Lara pushes through the lifeless corpses of village folk as she swims through a submerged bus, to escape through the back window. She manages to reach the dry walls of a collapsing church only to witness the last moments of a child falling to his death in a fire pit as he screams for help. She stumbles to the top of the building horrified. The beginning scenes set a shocking image. Moments earlier, she stole an ancient dagger, and is told that she recklessly initiated an apocalyptic series of events, the first of which just wiped out the whole village. Days later she is back to her best self, rampaging through jungles and taking out henchmen and locals as an unstoppable killing machine.
Conversations around the character and image of Lara Croft and her impact on the gaming culture never ceased since emerging in 1996 on the first PlayStation console. She was at the centre of debates and criticisms that ranged from gender and female objectification to colonialism and cultural appropriation. In 2013, game publisher Square Enix and developer Crystal Dynamics decided on a reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise, a retelling of Lara’s origin story that showcased a more mature and nuanced development of the character. She was presented as a strong female individual in the making, that was not defined by her sexualised mannerisms and over the top breast size, but rather her character development and fixation on seeking the truth behind her father’s death. However, with her most recent entry in the rebooted trilogy, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, one original question is put under the spotlight …again, what are the motives, drives and consequences of her actions? Yet, more importantly I think to myself, how does all this affect her and how exactly is her character developed and her adventures justified to both her and in proxy the player?
The rebooted third-person shooters are structured around a more cinematic gameplay that has minimal distractions from the story unfolding. A HUD is almost non-existent, except for the occasional action prompts and inventory selecting. The focus is primarily and solely on accompanying this heroine on telling her journey. She traverses unusual locations, stumbles, climbs, unearths, collects, meets, and most prominently kills. The complicated gameplay structure is designed to be intuitive and responsive to the challenges presented, but unfortunately almost mainly focuses on her reaction to waves of soldiers. New stealth mechanics exclusive to the third entry allow for the titular figure to conceal herself in shadows and between plant leaves, allowing for silent takedowns and gruesome manslaughter. Yet in considering the narrative the game wants to present, the gameplay feels restricted.
In his book “Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture”, Alexander Galloway distinguishes video games as visual-cultural mediums, from photographs and films, by being about actions rather than only static or moving images. Actions that both direct and are in return influenced by the game’s underlying structure and coded rulesets, producing an understanding for the player. The visual representation of this code represents the virtual world in which the game inhabits and through which the player experiences. This is the game feel. In Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect, Aubrey Anable distinguishes it from game affect, which is the comprehension of this world and its impact on the player’s senses, affective lives and responses, creating the complete narrative.
In Rise of the Tomb Raider, the second entry in the trilogy, in one of the collected documents, Lara listens to a tech’s reflections on the motives of the organisation he works for, the series’ antagonists. In the recordings the tech questions which side of history he is on, and whether it is the right one, seeing clearly that they are the invaders to this land, pillaging and killing its people. The series presents the player with conflicting messages. The intent of the developers to question important topics about history, culture and motives goes against the gameplay. Both Lara and the people inhabiting this virtual world present complex examples of people who are self-aware and question their actions, yet the gameplay presents a killing machine that relishes in what she does. She kills and “collects” artefacts without question, only justifiable by a shallow urge of character development. This puts the game feel and game affect at contradicting poles. Thus, the only way to understand her actions is to either see her as a psychopath or to align the players’ perspective to hers and create another generic white saviour filtered through a western gaze, missing an opportunity of really addressing the question at hand.
