PART III
CHAPTER 10
Hannah-Marie Chidwick
Introduction
It seems such a cliché to write about violence in video games. This increasingly pertinent and complex issue saturates scholarship in Cultural and Media Studies, Psychology, Sociology, Economics, Public Policy and beyond, but it is yet to be treated explicitly in the context of receptions of the ancient Mediterranean.1 Since the 1990s, most video games, especially those in historical settings, have coerced their players into violence, whether with a sword, a cartoon mallet or bad vocabulary, ascribing to their participants the agency to kill, mutilate, rape and torture their opponents at the push of a button.2 For the gamer, brutality colours normality, with strikes against opponents rewarded by numerical grading, game-specific capital or enhanced physical strength. Savagery is a selling hook: the blurb for the 2013 expansion pack to Creative Assembly’s bestseller, Total War: Rome II, exclaims: ‘Experience the violent horror of the ancient world battlefield with Total War: ROME II Blood & Gore DLC. Blood & Gore brings the savagery of front-line combat to viscera-splattering life with decapitations, dismemberment and devastating impalements,’ ending with the tagline, ‘How far will you go for Rome?’
The relationship between violence and women – as playable characters or non-player characters (NPCs) – furthermore constitutes a gap in the conversation concerning games set in the ancient Mediterranean. In general, unless the research is framed by a feminist methodology, discussion of violence in video games eschews the topics of battery, intimate partner violence (IPV), rape and female agency in virtual fighting scenarios. This chapter will analyse the way violence is perpetrated by and against women in action, strategy and role-playing video games set in a period where extreme brutality is a genre benchmark. The case studies selected allow for exploration of players’ expectations concerning the relationship between women and violence in ancient Mediterranean narratives, and how those expectations relate to broader trends concerning gender ideals. The discussion will be informed by paratextual materials which provide an insight into gamers’ and game-developers’ attitudes to violence against women as entertainment, in a market dominated by male protagonist storylines, for a target audience of heterosexual, generally cisgender, males.3
Studies suggest no clear line of causation between violent video games and real-life aggression.4 Nevertheless, there is widespread concern that the normalized representation of violence against women in immersive media is not only unnerving, but intersects with broader sociocultural attitudes and discourses which facilitate the battery, rape or murder of real women.5 Discourses run deep and these days they run digital. When it comes to the ‘sword and sandal’ arena (receptions of the ancient Mediterranean which prioritize physical brutality), the contentious relationship between women and violence warrants further investigation. Sian Beavers recently treated the characterization of women in Crytek’s counterfactual Ryse: Son of Rome (2013), noting every female character’s representation as ‘exceedingly problematic’.6 This chapter will work towards a new understanding of the logics of violence in ancient Mediterranean video games, by considering how the women–violence relationship in some games is informed by, and may function to uphold, harmful ideas about masculinity and femininity. Furthermore, certain trends construct a scaffold of expectations which bolster a conception of ancient warfare specific to certain spheres of twenty-first-century popular culture.
Women and violence in video games
Most Triple-A blockbusters considered by consensus to be ‘real games’ are worlds that foreground violence.7 Violence perpetrated by women features across a range of popular franchises, like Core Design’s Tomb Raider, Platinum Games’ hack-and-slash fantasy Bayonetta, and Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn. However, as Malika Saada Saar reported for HuffPost, video games set in modern or speculative worlds routinely present violence against women, including battery and rape, as first-person entertainment.8 The proliferation of ‘Violent-Sexist’ games has prompted critique and concern,9 with studies connecting them to the endurance of ‘rape culture’ myths,10 and ‘decreased empathy’ amongst male players for female victims.11
Other chapters in this volume treat sexualized portrayals of women in ancient Mediterranean games; this chapter joins the conversation by broaching the women–violence relationship in digital gaming, intimately connected to the portrayal of female bodies and behaviours. If ‘game aesthetics are designed primarily to cater for male interests’, as Jo Bryce, Jason Rutter and Cath Sullivan argue,12 then it follows that the logics of violence in play similarly ‘cater for male interests’.13 Where do these logics stem from and how do they work in ancient Mediterranean games?
Even in virtual, far-removed historical settings, these spaces – like geographical, architectural and social contexts – reflect and perpetuate real sociocultural norms, including gender ideals. Gender ideals underpin attitudes, individual or institutional, to violence against women.14 This chapter showcases a methodological approach to digital media which begins by focusing on representations of violence and women. This methodology will be used to read case studies from (amongst others) two long-running, mainstream franchises influenced by Roman and Greek culture: Total War, especially Total War: Rome II, and Sony Interactive Entertainment’s God of War action universe (2005–18), particularly the Furies as female antagonists in the fourth instalment, Ascension (GOW:A). Both games were released in 2013, the year the US military lifted the ban on women combatants.
‘Characteristics of online gaming environments,’ assert Jesse Fox and Wai Yen Tang, ‘including anonymity, diminished nonverbal cues, lack of observable authority, and a hypermasculine atmosphere’ facilitate sexual harassment and negative interaction.15 By prohibiting female participation, gaming spaces can permit the reinforcement of certain masculine/feminine behavioural trends and expectations.16 Exploring these trends, and their relationship to the ancient past, can enable us to challenge them. This chapter adopts a ‘multimethod’ interdisciplinary approach, advocated by many working under the umbrella of violence studies, informed by feminist critical theory.17 Alongside scholarship and gameplay itself, it is productive to consider player responses to the games via the paratextual multiverse of online discussion boards, fora, reviews and guides, in order to show how these game-worlds function in real hands and hearts, and how developers respond to their audience’s needs with their creative choices. This author does not claim to universalize the gamer experience, nor to argue that all gamers consciously enjoy participating in violence against or oppression of women in digital storyworlds.18
In dialogue with scholarship concerning interpersonal violence in video games of all genres, this chapter explores whether historical games reproduce broader trends by providing spaces where players can participate in unconstrained, uncritical brutality against women, without real-life accountability.19 While this author could find no rape in mainstream ancient Mediterranean digital games, studies have shown that popular media does not need to explicitly feature scenes of sexual assault to contribute to ‘rape myths’ and the objectification of women’s bodies.20 Media images which pair sex and brutality tend to impact negatively on attitudes to women,21 and can generate more acceptance of IPV.
The case studies discussed in this chapter feature, varyingly, the ‘violent-sexist’ content consistent with Triple-A game trends, but as these games draw from historical and/or mythic narratives, we might ask whether the violent content is an attempt to ‘authentically’ reflect stories inherited from an ostensibly systemically violent ancient Mediterranean. The slippery concepts of ‘authenticity’ and ‘accuracy’ in video games are inextricably part of the problem when it comes to the connection between brutality and women. The questions concern what ‘scripts’ or ‘knowledge structures’ – traits, sex, beliefs, values – sustain the portrayal of women as victims or perpetrators of violence in ancient Mediterranean games, and how players interact with this violence.22
Brand ancient Mediterranean
Violence is not just an expectation of many historical games, but a fundamental component. Part of the pleasure of gameplay is swinging a sword or wielding an axe, and watching opponents splinter into a savage blast of red polygons. Both Total War and God of War, although differing in many ways, take their titles from the most common manifestation of violence in historical video-gaming: war. Marcus Power writes that ‘war has been a mainstay of commercial video-game culture from the very beginning’, with ancient Mediterranean warfare especially popular.23 It is perhaps to be expected that war features prominently in games inspired by conflict-driven Roman and Greek historiographies: series like Ancient Warfare (2016–17) and Civilization (1991–2016) prioritize military conflict, often in real-time strategy format, like Rome: Total War. The central unit of war is largely considered to be combat, but in the context of ancient Mediterranean digital games, combat of what ilk?24 What are gamers doing, and why, when they engage in collective or individual virtual violence that involves female bodies?
In digital gaming, combat and conflict become neatly packaged, empirical concepts:25 click to engage in combat mode or ‘Concede defeat’ through the Rome II Game Menu. The virtual world allows for killing and mutilation which is decontextualized from civilian space: there are no perceived ‘actual’ repercussions in the gamer’s life. Many games, like Activision’s Call of Duty series, are popular because of their military subject matter.26 Furthermore, digital gaming has become commonplace in UK and US defence strategies and preparation, with video game simulations used to train recruits and normalize battlefield brutality, by replicating warzone scenarios in virtual reality.27 Forces-wide tournaments make cyber warfare into a competitive sport, blurring the distinction between war as real and as entertainment.28
In military communities, aggressive sexuality and violence are naturalized as ‘letting go’, tension-relieving ‘blowouts’, and we perceive similar attitudes underlying ‘trash talking’ repartee and misogynistic behaviour in gaming communities.29 All these phenomena provide an empirical starting point for examining the attitudes to gender and violence which stem from the complex intersection of gamers’ knowledge of professionalized brutality with virtual story-worlds. By entering into play, like going to war, gamers can adopt a new identity, and it is possible that their attitudes to brutality and sex transform or amplify as a result. The remote historical period, as this chapter discusses, precipitates its own set of genre expectations which can serve to legitimize hostile behaviours: as general, emperor, legionary, players can indulge in praxes accordant with societies painted as patriarchal, military – like political manoeuvres resulting in mass slaughter.
In modern UK and US cultures, war is commonly accepted and purported as a site of ‘hypermasculinity’,30 wherein the archetypal, male warrior is constructed in opposition to others. ‘Consequently,’ write Katharine Millar and Joanna Tidy, ‘the male/masculine (as interchangeable) nature of combat is apoliticized and naturalized into the empirical description of an objective social phenomenon.’31 When a woman enters a warzone – particularly as an agent of violence – this is deemed a political, non-comformist act, open to adverse critique.32 Despite being at base an artificial construction, the artificiality of the idea that military combat is ‘the sole preserve of men’ does not diminish its cogency, especially when it comes to the ancient Mediterranean.33
The rejection of effeminacy and the emasculation of enemy combatants are not unique to twenty-first century war narratives: Latin historiography and poetry provide clear examples of Roman attitudes to the ‘female’ in the warspace.34 In ancient Rome, legitimated violence made men masculine.35 Women barely feature in ancient war reporting, acting merely as reference points for othering or, as Sara Elise Phang describes, a foil to the ‘highly volatile, aggressive, and competitive’ virtus (manliness, heroism) closely associated with battle.36
As discussed in the Introduction to this volume, the backlash against the inclusion of playable female fighters in Rome II is perhaps unsurprising. Not only do these games feature fabrications of male-dominated empires, in male-dominated digital gaming culture, they are military-themed. Also in 2013, Triple-A war franchise Call of Duty released ‘Ghosts’ which included female fighters in its multiplayer function; other games like EA’s Battlefield V (2018) followed suit. The inclusion of women combatants in modern warfare games was met with fuming accusations of ‘revisionist history’ and ‘political correctness’,37 which impaired the player’s immersion in the game, resulting in the outraged hashtag #NotMyBattlefield.
In this context, ‘immersion’ refers both to the way that advances in video game technology and the believability of historical story-worlds in their replication render them ‘increasingly realistic’.38 Using the context of Second World War games, Andrew Salvati and Matthew Bullinger explain that ‘immersion’ and ‘realism’ are essential components of the historical virtual:
Immersion privileges the kinesthetic experience of shooting, running, jumping, and navigating through richly rendered landscapes populated by allies, enemy troops, and challenging objectives. […] the capacity to explore well-designed game environments is often cited by players as offering rewarding, authentic engagements with the past.39
Salvati and Bullinger argue that the sense of play and engagement with the games are ‘scaffolded by a set of familiar narratives and generic conventions’, drawn from players’ knowledge and beliefs about the world they are entering.40 The turn-based gameplay of Rome: Total War, the first outing, makes violence clinical (click and drag to move your units, and select from a range of pre-set formations at the bottom of the screen), but the real-time battle re-enactments, spectacular graphics and 3D maps, with ‘unit cameras’ which allow players to focus on individual units, altogether provide the prized ‘immersion’.41 The game therefore aligns with the way that historical video games can allow ‘players to experience violence cleanly’ with allies and enemies clearly demarcated.42
Therefore, using violence and women as an analytical point of departure lead us into tricky territory concerning what kind of ‘scaffolding’ in digital games constitutes a ‘rewarding authentic engagement’ with the ancient Mediterranean, when so many experiential and ideological factors are interlinked. The ‘battlefield’ must seem familiar to the player, even if it is far-removed in space and time. A crucial element of the ‘scaffold’ is when the game replicates events believed to have happened, even when those events become manipulable fantasies through the speculative nature of the game. In Rome: Total War, Augustan Rome can cede to Cleopatra VII’s Egypt. Rome: Total War, where all controllable characters were male, was considered so factually accurate that the Gold Edition (2006) became an ‘illustrator’ for the History channel.43 The chance to ‘rework’ historical battles, either for the sake of curiosity or to create an outcome that better suits the gamer’s politics, gives players a flexibility within the framework that is a major part of the games’ appeal.44
If, as argued in the Introduction, many young people first encounter the ancient Mediterranean through virtual games, this is often an ancient Mediterranean where few women have agency, and conquerable territory is ascribed female gender. A bloodless, women-less, representation of combat reflects ancient war reporting: while Greek and Latin historians acknowledged the human cost of conflict (see Caes. African War, 71–2; Joseph. JW. 3.246–7), most war narratives and military manuals are starved of the corporeal. Roman historiographers relegate their opponents’ losses to statistics (Livy 22.41), while didactic texts like Vegetius’ On Military Matters recommend which weapons will kill most effectively without loss of blood (fustibalus, 1.16). Furthermore, female rulers and generals are scarce. The discourse in these ancient texts palpably underlies the Total War franchise, particularly in their exclusory attitude to female playable characters. Of course, the ‘Roman warfare’ in which players immerse themselves is not a faithful, ‘accurate’ representation but a complex fabrication of twenty-first-century expectations concerning ancient Mediterranean history, war and the military in general, all enfolded in specific value regimes.45 A truly ‘rewarding, authentic’ experience of virtual warfare should feature both brutality and violent women, on the battlefield and in the inevitable routing, plunder and rape rarely reported.
This misrepresentation was perhaps addressed by the developers at Creative Assembly (CA) when they added downloadable content (DLC) featuring ‘viscera-splattering’ violence (Blood & Gore) and, most controversially, playable female generals (Desert Kingdoms, Daughters of Mars) to Rome II. While sensationalized brutality proved desirable (consistent with the post-Gladiator sword-and-sandal genre), assigning authority to women in battle did not, demonstrating that certain logics still apply even in alternate-universe and counterfactual histories. Like Teuta of Illyria, Queen Zenobia and multiple Cleopatras, CA were faced with ‘a horde more vicious and bloodthirsty than the Visigoths or the Spartans: angry manbabies’, wrote Chelsea Steiner for The Mary Sue.46 Reviewers like Richard Lewis theorized that the ‘insertion’ of capable, weapon-bearing women of variant factions into Rome II enraged some gamers because it gave women ‘a disproportionate role in a setting that certainly wasn’t as enlightened as our wonderfully woke present day’, despite the prevalence of the female warrior, like Boudica, in the popular imagination.47 Game developers work with historians and archaeologists to construct what CA call ‘historically authentic’ rather than ‘historically accurate’ story-worlds, but that slim semantic difference did not assuage fans of Total War who vehemently denounced the attribution of agency to ancient female warriors.
The ancient Mediterranean exists today as a mesh of ideas which provides a rich and popular resource for digital games. However, this mesh is highly selective, resembling what Salvati and Bullinger refer to as ‘the historically real (our perception of what actually happened in the past)’.48 They explain, ‘game designers draw upon a chain of signifiers assembled from historical texts, artefacts, and popular representations of World War II – an ensemble that we have defined as BrandWW2’.49 The brand unites specific receptions, ideas, attitudes and fragments of history, including historical newsreels, maps, accurate representation of weapons and technology, to create a ‘synthetic’ history much more durable than the real thing. In twenty-first-century popular culture, historical films, television and novels all draw from and perpetuate the identifiable brand. For instance, C. W. Marshall writes on the Furies across literature, in particular the DC Comics Universe (and GOW:A): ‘any mythological developments made in our hyperliterate age must meet the exacting expectations of cross-referencing and consistency demanded by a readership that ascribes value to recherché allusions not only within a series but also within [a] larger megatext’.50 Games like Rome II work within an ancient Mediterranean history and myth ‘megatext’, in essence a feedback loop which informs virtual story-worlds, and which in turn informs gamers’ perceptions of ancient warfare, to construct a brand.51 Selective interpretations and ubiquitous imagery work to create ‘the historically real’ and the logics which ‘scaffold’ immersion in a recognizable arena. Like any form of marketing, this brand must intersect with contemporary ideas about masculinity, femininity and violence which transcend but are tortuously linked to historical and mythological texts. Those wedded to the brand of the ancient warrior as white, cisgender male, heterosexual – and who pursue that prototype as a desirable icon of the ancient Mediterranean – perceive the inclusion of women and multiple ethnicities in positions of authority as:
[sic] the constant ‘streamling/dumbing’ down of Total War iteration after iteration in a desperate attempt to make the franchise appeal to wider casual audience at the cost of the needs and desires of the franchise’s core fans, that want a more complex, historical, and deeper game (like older Total Wars).52
This review is useful solely for its (typical) language, redolent of the ‘alt-right’: it is clear what the reviewer deems to be a ‘rewarding, authentic engagement with the past’. The ‘wider casual audience’ are othered as not true veterans. Within this scaffold of expectations, accusations of ‘historical inaccuracy’ make sense, spawning forum threads under the age-old sentiment, ‘We need to respect history, not change it.’53 This rhetoric reverberates throughout a portion of the online gaming community who rigidly associate ‘a more complex, historical and deeper game’ with the absence of female agency, a discourse which serves to legitimize through repetition rather than proof the vilification of women in the gaming space, and a confrontational response to their inclusion.
Examples suggest that the brand permits women to be agents of violence only when women conform to wider gender expectations, which can be located in ancient Mediterranean texts. Although Plato discusses the proficiency of women as guardians and warriors (Republic 451c–457b),54 the Roman historian Livy states unequivocally: ‘No magistracies, no priesthoods, no triumphs, no marks of power, no gifts, no spoils of war can come to [women]: elegance, adornment, clothing – these are women’s marks of power’ (34.7.5–9, trans. Keith).55 The association of ‘elegance, adornment, clothing’ with women is palpable in the promotional material for Rome II. A live-action trailer splices footage of a soldier’s execution with a couple having sex; the woman pulls a knife from her hair and plunges it into her male lover’s chest.56 The tokenistic inclusion of this seductive and murderous woman, otherwise absent from the gameplay, complies with criteria uncritically connected with the feminine in Roman writings and elsewhere: deception, sexuality, ornamentation; unchecked evil.57
Any woman who defied these stereotypes was considered unnatural. This characterization persists in media today, where the depiction of female murderers ‘as monsters or almost mythical figures of evil is not only a denial of gender but also a denial of agency’, writes Karen Boyle.58 To be rendered monstrous, making her un-womanly, unrelatable, is to a degree to absolve her of human agency in the perpetration of a violent act. Together with this logic, violent women are commonly denied agency through the association of femininity with ‘victimhood’ in the popular imagination, whereby a woman only utilizes ‘masculine’ aggression if coerced.59
The ‘simultaneously sexualised and violent’ Boudica in Crytek’s Ryse: Son of Rome (2013), expertly analysed by Beavers, exemplifies the connection between monstrosity, victimhood and the non-playable woman.60 The connection between identification and agency can be arguably realized in the gaming universe with the NPC: either an anonymous background character or opponent, or a named individual featured prominently in cut-scenes but whose actions the player does not control, therefore with whom they do not have to identify. In this alternate-universe, hack-and-slash adventure game, Boudica the ‘barbarian leader’ is the only female fighter encountered by the legionary protagonist Marius.61 The Roman record of her traumatic backstory (Tacitus, Annals 14.30–6) is transformed, but not to her advantage: Ryse makes her motive for rebellion the murder of her father, not the rape of her daughters, so her life is imperilled for the sake of masculine honour. Her ‘feminine’ demise in Latin literature (poison, suicide) is here made masculine: Boudica kneels before Marius’ sword and cries, ‘Do it, Roman,’ baring her collared throat to her conqueror’s brutality.62 The ‘masculinizing’ makeover of Ryse’s Boudica actually exacerbates her subjection to the violence of this storyworld. In both ancient and modern narratives, she is a victim. The catch-all description ‘barbarian’ signals her monstrosity and otherness, while her sexualized apparel and NPC status ‘undermine her empowerment’ as a combatant.63 Ryse players bemoan the inaccuracy of weaponry and the believability of narrative choices, like Boudica riding an elephant – a further, problematic accentuation of her ‘barbarianism’. However, they do not seem to perceive the presentation of Boudica as a colonized ‘conflation of sex, violence and victimhood’ as disrupting the game’s ‘immersive’ or ‘real’ qualities.64 This does not contradict the brand.
Ancient Mediterranean games containing violence can, in some cases, enable a highly toxic alliance of two factions: both the video-gaming community and the Graeco-Roman brand, as it persists today, are in broad strokes notorious for the exclusion, alienation and victimization of women. The reaction to Rome II’s playable female generals and the depiction of Boudica (amongst other female fighters) exhibit gender expectations consistent with the ‘wider societal conceptualizations and representations of masculinity and femininity’65 that both infuse the ancient Mediterranean brand and can, if unknowingly, inform game-makers’ creative choices.
Gendered violence
While ancient war narratives routinely exclude or denigrate violent women, the same cannot always be said for Graeco-Roman mythology. Figures like the Erinyes (Furies), for instance, appear across texts as unstoppable, asexual justice-bringers, dominating males. Yet, video games which depart from history in favour of mythology still sustain analogous tropes in their representation of women and violence. In fact, the fantastical machinery of universes like the long-running series, God of War, mean that this representation can be disturbingly intensified, especially in terms of the connection between female sexuality and brutality. This connection runs from the ancient past (see the rape and suicide of Lucretia in Livy 1.57–9),66 through to modern storytelling.
In GOW, all bodies are heavily stylized, the women highly sexualized, fulfilling the voyeuristic expectations of many popular game-worlds. GOW has amassed an enormous fan community and a paratextual multiverse that interacts extensively with the games’ receptions of Greek and Norse mythology.67 Much of the action in GOW (rated ‘M’ for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language) is immediately fantastical, happening amongst towering buildings, giant statues and pillar-lined halls, with combat featuring flashes of magic and hyperbolic moves.
GOW includes hundreds of female NPCs, almost all victims or seductive antagonists, but no game has a female ‘god of war’.68 While the 2018 reboot trumpets a more ‘thoughtful and mature narrative’, this release prompts reflection on previous GOW outings, especially ‘the series’ creative lowpoint’, Ascension.69 While Ascension polarizes fans, it remains a popular entry in the GOW canon for meeting gamer expectations of the series’ ‘hallmark violence’.70 One reviewer remarked that Ascension’s story ‘took a backseat to the brutality,’ stating, ‘it really is a game that makes you wince, but in a good way’.71 GOW combat is usually waged against gigantic monsters or disfigured humanoid characters; a growing ‘rage meter’ provides quantitative reward for aggression. It is a ‘quest chock full of mythical beasts, breasts, brutality’,72 situated snugly in what we might term the ‘Greek mythological real’, as Sony game design manager David Hewitt explained: ‘Greek mythology’ means ‘blood and guts, vengeful gods, horrific things being enacted on mortals’.73
Ascension makes an especially worthy case study in this chapter for the way its own recreation of ‘Greek mythology’ revolves around mutilated female bodies – mutilated by men. The protagonist, Kratos, has murdered his wife and daughter in a fit of madness; he is haunted throughout the game by the Furies’ illusions of his family’s bloodied corpses. To cease his torture, he seeks the eyes of the Oracle, ripped from her by Zeus. An additional treasure recovered is a Gorgon’s eye.
The mutilation and deformation of female bodies in the game is most pronounced in the Furies themselves, whose feminine features are both highly accentuated and distorted. To an extent, Ascension’s Furies coincide with their appearances in ancient sources, especially Aeschylus’ fifth-century BCE depiction in The Libation Bearers: ‘like Gorgones, wrapped in sable garments, entwined with swarming snakes!’ (1048ff., trans. Weir Smyth). Ascensions’ Furies, too, wear black; Alecto sports a snake headdress, and all three can transform into monsters. Fragment 52 of the Greek lyric poet Bacchylides (fifth century BCE) marks a point for the sisters to number three: Alecto, Megaera, Tisiphone.74 Vase paintings depict them as hunters wielding whips, sometimes with wings (Euripides, Oresteia 317), born of blood and dripping with it (Hesiod, Theogony 185).75 Orphic Hymn 68 is dedicated to these ‘terrific virgins’. Always prominent in ancient incarnations is their authority to dominate and emasculate men: for Marshall, receptions of the Furies ‘in whatever form continue to embody a relentless, indefatigable sense of purpose’.76
The vision of the black-robed, snake-haired ‘cthnonic’ monsters, full of rage, bringers of sorrow, became highly influential for Latin writers.77 It is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, however, that the potential for sexualization in the Furies’ image comes to the fore, including a description of Tisiphone’s snakes ‘gliding over her bosom’ (4.492f.). In Ascension, too, the Furies’ sexuality is intimately connected with violence and monstrosity, tapping into a well-worn media trope which marries centuries of misogyny with brand ancient Mediterranean.
When Kratos first encounters Megaera, she leaps into view as legs and breasts; the camera pans upwards to a helmet, her face concealed. She is missing her right arm but has four extra limbs. Giant insects spill from holes in her breasts. Megeara is a powerful agent, but in this cut-scene, her femininity is accentuated to make her monstrous; her sexuality is what is threatening. There are constant indicators of the Furies’ femininity throughout: Kratos defeats Alecto by plunging two swords into her breasts. Game reviewer Stephen Totilo listed as one of his dislikes about Ascension: ‘The sexing-up of enemies that I am then required to cleave into bloody bits. Gross.’ Within the heteronormative arena of the game, a body that is immediately, hyperbolically, recognizable as ‘woman’ should be a sexual object or ‘damsel in distress’, not a combat target, not an agent of destruction. Totilo is revolted by the combination of feminine sexuality with violence:
But when a close-up kill include [sic] the slicing of a half-woman/half-snake from her neck to her breast, my takeaway is that I’d rather the sexualization of video game characters and the gory rendering of the death of game characters not be mixed. Please. Unless you’re trying to elicit a reaction that’s more ‘ugh’ than ‘awesome!’78
This reaction indicates the developers’ successful use of a well-worn game-making and horror genre mandate, labelled by the makers of id Software’s Doom 3 (2004) as the ‘sexy + gross = creepy’ formula.79 Female sexuality being rendered grotesque, transgressive and threatening for entertainment is nothing new, and thrives in GOW.80
Further into Totilo’s review, the logic behind his complaint becomes clear when he excuses the explicit nudity in the game (an earlier scene in a harem) with the quip, ‘but, hey, it’s Greek mythology’. In this way, ancient Mediterranean video games match patterns across many digital games but, like the ‘historical real’ of Rome II, they stem from a template of intersecting expectations concerning history, mythology and gender ideals. With the Furies, the game-makers take sexualized body parts and render them monstrous, heightening the horror of the female as emasculating agent. Reviewer Erik Kain, for Forbes, lists amongst the game’s features, ‘Lots of topless women and topless women monsters, that sort of thing. Which has its place I suppose …’81 As monsters or victims, women’s injured bodies ‘have their place’ as sideshows and/or spoils: in Ascension’s precursor, GOW III (2012) one in-play mission sees Kratos manhandle a topless female prisoner through Poseidon’s stronghold, then bind her to a door crank which crushes her, screaming, offscreen.
Ascension’s Furies have superhuman agility, strength, stamina; in-play combat predominantly involves magic. But they do not always look monstrous: some cut-scenes bookending boss fights feature a brutality more recognizable as IPV than supernatural sparring. In ‘The Gauntlet of Apollo’, Kratos captures Tisiphone – now a beautiful woman – with a chain, smothers her face and repeatedly smashes her head against the floor, then pushes her body onto a spike. Blood spurts over Kratos and the close-up camera. In another scene, when Tisiphone transforms into an illusion of his wife, Kratos throttles her and breaks her neck.
In these scenes, the mode of dispatch is not with magical weaponry but simple battery, a mode not unfamiliar in ancient Mediterranean mythology. Kratos murdered his family in a Hercules Furens-inspired ‘blood frenzy’ that marries Graeco-Roman myth with modern video game violence.82 In this way, the player of GOW is immersed in a universe resembling other ‘violent-sexist’ games which, as Saar describes, can ‘comfortably exist in our rape culture’.83 Hewitt admitted to an issue ‘with violence against women’, stating in advance of Ascension, ‘the team’s pulled back from some of that and assessed that a little more carefully’.84 For a senior game designer to make this claim indicates, above all, a misstep in the understanding of what ‘violence against women’ implies and instigates.85
Reviews of Ascension concentrate predominantly on fighting styles, unlockable content and the defective multiplayer function. Gamers accept and excuse the sexual denigration and brutalization of women in games like GOW because, firstly, it does not depart from virtual gaming norms; secondly, it replicates a specific conception of ‘Greek mythology’. Like the exclusion of women from Total War, this is indicative of the way ‘Classical’ culture can be mobilized to facilitate prejudice and marginalization. On the misogyny of the GTA franchise, which similarly excuses its representation of women as ‘satire’, Saar writes:
If Cambodia, India, or Nigeria produced such a video game, there would be global outrage. It would serve as unequivocal evidence of their misogynistic cultures in which women and girls are systemically raped and murdered with impunity. We would critique the ways in which their cultures and values are organized around the normalization of gendered violence.86
Conclusion: Women against violence
By examining macro trends and granular details concerning the women-violence relationship in some ancient Mediterranean games, we can detect a toxic, synthetic, ‘historical real’ whose basis in history is highly selective, but which facilitates the continued exclusion and/or victimization of characters and gamers who do not conform to the white, male, heterosexual hegemony. Gaming community responses indicate that gendered violence is internalized by some gamers and developers as entertainment, with players explicitly taking issue only when women, whether verifiable historical figures or punishing goddesses, are not on-brand. This latter point warrants further investigation, as it signals the complex, intersecting factors constituting gamers’ expectations, including the agency of a female character (playable or NPC), the player-character identification, her authority – altogether braced by a historical scaffold. More work needs to be done, beyond the limitations of this paper, to better understand the impact of the widespread normalization of violent-sexist tropes in ancient Mediterranean games, informed by sociological and psychological studies of virtual violence.
Game developers’ attempts to redress misogyny are mostly admirable: the soldiers in Rome II, like Kassandra in Assassins Creed: Odyssey, are not as overtly sexualized as Ryse’s Boudica or the Furies. However, these virtual women warriors/victims prompt us to consider a more insidious issue: is it really empowering to put women on the digital battlefield, to make space for female characters and gamers in militaristic storylines valorizing bodily strength, aggression and a hypermasculine physique? ‘Explanations of men’s violence against women,’ write Michael Flood and Bob Pease, ‘and efforts to prevent it, must also address the material conditions and institutionalized power relations that underpin violence against women’.87 Bryce, Rutter and Sullivan argue that despite ‘grrl gamers’ and female-led clans dedicated to proving women are just as capable in ‘masculine game themes of war and aggression’, these subgroups represent neither the experience of most female gamers, nor the kinds of representation sought.88 Instead, critics call for more positive promotion of narrative-driven, over action, games for high-end consoles, expanding what is considered Triple-A ‘real’ gaming.89
In many ancient Mediterranean games, players engage in receptions of history dominated by extreme, often gendered violence. In one sense, these games reinforce assumptions and attitudes about gender hierarchies, but there is potential for them to aid in recognizing and destabilizing the artificiality of these hierarchies.90 This author would like to see more virulent deconstructions of the on-brand ancient Mediterranean ‘historical real’ which has become as empirical a concept as ‘combat’, transforming it into a multiverse which celebrates women rather than concealing them behind swords or sorcery.
Notes
1.For a detailed survey of this issue, see Anderson, Buckley and Gentile (2007); Anderson and Bushman (2018). This author writes without consciously asserting a political agenda, nor claiming that virtual violence always begets real-world violence – instead, a concern to expose creative trends.
2.‘Starting in the late 1980s video game producers experimented with what the public would accept in video games. Gradually it became clear that games sold better if they contained more violence’ (Anderson et al. 2007: 5). The majority of game-world perpetrators go unpunished, which some have argued normalizes aggressive behaviour as ‘an effective means of resolving conflict’ (American Psychological Association, APA, 2015: 1).
3.Gender asymmetry in the design and marketing of games is rigorously deconstructed by feminist media critics like Sarkeesian (2016).
4.See Boyle (2005) and Anderson et al. (2007: 8). On the physiological effects of gaming, see Beck, Boys, Rose and Beck (2012: 3027).
5.Flood and Pease (2009) and Bryce, Rutter and Sullivan (2006). Women are not the only category of persons to suffer from this discourse: see Greitemeyer (2014) and Jasinski (2005: 414), on the invisibility of minority group experiences in studies of violent behaviour. Given the sensitivity of the discussion in this chapter, most qualitative data used comes from this author’s cultural context (English-language, UK and US gaming communities).
6.Beavers (2020b: 77).
7.Lien (2013).
8.Saar (2015), on Grand Theft Auto V; Sifferlin (2016) and Beck et al. (2012: 3017).
9.Gabbiadini, Riva, Andrighetto, Volpato and Bushman (2016).
10.Saar (2015).
11.Sifferlin (2016).
12.Bryce, Rutter and Sullivan (2006: 162).
13.Studies are rare which address female gamers’ aggression: Anderson and Murphy (2003).
14.Flood and Pease (2009: 128) and Bryce, Rutter and Sullivan (2006: 162).
15.Fox and Tang (2016: 1291) and Bryce, Rutter and Sullivan (2006: 157). Following #Gamergate in 2014, the ‘hate-storm’ continues today (see Romano 2020).
16.Bryce, Rutter and Sullivan (2006: 156).
17.A mix of quantitative and qualitative data, and multiple methods of data collection. See Jasinski (2005: 415).
18.Jasinski (2005). This chapter does not treat the ‘pleasure’ of video game violence, nor does it link to real-life aggressive behaviours. See Boyle (2005: 26).
19.Beck et al. (2012).
20.Ibid., 3018–19.
21.Flood and Pease (2009: 127).
22.Anderson and Bushman (2002: 35–6).
23.Power (2007: 274). E.g. Commodore 64 release, Legions of Death (1986); see Brouwers (2013).
24.‘The fact that to many readers this equation of warfare with combat with the purpose of the military will seem obvious is a reflection of the naturalization of this formula’ (Millar and Tidy 2017: 144).
25.Millar and Tidy (2017).
26.See Ciută (2016); and Power (2007) on the ‘war-as-game motif’. A much-criticized 2019 British Army ad campaign proclaimed, ‘Binge gamers: your army needs you and your drive,’ openly embracing ‘the longstanding relationship between entertainment and military recruitment’ Robinson (2019).
27.British Army (2019). First-person shooter, Soldier of Fortune (2000) was co-designed with a former colonel, Anderson, Buckely and Gentile (2007: 6).
28.British Army (2020).
29.Fox and Tang (2016: 1292).
30.Higate (2003: 203).
31.Millar and Tidy (2017: 146).
32.Basham (2013).
33.Millar and Tidy (2017: 146).
34.See Virgil’s Camilla, one of the few female warriors in Roman texts, whose opponents lament being bested by a woman (Aen. 11.735f.).
35.Foxhall (2013: 84).
36.Phang (2008: 92).
37.Farokhmanesh (2018). Games like Assassins Creed: Odyssey now begin with a disclaimer: ‘this work of fiction was designed, developed, and produced by a multicultural team of various beliefs, sexual orientations and gender identities’.
38.Beck et al. (2012: 3027).
39.Salvati and Bullinger (2013: 156).
40.Ibid., 157.
41.Players comment on how well the graphics handle the ‘thousands of deaths’, with ‘no blood and no stabbing’; see ‘Kid reviews for Rome: Total War (including Barbarian Invasion and Alexander)’, Common Sense Media, at: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/game-reviews/rome-total-war-including-barbarian-invasion-and-alexander/user-reviews/child (accessed 8 September 2020).
42.Power (2007: 284–5).
43.Dy (2006). Christesen and Machado (2010: 107), argue for the pedagogical use of Ancient Mediterranean war games; Total War paratexts perpetuate this notion, with an ‘Academy’ site for play guides and TV show, Time Commanders (2003–5).
44.Power (2007: 285).
45.Ciută (2016).
46.Steiner (2018).
47.Lewis (2018).
48.Salvati and Bullinger (2013: 153).
49.Ibid., 154.
50.Marshall (2011: 90).
51.Christesen and Machado (2010); see also Clare (2021: 7–9), on ancient-world games and ‘transmedia’, and Paprocki (2020).
52.Chaos Puppy (2018), echoing player responses quoted in the Introduction.
53.Murray (2018).
54.Coker (2002: 56).
55.Keith (2012: 397).
56.Total War (2012).
57.Foxhall (2013: 70), Keith (2012: 397) and Loraux (1987). E.g. Sempronia in Sall. Cat. 24.3–25; Fulvia in Cic. Phil. 2, 4; Cleopatra and Antony in Plut. Ant. 25.5–28.1, 29.
58.Boyle (2005: 100).
59.Ibid., 100–6.
60.Beavers (2020b: 86–7); on NPCs, see Ngan’s chapter in this volume.
61.Beavers (2020b: 87).
62.See Loraux (1987: 9–12). Her costume prompted one YouTuber to comment, ‘She’d be unstoppable if she wore ANY KIND OF ARMOUR AT ALL!’ VGS (2013).
63.Beavers (2020: 87).
64.Ibid., 87.
65.Bryce, Rutter and Sullivan (2006: 153).
66.Keith (2012: 395).
67.Including an official novelization, graphic novels, ABC storybook, a film in the works, YouTube documentaries, even a heavy-metal album, God of War: Blood and Metal (2010).
68.Louw (2019).
69.Khalil (2019).
70.Thomsen (2012).
71.Simmons (2013).
72.Stevens (2013).
73.Thomsen (2012).
74.Marshall (2011: 89).
75.‘The purification of Orestes’ red-figure vase painting, attributed to Python, c. 360–320 BCE.
76.Marshall (2011: 90).
77.Virg. Aen. 7.845; Strabo, Geog. 3.5.11; Val. Flac. Arg. 2.192. A depiction not always replicated in cult images (Paus., Description of Greece 1.28.6).
78.Totilo (2013).
79.Sarkeesian (2016).
80.As meticulously analysed by Goad, in this volume. Famously, Bakhtin associated the ‘grotesque body’ with the feminine (1984: 303–67).
81.Kain (2013).
82.Clare (2021: 43–4).
83.Saar (2015).
84.Thomsen (2012).
85.‘If video games degrading (e.g., objectification, battery, murder) women increase rape myth acceptance, as suggested by study findings, and that acceptance decreases victim sympathy, then, based on social learning theory of rape, playing such video games may indirectly promote an increase in rape’ (Beck et al. 2012: 3026).
86.Saar (2015).
87.Flood and Pease (2009: 126).
88.Bryce, Rutter and Sullivan (2006: 157).
89.Lien (2013).
90.Bryce, Rutter and Sullivan (2006: 163).