A Tomb Raider Clone

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However, a study of these other heroine-centered games reveals that their potential for empowering women is undermined by sexist patriarchal imagery. Eidos Interactive’s Urban Chaos is a prime example. A third-person action/adventure game much like Tomb Raider, Urban Chaos is noteworthy in that it is focused on an African-American rookie police officer named D’arci Stern. The creation of a minority woman lead character is encouraging, but like Croft, D’arci’s strength of character is undermined.
          This happens in two main ways. First, like with Croft in Tomb Raider, the third-person perspective prevents true merger with D’arci. The gamer doesn’t fully become D’arci, but instead controls and watches her, as this screen shot demonstrates.
          The second way that Urban Chaos undermines feminism can also be seen in this screenshot. Much like in Duke Nukem 3D, many of the women characters who appear are prostitutes. Even the environment D’arci navigates is covered with imagery that encourages the gamer to associate women with sex objects, as seen here.
          These examples from Tomb Raider and Urban Chaos demonstrate clearly a disturbing trend regarding E-games that contain heroines: the potential for feminist empowerment is deliberately sabotaged with recurrent imagery that forces a merger between women and sex objects, and gameplay interfaces that keep the gamer divided from the heroine in question.
          Of course, it could be argued that the aforementioned games don’t really target a female audience, and that the rhetoric as a result is a little more stereotypically patriarchal. I don’t believe this excuses the rhetorical choices made by games like Duke Nukem 3D and Urban Chaos, but it does raise an interesting question: are there any interactive narratives that target women, and if so, is the rhetoric of these E-games more compatible with Feminist ideals?
          The answer to the first question is yes: there are E-games that target women. But before I begin analyzing these E-games through a Feminist lens, a brief examination of the second-wave of American Feminism is in order.