Week 7 - Old Lara... meet new Lara!

Few video game characters have been subject to as much discussion and controversy as the Tomb Raider franchises Lara Croft.  Some have hailed her as a feminist icon.  Others critiqued her as a sexual object for males to fantasize over.  Hall (cited in Raessen, 2005, p. 375) argues that a products reception and consumption are “active, interpretive and social event(s)”.  Effectively Hall distinguishes between 3 ways in which a text can be read.  The dominant or preferred reading, the negotiated reading and the oppositional reading.  The two interpretations above are examples of negotiated and oppositional readings of this particular franchise. 

Source: Google Images

Lara croft originally appeared in 1996 and has starred in many games.  Amusingly enough in the early years of this franchise, the characters sexuality and appearance were leveraged to great effect in the games marketing including magazine covers and other images such as the ones embedded below.  Clearly in the early years of this franchise, the games creators had no qualms with playing up Lara’s sexiness and to be fair, not many strong female lead characters existed in video games at the time, contributing much to the success of the title.  Interestingly as the characters assets became more and more the focus, the games themselves started to suffer, with more attention given to Lara’s polygon count than the actual gameplay of the title itself.  It is intriguing to me how different readings of a title can actually influence future development.  This is particularly relevant to this title.

Source : Google Images

In 2013 we live in a time where the gritty reboot is a popular way of revitalizing an ailing franchise and Tomb Raider is no exception.  In April this year a rebooted title was released with considerably less sexualized Lara Croft, and was a surprising success.  Reviews were extremely positive across the board.  This of course brought with it new controversies with a scene within the game implying an attempted rape caused a great amount of furor.  The developers intended reading is that putting Lara through horrific situations will develop a bond between the player and character that encourages protecting Lara.  As for my thoughts? Well I was a teenage boy when the original Tomb Raider released so the sexualisation of her character didn’t seem like a problem to me at the time.  However it is great to be able to look back on this franchise as an adult and see that video games are evolving as an entertainment medium and can approach much more complex issues and not be so one dimensional.  The new Lara title may not have been perfect but it was a great step in the right direction that put the focus back on presenting a stellar game.

Source: Google Images

References

Raessens, J 2005, ‘Computer games as participatory media culture’, Handbook of Computer Game Studies. MIT Press Cambridge. Mass, pp.373-388.