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She Was Just a Glitch

The Ludic Erasure of the Feminine in Call of Duty: Black Ops III MARC A. OUELLETTE Call of Duty: Black Ops III (Treyarch, 2015), has been touted for being (ostensibly) the first in the series to feature a female playable character. However, it is not the fact that Call of Duty: Finest Hour (Spark Unlimited, 2004) features a playable Russian sniper who happens to be female that calls the claim into question. Rather, it is precisely at the level of playability that the game fails to fulfill its promise. An analysis of the game, from a Gender as well as from a Game Studies position, shows that if anything, Black Ops III eliminates woman from start to finish. As Paul Tassi (2015) notes in his Forbes review, the game’s creators “purposefully didn’t have a woman in mind at all.” Moreover, the creators assumed that they had written what Treyarch’s Jason Blundell alleges is a “gender-neutral script” (as cited in Tassi, 2015). Tassi (2015) observes in his review, this was not without obvious effects, for “there are some, uh glitches” resulting from what proved to be a flawed assumption. Ultimately, the belief that there could be gender neutrality in such a production provides a textbook example of the contingency in Roland Barthes’s (1972) definition of what he calls “ex-nomination”; that is, the process by which the dominant becomes “the social class which does not want to be named” (p. 138). As John Fiske (1996) elaborates, the significance of exnomination occurs because the ex-nominated class interest “appears to have no alternative and is thus granted the status of the natural, the universal, or that-which-cannot-be-challenged. […] Nominating disruptive discourses and ex-nominating that of social control is a common tactic of semiotic and ideological containment” (p. 238). Simply put, any distinguishing sign of difference becomes suppressed, denied, or obfuscated, as if it does not even exist. The challenge, as in cases of supposed gender-neutrality, then, becomes 158

The Ludic Erasure of the Feminine (Ouellette)

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recognizing not only the underlying structures which allow this to occur but also considering the repercussions of their perpetuation. Here, Black Ops III provides not only a hegemonic masculine conception of what comprises gender-neutrality, it does so in a realm in which the playable character is never actually the principal investigator of the story. In comparison to other recent games with similar themes of resurrection or rebirth via cyborg augmentation—including the Deus Ex series and other games in the Call of Duty franchise—Black Ops III involves following a trail, following instructions, and following a leader. Thus, this essay considers not only the combination of ludic and narratological elements through which Black Ops III erases the female, but also offers a critical framework for considering further figurations of this sort. Instead of an advance, then, the game is something of a step back both in terms of its story elements and in terms of its play. In the latter regard, Steven Conway (2011) writes about the limitations of L.A. Noire’s (Team Bondi, 2011) apparatus as having “murdered play”: Quite simply, the player is positioned not as detective, but as labourer within an information economy, forced to fulfil various quantifiable performance indicators to improve their productivity (“score”) according to the system’s often illogical rules, always compliant, always unquestioning; if George Orwell was a game designer, this would be his 1984.

If L.A. Noire murdered play, then Black Ops III murders a woman to murder play, in an equally laborious detective story in which the player is always already the faithful sidekick, following along and performing the menial tasks. And, then the game rebuilds her in a man’s (meta-) version of a woman. In the ex-nomination of gender, the game recalls debates that were ongoing in Gender Studies roughly twenty years ago, particularly the polemics circulating between Janice Raymond (1998) and Sandy Stone (1998) regarding the role of science in producing a man’s version of a woman, at least through surgery.1 Whereas Raymond’s conclusions are damning, Sherry Turkle’s (1994) roughly contemporaneous view holds hope for digital environments offering productive potentials for science. Within these spaces, “the self is not only decentral but multiplied without limit. There is an unparalleled opportunity to play with one’s identity and to try out new ones” (p. 159). On its face, this is what should be happening in Black Ops III. As Helen Kennedy (2002) observers of Lara Croft, in the early Tomb Raider games, the potential exists for the fusion of player and game character as a kind of queer embodiment, the merger of the flesh of the (male) player with Lara’s elaborated feminine body of pure information. This new queer identity potentially subverts stable distinctions between identification and desire and also by extension the secure and heavily defended polarities of masculine and feminine subjectivity.

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Responding to Call of Duty

Yet, this is not at all the case. When one first encounters the full form of the playable female character, she is hauling on a cigar, a very obvious phallic reference which serves to displace the homoerotics of the situation, to displace the threat to masculinity, to feminize and to sexualize the character (and player, by implication), and to set up a clear exchange value for the acquisition of the powers. To dredge up an equally anachronistic line of scholarly pursuit, the game activates almost every detail of the “Eliminate Woman Argument” (EWA), which Julien Murphy (1998) enumerates as the scientific process of “making women extinct” (p. 192). In fact, when Murphy considers the EWA, she does so from the perspective of ectogenesis; that is, reproduction outside the uterus.2 This is precisely what Black Ops III does in bringing the character back to life. It is not surprising, then, that the transition at the beginning follows the rapid pace and climax of the male sex curve. Moreover, such a move in a game is not altogether typical. Shira Chess (2016), for example, argues against such a reading, since games are unrecognizable as heteronormative narratives. […] If we think about games not as a {ext}narrative en route to a singular reproductive climax—if we focus on the process of narrative, rather than a singular heightened point of pleasure—then we find video games have potential for alternative pleasures [p. 88].

However, this is something of a recent development, and one predicated on the role of play and of games featuring multiple such points of climax, as in the ubiquitous “boss level.” What becomes clear in playing Black Ops III is that player and playable character have limited agency. One might argue the game manipulates the player while the playable character is manipulated by the non-playable characters within the narrative. There is only obedience. In her seminal reading of gender role subversion, Anne-Marie Schleiner (2001) recognizes that some scholars view female characters like Lara Croft as a female Frankenstein monster […] a disturbing trend in computer gaming culture, where boys and men are permitted to develop unrealistic ideals of female body type, or to dispense with relating to human women whatsoever, replacing them with easily controlled virtual female bots [p. 223].

What scholars do not acknowledge frequently enough is that Schleiner actually argues against this position, which follows from the same premises held by Raymond and by Murphy. Similarly, Laura Fantone (2003) writes, “the fact remains that in videogames it is possible to choose to be a character of a different gender or even a different species, and this offers interesting possibilities. […] This conceptualization of the body creates new variations on the way gender is typically portrayed” (58). Not surprisingly, then, the current version of Lara Croft is not the same as she was originally, nor is the game the same kind of game. For Esther MacCallum-Stewart (2008), the progres-


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sion, results in part because “the adoption of a female form was such a naturalised action that many players now choose to move across gender for aesthetic pleasure, rather than from a need to experience a new form of being” (p. 28). As the game’s menu screen signifies, the female body is just a vessel, an object, and an inferior one at that. Moreover, it can always be supplemented by technology to overcome its lack, or it can be eliminated and replaced. It is just another game feature in a presumed gender-neutral world. As much as the female figure become a commonplace, Fantone (2003) presciently cites the “capitalist interest in bodies” as one of her key reservations about future portrayals and implementations of female characters in video games (p. 58). This follows from the fact that the Western patriarchal form of capitalism provides its own defence against the EWA, for capitalism always needs objects, cheap labor and speedy reproduction. In playing Black Ops III, I could not help but find myself participating in these processes. Indeed, the ludic structure, which demands conformity and inhibits play, renders one helpless to intervene.

Game Play and Gender While unfortunate, it is not entirely surprising to find the anachronism of the Eliminate Woman Argument in a relatively recent video game like Black Ops III. As I (and others) have noted, considerations of gender in Game Studies tend toward their own retrograde assumptions and conclusions (Ouellette, 2013; 2014). Indeed, noted scholars Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell (either together or with other colleagues) make this very point— seemingly to no avail—in several essays which call for some recognition that the leading critical positions in Gender Studies stress the performativity of gender as a construct. For Jenson and de Castell (2008), the “‘trouble’ with studies of gender and gameplay has most frequently been the static attribution of gender norms and characteristics to actors, contexts and artifacts that are always in flux” (p. 22). Yet, games involve practice, rehearsal, threat preparation, and performance, all of which constitute the basis for gender scholarship over the last twenty-five (or more) years. Even so, approaches grounded in sex role theory abound and dominate in Game Studies. Kelly Bergstrom, writing with Jenson, Victoria MacArthur, and Tamara Peyton (2011), puts it most succinctly and damningly: “What remains in most of this work is a predominant, indeed, an almost intuitive reflex to crudely attribute difference as demarcated by male/female sex binaries” (p. 3). Quite simply, these approaches actually reinscribe gender binaries and stereotypes because these define the terms and the boundaries of the debate. Moreover, scholars put themselves in a position of arguing about the preferred reading of a given

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text instead of seeking, finding, and enumerating alternative subject positions, as well as differing cognitive and affective responses. Gender roles, remain fixed and static. Jenson and de Castell (2010) find that “this reflex is present in even the most current work on gender and digital game play and presents itself no less persistently in research that sees itself as assiduously attempting not to reinvoke gender-/sex-based stereotypes” (p. 63). In other words, the reinscription does little to redress the situation because it limits the available subject positions. If the positions are fixed, then alternative constructions and identities are necessarily excluded, as possibilities not just as formations. Simply put, then, “It takes no intellectual effort (or political will) to simply describe stereotypical patterns and choices, and then to explain them by reference to stereotypes” (Bergstrom, et al., 2001, p. 32). In other words, there exists a plurality of gender formations across a spectrum, as opposed to a binary pairing. Even so, Game Studies still finds itself perpetuating reductive binaries even as well-intentioned scholars hope to dismantle them. More important, this approach is neither ahistorical nor universal and therefore takes change—or at least the possibility of change—into account. In terms of Game Studies, the connection should be clear given the emphasis on performance and play in the seminal, foundational works of Judith (Jack) Halberstam and Judith Butler. The study of games and gender should coalesce around these fundamentals. However, Taylor, Jenson, and de Castell (2009) find the opportunity to include many “not-so-recent developments in gender theory” has not been realized in studies of video games (p. 249). While gender always has a bodily component, it needs to be distinguished from biological sex and/or sexual desire. While the three may be related (and imbricated and conflated), they need to be understood as separate categories, each of which is culturally determined in and through discourse. As Butler (1999) herself notes in an oft-cited passage, “Whether gender or sex is fixed or free is a function of a discourse which seeks to set certain limits to analysis or safeguard certain tenets of humanism as presuppositional to any analysis of gender” (p. 12). Not only is gender defined in and through discourses, these define implicitly what is outside the discursive boundaries even as they define explicitly what belongs. In this regard, it is the negotiation of what can and cannot be done, what is and what is not acceptable, that offers the most important intersection between game play and gender performance. One of the typical means of teaching a player about a game—and its limits—occurs through the device of a birth or re-birth scenario. Steven Conway (2010), in “Hyper-Ludicity, Contra-Ludicity, and the Digital Game,” defines ludicity as “the degree to which digital games allow play, “play” here being defined as the possibility to act and have an effect upon the gameworld” (p. 135). In terms of its premise,


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Black Ops III is one of several recent games to feature a resurrection, particularly a cyborg or machine-enhanced, as the means of instantiating infancy. Here, it follows or compares with games like Bioshock Infinite (Irrational Games, 2013), Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Eidos Montreal, 2011), and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (Sledgehammer Games, 2014), in which players are brought back from the dead, or from near death, and are given technological enhancements to alter their engagement with the game. Where Black Ops III differs most strikingly from these games is in its level of ludicity, as will be discussed in more detail. In gaming, we often refer to the idea of a spawn—and that is true enough for the later levels and the bad guys—in which you are a helpless infant in the game world. What is interesting to note are the ways the language lends itself to the construction of masculinity and/or femininity. The relationship between text and play recalls Espen Aarseth’s (2004) controversial axiom regarding the distinction between narrative and algorithm. He argues that video games are “constrained by the story in unrealistic ways. What makes such games playable at all, and indeed attractive, is the sequence of shifting, exotic, often fascinating settings (levels), where you explore the topography and master the virtual environment. The gameworld is its own reward” (p. 51). Thus, if the game world is its own reward, then full-fledged gender performance becomes one of the central rewards of the game, if only because of the hype surrounding the ostensibly first female playable character. Moreover, the player should develop the character’s capabilities and in turn have greater access to the game’s features (ludicity) through achievements acquired in the process. In terms of playing the game, then, the power of the player increases as the masculinity of the character increases. Steven Conway (2010) offers the term, “hyper-ludicity” to describe the ways in which games offer the user new possibilities. In Black Ops III, these include running along walls and seeing through them. As he puts it, “thus the implementation of hyper-ludic features can broaden a game’s learning curve as the use and implications of these features must be fully understood in order to achieve [the goal]” (p. 136). Said another way, the game itself should furnish the means and ends of the gendered performance. Ultimately, in positioning the player and playable character as always following the lead of a non-playable character (NPC), in Black Ops III the story and the algorithmic kernel coincide. This is a reminder that games entail what Gonzalo Frasca (2003) calls “manipulation rules” (p. 231). As much as the player is an agent within a game, the game prescribes the limits and proscribes the available actions. This is important because it means that the gender performance falls within the rules and algorithms of the dominant discourse just as surely as it does those for the game. Indeed, every other

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game listed above merges hyper-ludicity with the progression of gender. In contrast, and as will be discussed, Black Ops III highlights the limits. While this should seem counterintuitive, that hyper-ludicity reveals the limits of potential performance is the heart of the contingency. Not only is gender performative, but each increase offers a new boundary: of time, of power, of energy, etc. This becomes more interesting given the resulting diminution of power, or cases of what Conway (2010) calls “contra-ludicity,” which refers to the ways the game will actively “resist the user and stop play” (p. 135). He offers the increasingly difficult defensive schemes in video soccer games as an example of a contra-ludic “punishment” (p. 138). As with other games in its class, most obviously Deus Ex, each use of the bionic augmentations results in a loss of energy. Consequently, the player must wait for the energy to recharge and so loses access to every other bit of kit acquired to that point. The game then requires greater skill or better reactions from the player but the character cannot be relied upon in a meaningful way. Moreover, in Black Ops III, the player and character are always already subservient, which offers a further reminder of their (now) shared lack. Thus, the bionic powers, while still prosthetics, cannot be relied upon. In comparison to the other games, Black Ops III stands out as the one that does not build and prove gender in the process. Rather, it alternately erases gender or it portrays gender as a limiting factor and it limits the play of that gender. Thus, Conway’s (2012) third type of ludicity and its role in the performance of gender cannot be understated. In this regard, Conway defines “hypoludic” features as those that “instantiate the absence of play itself ” and which reduce the player to a mere automaton, mindlessly pressing keys (p. 32). In describing the tedium of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios, 2013) and L.A. Noire, Conway notes that “as the game removes the very essence of control and agency so necessary to the experience of not only winning and losing, but playing a game. […] hypo-ludicity offers nothing but absence: of empowerment, of resistance, of agency” (p. 38). As the game begins, progresses, and ends, this becomes a central function of the playable character throughout Black Ops III. The player is merely a helper who must run to consoles, find the precise spot to stop and press the “X” button to hack, open, or switch. There is no activity. There is no performance. There is only subservience—to the game, and its rules of gender and of play. Whereas other games offer opportunities for hyper-ludicity to be the reward for hypo-ludic patience, as in Splinter Cell games rewarding the player for stealth, Black Ops III offers no such outcome. In a Foucauldian sense, the game and its apparatus of surveillance, demand and instill docility in the player and the character alike. This should not be surprising given that Conway (2010) stresses that “hyper-ludicity and contra-ludicity are always firstly design features imple-


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mented by the game developer, they should also be understood as contingent upon the player’s expertise with and knowledge of the game” (p. 137). In other words, the narrative elements conform to the algorithmic kernel. Since the game is always already a learning mechanism, the outcome and the rationale of the surveillance becomes clear. A game necessarily anticipates errors and missteps—as in the danger of leaving the “battleground” area—and as such provides a rather rigid framework within which the player is allowed to act. Surveillance then becomes a means of enforcing the rules of the game and of gender. Playing the game means conforming to the game and, as a consequence, to the gender rules, depicted and deployed. Indeed, the restrictions on gender and the restrictions on player actions become one and the same so that the ludic function and the cultural imperative map onto each other. Ultimately, not only is technology feminized, it is shown to be a sign of weakness—and vice versa.

Playing Black Ops III Admittedly, there was a time when I might have argued that Black Ops III creates a space for the kind of cross-gender identifications Schleiner, Fantone, and Kennedy suggest (Ouellette, 2004; 2006). Thus, I found that the opening sequence, one which actually precedes the training levels, is something of a bait-and-switch. The character is tasked with locating and rescuing a high-value hostage. In the course of the search, other hostages are located and one has to watch with the playable and non-playable characters via an in-game video screen as the hostages are tortured. At this moment, the game features what Rolf Nohr (2015) argues is one of the hallmarks of a “metagame” insofar as it provides its own means of evaluation (p. 201). This is reinforced by the character’s question to her commander, “Are we just gonna leave them to be tortured?” This comment provides a basis for connecting these early events with later events in the game, for the character will be the one demonstrating the instrumental rationality and the ends-over-means approach after she has been reconstructed. In other words, the early version offers a feminine mode of reasoning, one which favors an ethic of care and is as concerned with the means as with the process. The effort fails, as she is utterly destroyed by the attacking robots and then has to be rebuilt—both in body and in mind—and only then is she ready to become part of the investigative team. This is important because the character never becomes the leader or the principal investigator. Even in Conway’s (2011) example of L.A. Noire, the player is at least the lead detective. The game play of Black Ops III reinforces this perspective. In terms of actual agency, the player is left to simply move

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to precisely the proper location and click the “X” button. Each of these is followed by moments of watching and of sharing the gaze of the playable character. To be sure, staring at the screen becomes one of the commands that must be obeyed. Said another way, the entirety of the opening mission is hypo-ludic—it eliminates play—and grounded in nothing but manipulation rules—that is, the features and actions the game itself demands of the player. This would be understandable if it were a training cycle, but even the training missions merely prepare the player to follow and to press “X” at the right moment. Even after the character is reconstructed, this becomes the hallmark of the so-called playable character. This too becomes significant. As the initial rescue proceeds, she is given another job of watching and gazing through the glass. At this moment, the player is reduced to a watcher, as well. The robots interrupt the rescue and slowly kill the woman. They hit her as she screams and they cut off her hands as the screen fades to black and then she is reborn as a robot, or at least partly a robot. In addition to having her hands replaced, the technicians insert a DNI, or direct neural interface, with which she can receive information and which enhances her capabilities. However, the DNI also becomes the central problem of the game since it effectively acts as a piece of malware, infecting and controlling those with one, including the squad leaders, Taylor and Hendricks. In fact, eliminating the female occurs through an entire system of power-ups and level- ups. These include wall running, the ability to see through walls, and the ability to communicate with team members and even objects via the DNI. In other words, the world of connectedness has been colonized and transformed into a set of algorithms (within the game’s own set of algorithms). Said another way, the game encompasses a system built by men to build a woman within a system built entirely by men—for the pleasure of play. Thus, it is no surprise that during the crucial mission in which player and character encounter Hendricks’s asset, the drug dealer, the playable character is again smoking a cigar. As a player, though, one is limited to watching the cigar go back and forth as the character waves it, plays with it, drags on it, and blows the smoke away. Whether one follows a Freudian line of analysis or not, the implications and parallels still hold. The scene evokes not only the menu but also the scene of Hendricks taking tiny bites from a giant candy bar. It is also no mistake that she later cuts off the hand of a dead civilian when faced with the inability to hack a system. Not only does this occur in a cut-scene, the character does not need to dismember the hand. After all, she is an enhanced being and the body is dead, so it could have been carried. This excessive parallel, though also echoes the ways in which even the rudimentary symbolism and internal story of the game is contained and constrained by the ludic structure, and vice versa.


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As such, her membership as one of the robots, combined with the excessive act, emphasizes the expedience, the ends over means, the technorationality, of the system. Here, it is Hendricks who protests, in contrast to the opening of the game. The significance of the moment lies in the recognition that the most powerful clue to a fully functioning and stable patriarchy is (a) woman’s deference to it and actions in the support of it.3 That said, even if one were to read the game as an oppositional text, arguing against such a system by revealing its scope, the depiction still relies upon and leaves the original intact. Indeed, this occurs in two ways. First, the FMVs, as in the multiple references to hands being amputated, and second, the moments of limited control, as in the cigar and the candy bar moments, serve as reminders that masculinity and technology cannot be combined or taken over as easily as the feminine. The female and the technological, however, remain as areas that can be colonized and controlled. In this game, woman becomes a technological apparatus. By having limited ludicity, especially in these particular moments, the player is therefore part and parcel of the system. The hypo-ludicity of the game then becomes central to the message that you are not a full-fledged member of the team, or of society. In contrast, in the series Deus Ex, Splinter Cell, and BioShock, the player becomes a part of even the most menial jobs like lock-picking and computer hacking. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, each of these games offers similar themes—betrayal, resurrection, cyborg enhancements, secret or black ops missions, and a kind of detective story. This is not play. This is just following directions. Here, it might be argued that the more ludic games feature a masculinized version of play, based on mastery, conquest, discovery. That is precisely the point. Such a system will always already posit the feminine (as distinct from and yet as related to the female) of inferior, as lacking or as an outsider to the system. The player is then reduced to a passive clicker who does nothing else. These are the “special” powers afforded a woman in the economy of the game. In this last regard, these are, quite paradoxically, the power-ups, augmentations so that the hyper- ludic elements actually function as contra and/or hypo-ludic—if they have any impact at all. In this last it cannot be hyper-ludic since everyone else had these, or, in the case of Hendricks, actually gets to use them. It is contra-ludic for at least two reasons. First, when and if you actually get to use them, you lose energy and have to wait and, second, if you can use them, you have to stop all that you are doing, and let go and then depress the left and right buttons at the same time. The pause can be deadly, as can the aim and hold. The game literally takes away power and the ability to play even as it ostensibly gives or bestows powers. It effectively says this is not for you, or not the same for you. Indeed, the mark of

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inclusion is the very contingency of hegemony and the hegemonic process— the very essence of the idea that freedom and choice are packaged and sold as such but it is only the illusion of the same. Moreover, the fact that player choice, as it were, includes a seemingly infinite amount of “load outs” and paint schemes is more insidious, not because it is a stereotypical dress up by another name or because it is a mere shuffle of the deck chairs, but rather because it reduces everything to a consumer choice. This is yet another reminder of the femininity of consumption (as opposed to production) and the idea of being a citizen qua consumer. This is not full personhood. In fact, it is just a reinscription of a familiar pinkwashed paradigm. Finally, this is yet another reminder that the very conditions of patriarchy are themselves the argument against the EWA.

Conclusions The multiple and simultaneous layers through which games operate as story, as visual representation, and as ludic structure make them a potentially powerful medium for the exploration of shifting gender roles, positions, and identifications, particularly given their basis in fantasy, play, and animation. The reality, though, is counterintuitive because the EWA actually usually falls apart because of the existence of a stable and successful patriarchy. As Murphy (1998) laments, Male egotism is maintained by a sexist […] heterosexual structure that is thousands of years old. Male heterosexuality would have to undergo a radical transformation. […] it would be hard to eliminate women if women remained the objects of sexual desire for many men [p. 193].

This occurs primarily because such a system depends on and needs to reproduce women, femininity, and (the act of) mothering because of the need for cheap and/or free labor. However, the situation in the virtual world of a game is very different. The application of technology, both in game and in the technology the game anticipates, necessitates understanding the difference between socially training and genetically engineering a person. In introducing the EWA, Steinbacher and Holmes (1987) argue that there is “no atrocity too terrible for human nature to contemplate and often carry out. This has, in fact, been the case numerous times throughout history, and has been justified as necessary to fulfill the needs and ‘rights of superior’ individuals or races” (p. 57). Black Ops III imagines and enacts such a world. Indeed, one must wonder if the images of robots gone wild serve as symbols or thematic structures for the timeless trope of controlling female sexuality.


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Nowhere is this clearer than during a lengthy cut scene in which Hendricks interrogates the scientist regarding test subjects for a failed bio-tech project. The key is that our avatar stands by outside and cannot even move with full motion for the lengthy walk to that point; all we get to do is open the door. You cannot run, jump, look, aim, or shoot. And, we get to play second fiddle, during the process. Other games in the series include and inculcate the player and the character. In Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Treyarch, 2012), for example, an infamous scene occurs during a combined interrogation. An NPC is the helper as the playable character places broken glass in an interrogation subject’s mouth. The player then gets to decide whether or not to punch the victim in the mouth. As early as Call of Duty 2 (Infinity Ward, 2005), the game allows the player to choose to firebomb German soldiers in the subway. In other words, the woman cannot be trusted with moral choices. More than that, though, Hendricks believes that either Kane or Taylor has gone to the other side, revealed secrets, and compromised their DNI codes and communications. Here, it is woman and technology that provide the entry point—that is, the point at which penetration can occur—and one need not be a Freudian to note the obvious phallic and Oedipal images, plot devices, symbols, scenes, and characterizations. Even if one were to ignore the obvious Freudian scenario, there would still be the issue of the central detective story and the classic model of false consciousness to be resolved. In this regard, the moment when the character calls Hendricks and the Egyptian officer “ladies” not only constitutes one of the key “glitches” (of a game about glitches), it also reminds one of the phallic power of banter. In my case, this, along with the cigars, recalled the moment in The Long Kiss Goodnight (Austin, Black & Harlin, 1997) when Charlie proclaims, “Suck my dick!”4 Rikke Schubart (1998) reads this moment as being far from appropriative, far from redeeming. For Schubart, it is clear that “his story” structures and controls “her story.” The daughter, the mother and the amazon are nothing but modern versions of ancient male myths of femininity. These phallic action heroines do not exceed the bounds of traditional gender roles, they cannot empower women and they do not pose a threat to male dominance [p. 214].

In this way, the (phallic) banter serves as a reminder that she does not belong and cannot be trusted. Like the movie, the game’s tale is one of fragmented identity. A stable identity is lost, the identity becomes one of amnesia and a seeming death and rebirth, but that proves false—whether Frye, Campbell, or Propp—and the narrative leads the game play to the reconciliation of that identity. No matter the mode of understanding the narrative, it ends in the same place, with the playable character helping Hendricks. Like the woman

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with a gun at the beginning, the ending is a simultaneous repudiation of the feminine and re-affirmation of the masculine. Moreover, when we begin to take the ludic into account then we see that the play is limited tremendously. Where Ramirez, in Modern Warfare 2, famously had to fetch and be bossed around, leading to the viral “Ramirez meme,” all we do is watch as the woman is erased. In contemporaneous games, from Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Development, 2012) to Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar San Diego, 2010) to Bioshock Infinite, the player and the character are at least allowed to be agents in the discovery of the lost identity, instead of merely following, merely clicking. It is fitting, then, that the game ends in the middle of what could be described as a uterus. At the very least, each thorny passage is a portal, an entrance, to another realm in which the player burns an egg-like orb crisscrossed with veiny vines. All of this has been done to learn that you are a glitch. Then as the game concludes, you still follow—this time Taylor. As you reach the ultimate finale of the game, you are told you are Taylor. Even in the moment of what should be triumph, the game takes away the last shred of autonomy, the last hope of agency, and erases the woman.

NOTES 1. Raymond goes so far as to say that post-operative transsexuals are “rapists” as part of a colonizing empire (p. 307). In contrast, Stone argues that transsexuals reshape the gender order and demythologize patriarchy. While I appreciate both arguments, I would have leaned toward Stone, at least on the basis of the oppression of transgendered, two-spirited, transsexual, intersex, and other non-binary gender formations, all of which are occluded by the sex-role premise of Raymond’s polemic. Frankly, this game leaves me closer to saying that Raymond offers a provisional basis for understanding the gender order. 2. Interestingly, Murphy notes that radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone hoped that in-vitro gestation and/or ectogenesis might liberate women from the oppression of pregnancy and childbirth since these are “structures that keep women and children out of larger (roles in) society” (pp. 193–194). 3. For a contemporaneous “real world” example, one need look no further than the women who voted for Trump in 2016. 4. This moment was mimicked in the later G.I. Jane, which many mistake as the being the first to do so.

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