel calls tarrying with death, embracing our subjection to mortality. I examine marked and unmarked player-character death to explain how deaths endorse values like resilience. However laudable those values are, they often rely on sexist assumptions and imagery that crucially limit games’ potential to encourage tarrying with death. Chapter Two uses Bataille’s concept of sacrifice to frame the relationship between the player as a sacrificer and the player-character as a victim. Applying Bataille’s model of sacrifice to explicitly feminine player-characters shows how games continue to characterize feminine-coded vulnerability, suffering, and death as aesthetic spectacles. I examine the iconic player-character Lara Croft from Tomb Raider as a “sacrificial woman” whose marked deaths reflect mainstream game cultures’ lingering tendency to see women through the lens of the ‘damsel in distress,’ who must be rescued from sacrifice. Even when those women are player-characters, traces of the damsel mark and undercut their agency. Chapter Three examines the sex-specific depiction of sacrifice in dad games, a genre that uses heroic fatherhood and self-sacrifice to mark the previously unmarked. Dad games draw attention to qualities like whiteness and masculinity—which typically go unmarked—to present them as under threat and in need of defence. However, this defence uses images of feminine-coded suffering to express and allay anxieties about the perceived passing of patriarchal power. Ultimately, this treatment reflects online harassment campaigns like Gamergate’s staging of women’s real-life suffering to silence progressive and alternative voices in games. Gamergate’s performative sadism is another expression of how mainstream game cultures articulate masculine anxiety through feminine-coded suffering.