Abstract
This chapter examines representations of female experience in several Sierra games designed by women in the 1980s and 1990s, specifically Roberta Williams’s King’s Quest series and Phantasmagoria, Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight: The Sins of the Fathers, and Lori Cole’s Quest for Glory I. This chapter concludes that female designers have not necessarily produced more female-centered games, but also that these designers have used their games as a platform to express and comment on the experience of living as a woman in gendered spaces characterized by gender disparity and sexual violence. This study finds that women in these games typically have more limited options than the men in the same games, and these women often experience or perpetrate more violence than men in these games.
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Notes
- 1.
That these studies almost always discuss girls, rather than women, indicates problematic juvenilization of video games beyond the scope of this chapter, but worth examination elsewhere.
- 2.
For several examples in one volume, see Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher, Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
- 3.
For a discussion of the inability to resolve Lara Croft’s representational issues, see Helen Kennedy, “Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? On the Limits of Textual Analysis,” Game Studies 2, no. 2 (2002).
- 4.
I will tend to use the term “androcentric ” (from the Greek andro, for male) rather than “patriarchal,” as patriarchal implies a more explicit power structure and more strongly misogynist representation, while andocentric merely labels a work as focused on the male experience without necessarily being misogynist or patriarchal in nature.
- 5.
Biographical data has been verified via sierragamers.com .
- 6.
To use Ian Bogost’s term.
- 7.
The term “techno-historic limitations” is from Andrew Hutchison, “Making the Water Move: Techno-Historic Limits in the Game Aesthetics of Myst and Doom,” Game Studies 8, no. 1 (2008).
- 8.
Facsimile of the manual is available online at “The Wizard and the Princess.” Sierra Gamers. Sierragamers.com.
- 9.
Ibid., accessed via the AGIstudio developer studio.
- 10.
Ibid., also accessed via AGIstudio.
- 11.
Roberta Williams herself actually seems to have trivialized the significance of the scene: the Sydney Morning Herald quotes her as having said “even though the woman was ‘violated’ in this scene, her husband got his comeuppance—she wound up having to kill him. So, poor guy, she won, he lost.” However, this interview still suggests that Williams is working toward a certain justice in this game, a sense that misogyny is punishable even by death—a woman can be “violated” but the equivalent (or possibly trump) is to kill the man. See Stuart Clarke, “A Girl’s Own Adventure,” Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), March 27, 1999, Lexis Nexis (accessed February 11, 2011).
- 12.
The fact that players see Adrienne as weak is actually symptomatic of victim-blaming culture at large.
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Cox, A.R. (2018). Women by Women: A Gender Analysis of Sierra Titles by Women Designers. In: Gray, K., Voorhees, G., Vossen, E. (eds) Feminism in Play. Palgrave Games in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90539-6_2
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