A Prime example of Females in Shooting Games

When asked to blog about a particular game, I couldn't go past one of my absolute favourites, Metroid Prime.  Released for the Nintendo Gamecube in 2002, the game tells the story of interstellar bounty hunter Samus Aran as she explores a distant planet known as Tallon IV to defeat the antagonistic Space Pirates and to discover what happened to the planet's indigenous population.  It is a science fiction first person shooter, but with a lot more emphasis on exploration and discovery rather than combat.  The only human character in the game is the protagonist controlled by the player.  Samus Aran is a female, and using Hall's research on encoding and decoding messages and the construct of meaning I'll analyse how Samus is represented, and if any gender stereotypes apply to her. 

Gameplay of Metroid Prime

Video courtesy of youtube.com

Metroid Prime isn't the first appearance of Samus Aran, but it is her first in a 3D game.  Samus is well known as being the first female main character in a video game, and the first to be in a shooter.  She set the trend for other female characters, the most well known are Lara Croft in the tomb raider series and Joanna Dark from the game Perfect Dark.  All these women follow a gender stereotype that has come to be for females in shooting games, they are all strong, independent and very attractive.

 


 Images from top going clockwise, 1. Joanna Dark, courtesy IGN.com, 2. Samus Aran courtesy deviantart.com and 3. Lara Croft, courtesy wikipedia.com


The representation of Samus as the strong, independant woman is a strong part of her character, but it also raises many questions about how the developers created this portrayal to display the stereotype.  Hall's concept of encoding and decoding delves into the ways in which the producers of content encode their stories with meaning, and then the ways in which the consumers then deduct and decode meaning from that encoded narrative (Hall, 1980, pp.55-58).  It is important to point out that the encoded meaning into a message is not necessarily the decoded message.   

The gender representation in Metroid Prime can be decoded in three ways:

Dominant - The audience agrees with the game, in this case the players would accept Samus to be a strong independent woman, and these players can relate to true real life examples of women like Samus.  

Negotiated - The audience agrees with some part of the game, in this case players would agree with some aspects of Samus' character but won't agree with others.  In this case it would be the idea of the male gaze does not follow the stereotype, as the player never see's Samus' complete body, only the full body armor.  

Oppositional - The audience disagrees with the game, the players would reject the stereotype of Samus as a female shooter.  

Samus Aran.  Courtesy giantbomb.com

To me personally, I play the game not because it contains an empowering female figure as its protagonist, but because of the exploration of the new planet and the gameplay itself.  But I can see why many find either empowerment in the character Samus, or the opposite feeling in that another video game female is simply another unrealistically attractive girl created by the male gaze.  

References

Hall, S 1980, ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’, Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, England, pp. 55-58, accessed 12 Sept 2013