Tomb Raider - an unlikely example of gender equality

Lara and Natla - characters in their own right

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Helen Lewis, in the New Statesman, recently introduced me to the concept of the Bechdel test.

It's a way to assess the gender-equality of a piece of film and involves a fairly straightforward set of rules:
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• Does the film have two named female characters?
• Do they talk to each other?
• About something other than a man?

As the Washington Post points out, that’s a very low bar but many modern films fail the test. Helen Lewis asked the question whether video games need a test of their own. It got me thinking.

Wrote about whether games need their own version of a Bechdel test. The comments are *all* fascinating. I know. http://t.co/zSdGZJ9P7y
— Helen Lewis (@helenlewis) January 7, 2014

It’s safe to say the majority of games would fail, and that even having a fully-clothed female character is a rarity. But games are varied, even within the same development studio. The Last of Us, for example, passes with flying colours while Uncharted 2, from the same studio just four years before, fails miserably.

A game that surprisingly gets a pass is the original Tomb Raider, now heading for 20 years old. Despite Core Design’s unlikely representation of the female form, the game has women in both the lead and antagonist roles.

I’ve been playing it again recently - Tomb Raider was released for iOS in December. Lara is hired by Jacqueline Natla, the owner of a technology company, to find an unusual artifact. The duo end up enemies after it becomes clear that Ms Natla later wants to eliminate anyone who could link her to the artifact.

Questionable character design

But if the game is notable for its characterisation, Tomb Raider’s controls don’t hold up quite as well - particularly not on a touchscreen.

The original game is replicated in full on iOS though it boasts textures much improved from the Saturn/PlayStation release in 1996. This may be how the game always looked on PC, but for me it’s a revelation.

Tomb Raider is probably my favourite game of all time. Core took to the task of creating a 3D action adventure game, the first of its kind that I played. The developers created a game that worked within the constraints of the available technology and made full use of the controllers of the day.

This was a 3D game before dual stick controllers were invented. To design around those constraints the developers created a grid-based environment. Every piece of geometry has a surface plan of one unit by one unit. The grid structure was visible and the player could use it to measure and time movement and jumps.

They also created an elaborate control scheme using button modifiers. Hold L1 to look around the world with the direction buttons - you couldn’t run and move the camera at the same time. R1 slowed Lara to a walk, and prevented walking off edges. Using these tools the player could manage the loose run animations and navigate the elaborate maze-like level design.

This control mechanism needed to be replicated with on-screen buttons. And it doesn’t quite work. Lara has always moved like a tank, turn to the required direction and then push up to walk forward. On a controller, it’s easy to move and turn at the same time. Here, the clunky on-screen D-pad makes that all but impossible. As a result the game feels much less fluid on iOS.

In many ways the game is an exact replication of the original, right down to the annoying necessity to be standing directly over an object before you can pick it up. But now it’s harder to get yourself into just the right spot. And a change in how far Lara moves in response to a single tap up on the D-pad throws off the flow of the game. It’s a testament to how tightly designed the original was, that minor changes have such an impact.

It’s hard for me to recommend this version of Tomb Raider. But, if you’ve never played the original and you don’t have a PS3 or Vita (the original is available on PSN) then this might be worth a look. It’s a game very much of it’s time. But it had ambition that the team often achieved, and it had characterisation very easily lost in all of the marketing and obscured by the physical design of its character.