Playing With Lara in Virtual Space more

14 Playing with Lara in virtual space KATE O'RIORDAN Introduction Computer games have become part of the cultural practice of a wide range of social groups and although the many environments in which they are played remain socially stratified, this chapter relates specifically to their use in domestic space. 1 will discuss the traditional evaluation of computer game space as a male- dominated realm, and suggest that this assumption requires some revision. I intend to explore how computer game playing is a transformative process which offers identifications for a plurality of subject positions, sometimes beyond gender binaries. The main aim of the chapter, then, is to articulate the relationship between the player and the game, concentrating on the categories of subjectivity and identity. The technologies of gaming are significant sites of socialization which offer material interpellation to the subject. I will use two metaphorical constructs to articulate the relationship between the player and the game: symbiosis and the cyborg, demonstrated through a case study of specific game material, Lara Croft1 . I deal specifically in this discussion with console games, played in a domestic environment and represented on a television screen, for example, PlayStation K and Nintendo 64 l!. Although these game consoles are often referred to as media for video games, this is a misleading association. The games consoles are computers and the appearance of graphics on the television screen does not relate game material significantly to video (although I will mention some of the formal connections below). These types of game remain in the realm of computing and to refer to them as video games decontextualizes them. In this construction, the element which differentiates them from other media is the physical involvement demanded by the game. This involvement is unlike cither television viewing or the consumption of Playing with Lara in virtual space other traditional off-line media, which demand a psychic and discursive involvement with the content, but limit physical involvement to the form of the media. For example, when I view television I can physically change channels but I cannot change the production of an image within the channel. Through the methods outlined, I will offer an interpretation of game space which reflects upon the ontology of playing. Games: historical and cultural contexts Spacewar was the first computer game, and was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962. This program required the use of large and expensive hardware and was never developed for popular use. The first games to enter into the public domain were Pong (1973) and Space Invaders (1976), which really mark the emergence of computer games as a form of popular culture. As well as these arcade games, in .1.975 the Atari Corporation (USA) developed a games console for the home. Home Pong sold very successfully but it is Pac Man (1982) which has become an enduring cultural icon. Although the 1960s and 1970s had seen developments in the games industry, particularly in the public realm of arcade games, domestic computer games did not begin to enter the mainstream until the 1980s when the industry developed and diversified. This coincided with such factors as acclimatization to computer use, an increase in economic viability, decreasing hardware size and an increasing leisure market. Games consoles which could be used to play many different games at home were developed; hand-held games like the Game Boy and the Came and Watch became relatively cheap and accessible to consumers all over the world. The 1980s and 1990s have seen the emergence of a global market in console games, which are played by a wide variety of social groups on an everyday basis. The computer game in the late 1990s offers a filmic, photo-realistic world which presents the opportunity for the player to take on the character of choice and make identifications in the negotiation of imaginary worlds. These opportunities are constrained, however, by the limitations of the cultural values they reflect. Computer games, like many other media texts, reproduce cultural narratives about colonialization, exploration, domination and aggres- sion. Computer game playing and production are historically gendered: the public nature of the video/leisure arcade, the cinema lobby, pubs, bars and clubs has encouraged a male domination of this activity. As in other public leisure spaces, a male presence has predominated. The inception period of the 1960s and 1970s is traditionally viewed as having been dominated by 226 Kate O'Riordan masculine user-based practices, although in the 1980s and 1990s the gender imbalance of use has become somewhat less polarized. The creation of computer games is also seen as male dominated. The traditional educational segregation in the West of 'feminized' arts and humanities and 'masculinized' sciences has created, through the conflation of sex and gender, a working public that predominantly employs men in the engineering and programming sectors which produce ICTs (information and communication technologies). However, cultural values do change; public space is not as male dominated as has been traditionally assumed and with the miniaturization of technologies, gaming has become a predominantly domestic occupation which is conversely, historically and discursively assumed to be the location of the feminine. This relocation of games to the domestic sphere destabilizes any assumptions drawn from studies of public/private, masculine/feminine space. Programming departments now employ women, and academic and industrial segregation has seen organizational shifts. High levels of photo-realism have introduced artistic and design-based elements into game production. It is still true of computer games that they largely reproduce the cultural context of male, white and heterosexual ideologies, which remain entrenched in narratives of violence, domination, quest and colonialism. The feminine is largely represented as an object of reward or rescue, or as a titillating vehicle employed as a hook for the plot of the game. However, these generalizations must be further qualified by both the shift in location from public to domestic and a consideration of the different games markets. Games aimed specifically at young children, for example, deploy colour and music as major features, although games directed at young men still feature heavy armoury, darkness and gore. However, design companies like Purple Moon, founded by Brenda Laurel (1991), have researched extensively into the ways that girls play.1 After two and a half years of research Purple Moon started developing games that would appeal to girl gamers and have so far enjoyed commercial success. Their web page provides a 'safe space' for girls (although anyone can access the pages), in marked contrast to the male-dominated web pages of Games Quest and Gamespot, which promised: 'Kick Some Bot Butt with Epic McgaGames' Latest 3D Killer' in its July 1999 headline.- The Purple Moon site and the products associated with it tend, though, to be based on a philosophy that not only defines play as gender differentiated but conflates sex with gender. It is not clear that game playing, as opposed to design, is dominated by any gender and I will suggest that games, like other media, offer a multiplicity of identities despite the fact that the culture around them remains relatively masculine. Playing with Lara in virtual space 227 The shared spaces of television and computer games The realization of computer games on the television screen is indicative of media convergence. The imaginary space of the screen had been utilized by computer games well before the emergence of digital television, in the literal sense of the technological convergence of traditional programming. The cultural practices of television viewing are also of significance now when we talk about computer games: who watches and when and where are all factors to be considered. Of further significance is the assimilation of computer games into the narrative and images of television, and vice versa. Who uses the television, when and in what modes of viewing are issues of ethnography which are well covered in separate work.3 In this section I discuss specifically the assimilation of computer games into television narrative and of television narrative into computer games. The visual space of off-line computer games on the television screen has a close operating relationship to the traditional reception of audio-visual media. The television is an imaginative space, pre-populated with narrative and images. Computer games allow active intervention into this space. I am not reasserting the following binary: television = passive/new media = active- television viewing is both active and interactive in a number of senses. However, computer games operate at different levels of participation, particularly at the physical and material one. This assertion must be qualified by both cultural considerations and the fact that computer games offer a very limited interactivity, in the sense that they are pre-programmed, providing a restricted paradigm of both imagery and narrative. I wish to emphasize some qualifications before continuing this discussion, because it is important not to accept uncritically a utopian vision of the freedom of computer interactivity. Computer games are partially interactive at present, they can only offer certain freedoms and a qualified experience of entertainment. They are primarily, however, spaces of constraint with clearly defined parameters. Generic market leaders are quest, popular sport and combat scenarios with simplistic plots and linear narratives. The whole games market is too prolific to analyse in depth here, but the following contemporary sample gives an indicator of what leads it. PlayStation Magazine (1999) provides reviews, game information and a demonstration disk of forthcoming games among its services. The demonstration disk features Soul Reaver, Rollcage, Viva Football, Warzone 2100, A Bug's Life, and All Star Tennis as its playable games. The names are self-descriptive, apart from Soul Reaver, which stars a male-configured ghoul, and Rollcage, which is a racing game. Of these, only All Star Tennis features any female avatars. The cultural context from which the market emerges is largely being reproduced: popular sport 228 Kate O'Riordan simulations, the theme of war and film merchandising all contribute t_ traditional, conformist scenarios. Product synthesis comes into play with A Bug's Life, aimed at children and rendered from the graphics of a computer- animated film of the same name. This kind of merger has led to the vernacular 'Silliwood' to indicate the convergence between products associated with Silicon Valley and that of Hollywood. Television is a medium in which games are both closely related and significantly different, in both material and psychological ways. One factor which they both share is the screen, but the spatial barrier between screen and viewer is transformed through game technologies. The screen of the television film or programme is a flat surface which bars the viewer from material interpellation: it only offers a psychic location. The television screen provides a material barrier of glass that informs the discursive symbolism of our notions of viewing: off screen and on screen are seen as entirely distinct. The material barrier of the screen seems proof of the division, and even technologies like the remote control and 3-D glasses have not challenged the distinction between on screen and off screen. Technologies of computer games, however, challenge the material and discursive barrier of the screen because although the material barrier is still there, its meaning is changed through locating the viewer, with a strong identificatory presence, on the screen. In several significant ways, the viewer/participant temporarily inhabits game space. Although there is no 'real' space, there is an imaginative sense of space 'behind' the screen. The significant difference between watching a programme and playing a game is that the viewer of the game interacts with the material on the screen by exerting some control over it. There is a direct effect caused on the screen by the participant. Games are therefore partially interactive spaces and developments in authoring skills have led to some of them being labelled 'interactive cinema' (Friedman, 1995: 77). Through a joystick and control panel, the player controls the actions of the avatar, thus the traditional unfolding of the programme narrative is transformed into a manipulation of the action on screen. The actions of the player determine the actions on screen via a direct physical motor link. The participant, then, 'inhabits' the screen space in terms of sight, sound, spatial organization and control. The spatial organization of the participant is transferred to that of the game space. The mental process of motion is applied to the game space so that the participants experience moving through a physical space as they are enacting the temporal narrative. The sensory perceptions and physical motion of the body become both divided and extended. The neural sensorium extends to the screen, visualizing an interiority; interaction is not only on the screen, it is visibly below or behind the screen. Screen space has an interiority developed by the use of graphical Playing with Lara in virtual space 229 perspective, and it is this interiority that the player is activating and exploring through a kinaesthetic relationship. By representing computer games on the television screen through consoles like the PlayStation H by Sony, game space is inserted into the architecture of television. The images are imposed on an imaginary space in which we are culturally acclimatized to viewing images that reflect certain aspects of reality. Spatial arrangement is one of these aspects: it is a feature of screens that a flat surface can reflect the Cartesian perspective of points about a three- dimensional axis, which is the phenomenological experience of real space. We are acclimatized to viewing a representation of space on the television that visually reflects our material belief in three-dimensional space. In computer games a slightly less realistic representation is often presented which occasionally deploys a two-dimensional representation; however, game space offers a reflection of the experience of actual space through the ability offered to the player to intervene in this representation. This contrast between the television's reflection of an understanding of space, and the game's reflection of an experience of space, is one of the most significant differences between these media. The gap between the convincing images of television and the less highly resolved ones of games is one which technological advances are rapidly closing: the instances of two-dimensionality which used to be prolific are deployed less and less as game producers compete with each other to simulate increasingly virtual representations.4 Despite the diversity of materials available on television, it is a technological space which is widely accepted as reproducing reality: documentary, news, camcorder footage and CCTV images prevail. Computer games join the assembly of television material but they are selected at the point of consumption (like videos, which also share the same commercial outlets), and are widely accepted as fictitious, imaginary play spaces. These texts, whether fictions or simulations of the actual, share the same credible spatial paradigm that is presented by the television screen. In the same way that the television screen approximates a representation of reality, computer games offer a representation of virtual reality. They are not 'true' virtual reality, which would be totally immersive, but neither are televisual images true off-line reality. Computer games are only partially immersive because of this feature of the screen, which although offering representations of three-dimensionality, is flat. Another significant difference between the experience of television programme images and the images of computer games as they stand is that the player has a physical as well as a psychical relationship to the narrative space. In the mode of television viewing there is no direct physical connection between the representations on screen and the viewer. 230 Kate O'Riordan In the mode of game playing, the player is connected to the narrative space through a handset. This can be a multi-game application with buttons, or can be a dedicated aspect of a particular game. The game Die Hard Trilogy, for example, supplies a gun-shaped handset which projects a light and appears to 'kill' figures on the screen. This brings the game experience closer to that of virtual reality, but there still remains the barrier of the screen to the full immersion promised by virtual reality. When viewing television the screen is the material, impermeable barrier which renders the images 'unreal'. When playing, the screen has a psychological semi-permeability which occurs because the player appears to affect the screen space, penetrating the boundaries of the technology with human input. This psychological and physical intervention into game space connects off- line game playing to other interactive media such as virtual reality, the Internet and on-line games. If television represents the simulacra argued by the post- modern paradigm (Baudrillard, 1981), computer game playing inserts the human agent into the circuit of simulation. The physical continuum between the player and the space of the game reinforces the psychical one to the extent that the experiences represented on the screen are not the same as the vicarious ones of television. The poles of active and passive, represented and received, player and viewer are collapsed into a new paradigm of experience and subjectivity: 'Everywhere ... in which the distinction between these two poles can no longer be maintained, one enters into simulation' (Baudrillard, 1981: 31). Baudrillard's assertion that this collapse in polarity means that everything in the experience of the postmodern is shifted into the realm of representation is destabilized if we consider the relationship between the avatar and player. As I will elaborate through an evaluation of Lara Croft' , the symbolic realm of representation has a material relationship with the consumer through computer games because the identity of the player is required to activate the meaning of the game. Avatars and symbiosis The avatar is the player's point of intersection with the narrative of the game and his/her virtual presence in that space as a cyberbody or virtual self. The avatar is the point of entry into the simulation. Avatars, also known as game sprites or iconic representations, come in a variety of forms, with a subsequent variation in behavioural paradigms, perspectives and appearances. The element which is common to most off-line avatars at the time of writing is that they are pre designed. The player has a choice of different avatars in some games, but is seldom active in the design process. This means that the avatar adds to the constraining factors of game play as well as providing a point of insertion. Playing with Lara in virtual space 231 This point of insertion can be articulated through the metaphors of symbiosis and the cyborg. Symbiosis infers an organic-to-organic relationship which grants too much agency to the computer. However, it is a useful model which has helped to describe the relationship between player and game: It is very hard to describe what it feels like when one is 'lost' inside a computer game precisely because at that moment one's sense of self has been fundamentally transformed. Flowing through a continuous series of decisions made almost automatically, hardly aware of the passage of time, the player forms a symbiotic circuit with the computer, a version of the cyborgian consciousness described by Donna Haraway (1985) in her influential 'Manifesto for Cyborgs'. The computer comes to feel like an organic extension of one's consciousness, and the player may feel like an extension of the computer itself. (Friedman, 1995: 83) This material and psychological symbiosis is composed of the continuum between the player holding the controls and the actions of the avatar on screen. It is also created by the immersion experienced by the player while his/ her identification is transferred to the game space. Processes of communication with the immediate and actual environment are transferred to the simulated environment. This relationship has been understood in different ways, as liberatory - Today at the end of the twentieth century, many of our children have access to the one to five rooms inside their apartments. Video game technologies expand the space of their imagination' (Cassell and Jenkins, 1999: 265-6) - and as destructive - 'Video games can thus be understood as a paranoiac environment that induces a sense of paranoia by dissolving any distinction between the doer and the viewer' (Robins and Levidow, 1995: 109). These responses point both to the social significance of this site and to its difference from other media. The assertion that these spaces can expand the imagination is an optimistic reaction, which we must qualify by reminding ourselves of the limitations of game space. The judgement of this relationship as 'paranoiac' suggests that this psychological continuum is understood as a disturbing infliction, a notion which I would dispute as simplistically deterministic and technophobic. This assertion is informed by social debates5 which range over two main areas: content and form. Content involves the already familiar debate about violence in the media, its effects, and censorship. Form refers to whether or not technologies have a propensity for damage in themselves, in fears ranging from eye strain to disorientation or neural damage, epilepsy and strokes. These are fears which are regardless of actual game content but arise 232 Kate O'Riordan from the physical processes of repetitive playing. These latter debates unfortunately arise from a deterministic view which ignores the social relations which structure technological development. However, Robins and Levidow's definition of games as paranoiac environments emphasizes the significance, impact and proliferation of the relationships between avatar and player in contemporary postmodern experience. The negation of this experience, through the connotations of the term 'paranoiac', denies the imaginative dimension of the subject positions offered to the player. The experience that the consumer has of most media texts is one of material interjection into the form only (turning the pages of books, choosing the video, using fast forward, rewind or changing channels); interjection into the material content of games is a different experience which offers an expansion of space, not a retraction. This symbiotic model ignores the social relations which structure this relationship, and for this reason I will employ a further model which provides us with a way of realigning this paradigm. The cyborg is a useful model to articulate the relationship between player and avatar: 'A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as science fiction' (Haraway, 1991: 149). The cyborg has the advantage of implying a relationship between an organism and technology which is much closer to the actual relationship between player and game. It recognizes the game as a static artefact which is only activated by organic agency, highlighting the power that the player has in this relationship, usefully bringing us away from dystopian visions of psychic damage and technological determinism. Although new technologies can provide new sources of agency, they are still structured through human relations. We should embrace this model cautiously in view of the more sinister implications of the word 'cyborg', whilst also seeing how it positively opens up a space to explore the potential freedoms involved in our increasingly enmeshed relationship with developing technologies. A case study: Lara Croft1 Paradoxically, the most famous current avatar of these game spaces is represented as female: this is Lara Croft , the avatar of the games Tomb Raider (1997), Tomb Raider 11 (1998), Tomb Raider III (1999) and Tomb Raider: The Final Revelation (forthcoming). Fanzines receive letters which are purportedly written to Lara by gamers. Lara Croft(' shares some representational similarities with James Bond and has also been proposed by British government ministers to serve as an iconic 'ambassador' for scientific excellence.0 Douglas Coupland, a popular writer, claims to be in love with her (Coupland and Ward, 1998), and Playing with Lara in virtual space 233 in a recent survey (Shurville, 1998), 70 per cent of male respondents claimed to be sexually attracted to Lara. Although female contributions to the same survey were few, both heterosexual and lesbian female respondents claimed to identify with Lara. As well as in the mainstream, Lara also appears as a popular figure in the lesbian press.7 A whole market of commodities has emerged around 'her', including a promised film and an appearance in a high-energy soft drinks advert for Lucozade. Lara's cultural popularity is an indicator of how far computer games and their imagery have interjected into non-computer-mediated communication, appearing as significant sites of commodification within the symbolic and material processes of representation in the circuit of culture (Hall, 1997). Games and their avatars provide a new point of identification in culture for the consumer. Potentially, different subjective positions can be developed and arguably new kinds of subjectivity may arise through this relationship between player and avatar, within larger domains of representation. Lara is a group of pixels arranged in a shape which indicates a young woman of twentysomething. The player does not see much of her face and although the angle of view can be changed, it defaults to a point slightly to the rear of Lara (Fig. 14.1). This means that it is her profile from behind that is most Figure 14.1 Lara Croft1 . Image supplied courtesy of Cor: Design Limited. Lara Croft' and TM Core Design limited. All rights reserved. 234 Kate O'Riordan Figure 14.2 Lara Croft' . Image supplied courtesy of Core Design Limited. Lara Croft* and TM Core Design Limited. All rights reserved. reinforced to the player as a position of identification. During some action in the game a more extended profile is displayed when she goes into a pre- programmed sequence, such as swimming or shooting (Fig. 14.2). The external profile of her entire body is viewed by the player eventually, through the completion of the game narrative. In the advancement through the narrative, the player is rewarded by a developed disclosure of the entire external appearance of Lara. Lara is represented as wearing minimal clothing: for most of Tomb Raider III she wears shorts and a vest, a gun belt and boots, her brown hair usually in a practical long plait. There is a degree of appropriateness and functionality in some scenes: she wears a coat, gloves and trousers in Antarctica, for example. The clothes are always figure-hugging and thus retain the shape of her body image. She is a classic phallic fantasy figure: long legs, large breasts and a small waist. Her physiology is improbable, representing a Barbified caricature, suggesting the possibility of ironic play to enter into any identification with Lara. At the point of reception there is ample opportunity to enjoy Lara as a representation of hegemonic desirability which can be identified either with or against. There is evidence to suggest that heterosexual men and women and lesbians can all read her as desirable/ It is not problematic to imagine that any Playing with Lara in virtual space 235 subject position could find her desirable, as she is represented symbolically as the desirable phallic woman: 'the Uzi-toting cybcrbabe'.9 As with any successful mainstream figure, then, Lara provides a wide range of subject identifications which can interpellate the game player. The features of Lara's visible appearance conform to certain stereotypes: the pin-up figure and the clothing arc informed by existing images of intensely heteronormative femininity. Some of her preconfigured movements also strongly connote sexuality, such as the crawl - for this move Lara gets down on her hands and knees and crawls away from the player who is positioned to view her from behind. What makes Lara so resonant of sexuality is that the plot of the game focuses on the player's manipulation of her virtual body. The aim of Tomb Raider is to learn how to 'propel' Lara as proficiently as possible. However, this is not the model of control it might first appear, because the player is also 'Lara' during game play. The rhetoric of gamers indicates the extent to which a partial identification occurs: 'Having fought your way past the thrills of speeding tube trains that bowl you along the track and the pneumatic drill that will certainly have killed you a few times' (PlayStation Magazine, 1999: 127). The writer of this review is addressing a you who is both Lara and the player. When playing Tomb Raider, players often refer to Lara as T. These rhetorical references indicate the partial transfer of subjectivity which can occur. Although the player is positioned as a voyeur by the default perspective which always returns to a point behind Lara, the active relationship between the Lara icon and the player repositions the voyeur as the voyeur/ actor. This incorporation of self into avatar while playing renders debates about objedification and stereotyping rather less tenable, because Lara is not entirely an object of control, but rather a process of interaction within the paradigms of the game. The subjectivity of the player experienced in tomb Raider is surprisingly complex. Several positions are held in tension at once in the process of playing: that of the player, that of Lara and that of the 'player in action'. The 'player in action' is simultaneously Lara Croft in the game world, the self in the game world and the self external to the game world. The self external to the game world cannot be analysed here, because this 'self is the individual player as well as a conceptual realm. Such analysis would require a more detailed interviewing of players. What we can analyse is the textual representation of Lara in which the player's self is imaginatively inserted, partially transferring self to avatar. Through the partial transference of subjectivity which occurs, neither the player nor Lara's paradigm of behaviour is completely determined. The active role of the player in the Tomb Raider games provides a forum for a range of subject positions to be experienced through playing with Lara. One could spend the whole time in the game space headbutting a wall if one so 236 Kate O'Riordan desired (but not much narrative would develop). Lara does not have a discrete identity but neither does the player-as-Lara, and this confusion of the paradigms of identity and narrative allows for some freedom of identification. The continuity between the subject position of the player and the iconic representation of Lara allows for a cyborgian model to be employed in analysing this relationship, as the pixels on the screen have a continuous relationship with the effects of the self of the player. While playing, the body is directly connected to the action on the screen, entering into an affective physical relationship with the programming code. Through the physical and psychological continuum with Lara, the player enters into a symbiotic hybridity which negotiates game space so that the self becomes the self-and- avatar, in a diffuse but distinct relationship between person and machine. Computer games - a different social space The model of the cyborg abounds in computer literature, popular culture, science fiction and critical theory. Along with symbiosis, it provides a useful metaphor to articulate the blurring of the boundaries of human identity and technology. As I have explored in the case study above, even in one of the least immersive and paradigmatically constrained models of computer games, the off-line, television console game, the self is projected into the circuit of simulation. Even through the medium of television, game technologies draw upon a more involved relationship with the player, eroding the complete distinction between the medium and the self. The possibilities for constructing a partial, and always contingent, sense of self in the realms of virtual reality, cyberspace and computer-mediated communication are extensive. By exploring the real-world model of the games console, which has already found its way largely unnoticed into the living room of domestic space, I hope to have illustrated aspects of the complex relationship between the players and images that appear on our screens. The screen-as-mirror can now be physically related to, and a new reflection of self can be played with. The image in the mirror has still been put there by professional designers, but the viewer can enter in a projected guise and temporarily embody it with his/her own self, however gendered. Through these means the closed circuit of simulacra comes to refer to the real - the player. Computer games are significantly different from either imagined narratives, television, or narratives of fiction, because the computer game has physical presence: it provides a prosthesis for embodying the imagination and is an extension of the body, offering a consolidation of embodiment, putting 'you' or 'I' into the game. Playing with Lara in virtual space 237 The game technologies discussed here are already being superseded (for example, digital video disk, DVD). Interactivity is becoming more entrenched in popular culture, cyborgian practices are being increasingly explored. What this reveals is that between the medium and the consumer is a dynamic which prohibits the analysis of either the medium, the material or the consumer in isolation. The complexity of the relationship between the player and the game destabilizes any easy object/subject formation and questions the polarity between the consumer and the media. Cyberspace is with us in many forms, and game space is the most enduringly popular. Although it is clear that the architecture of such space is not new, the relationship that the consumer has with the material and medium is increasingly different, changing the ways we conceptualize separate domains of self and other. It is clear, then, that different theoretical constructions are required to analyse, rather than observe, the collapses which are occurring. Acknowledgements Acknowledgements and thanks are due to Irmi Karl, Dr Sally Munt and Dr Simon Shurville for their generous advice and contributions. Images supplied courtesy of Core Design Limited. Lara Croft '- and TM Core Design Limited. All rights reserved. Notes 1. Laurel is a researcher, author and software designer of long standing in the industry. Her company web site is www.purple_moon.com (accessed May 1999). 2. www.bigbig.com/gqand www.gamespot.com (accessed May 1999). 3. See, for example, Gauntiett and Hill (1999), Silverstone (1992) and Ang (1991). 4. Exceptions are the popular Abe games: Oddysee and Exoddus, 5. These debates are ongoing but have been returned to specifically in the wake of several news events, most recently the Littleton shootings in Colorado in April 1999. See, for example, 'In the line of fire' by Paul Keegan (1999), pp. 2-3. 6. On the BBC web site, and reported in the mainstream press. 7. She was the cover girl' in the June 1999 issue of the magazine Lesbians on the Loose (Australia), for example. 8. These groups were the only ones who identified themselves by their sexuality in Simon Shurville's survey, and I don't wish to imply that people who identify with other sexualities are excluded from this. 9. ht tp://news2.thls.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/ ncwsid%5F225000/225615.stm (accessed July 1999). 238 Knte O'Rhmlan Bibliography Ang, len (1991) Desperately Seeking an Audience (London: Routledge). Baudrillard, lean (1981) Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. F. Claser, 1994 (Michigan: University of Michigan Press). Cassell. jusline and lenkins. Henry (1999! From Barbie to Mortal Combat: Gender and Computer Coma (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press). Coupland. Douglas and Ward. K. (1998) Lara's Book: Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider Phenomenon (Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing). Friedman, Ted (1995) 'Making sense of software: computer games and interactive lextuality', in Steven C. Jones (cd). Cybersociely Computer-Mediated Communication and Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage). 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