Blue Man Sings the Whites

As I’ve hinted before, I played an awful lot of Guitar Hero II last year. For all its flaws (mostly centred around an incredibly patchy tracklist and the Space Needle-sized difficulty spike between Medium and Hard) it gets most things generally spot-on and is excellent fun. So I was more than happy to splash out for the third game in the series for my youngest’s birthday, in a text-book demonstration of the time-honoured “As Much A Present For Me As For You” parenting manoeuvre.

For those of you who might not be familiar, there’s no character creation system in any of the Guitar Hero games. Instead you’re given a selection of rock archetypes to choose from - there’s a bemohawked punk, a denim-clad metalhead, a 60s-era classic rocker and so on. My characters of choice were always the fey Nightmare Before Christmas stylings of glam/goth type Pandora and, especially, Casey Lynch.

Casey Lynch, see, was the hard-drinking tough-as-nails alternarocker. Rail-thin, wild-haired and incidentally bearing more than a passing resemblance to m’verygoodfriend Lori in one of her more unruly moods, she reminded me of nothing so much as a female Iggy Pop. I was particularly fond of her usual close to a song - contemptuously throwing her guitar down and fixing the audience with a fuck-you glare. She was, make no mistake, utterly ace.

The attentive viewer will have noticed the repeated use of past tense in that last paragraph. And will be surmising that the game’s transfer from its former developers and general good-eggs Harmonix to Tony Hawk’s L33t Wheelieplank veterans Neversoft has seen something unfortunate occur. The attentive viewer would be entirely correct. Well done, attentive viewer.

Faintly annoyingly, Pandora’s been dropped from Guitar Hero III altogether. But that’s a far better fate than what has befallen my girl Casey.

Gone is the almost-curveless badass who was plainly willing to fight every member of the crowd, one at a time or all at once. Instead, she’s been magically transformed by the power of adolescent wish-fulfillment into a standard-issue airbrush-pretty Maximtastic Barbie doll in fetishwear.

I mean, seriously. What. The. FUCK?

To add insult to injury, according to Casey’s character bio, this change of image has come as a result of her “embracing her feminine appeal”. Yeah. Because personally, I always equate “feminine appeal” with “one-dimensional object of lust”, don’t you?

And would that that were the end of the game’s problems. God knows I’m not as sensitive to the portrayal of women in the media as I really ought to be. I even liked Sin City (in which every single female character was a prostitute, for fuck’s sake!). But the misogyny is so pervasive and so gratuitous in Guitar Hero III that even someone as oblivious as me found himself repeatedly pulling up and saying “hang on a mo, that’s a bit unnecessary”.

Pop-punkster Judy Nails seemingly having nailed a couple of watermelons to her chest between GH2 and 3? Wow, that’s a bit unnecessary. The constant references to “getting” groupies? Wow, that’s a bit unnecessary. The PVC-clad dancing-girls that turn up to bump and grind on at least 3 of the game’s 8 or so levels? Wow, that’s a bit unnecessary.

Even if you’re the sort of troglodyte who doesn’t care how insulting, pathetic and utterly gratuitous this sudden, sadly all-too-explicable lurch toward the shallow end of the gene pool is – if you’re one of the game’s developers, for example – surely you care that it’s made the game quantifiably worse? GH2-era Casey Lynch had character. She had personality. She had a distinctive style that made her stand out and I know I’m not the only one who felt pretty fond of her.

GH3-era Casey Lynch has a nice bum.

And, er, that’s it.

You can’t develop an attachment to her anymore because there’s nothing to get attached to. Her animations, which previously oozed badassery from every pore, have now been replaced by her, well, prancing up and down in kinky boots and jiggling a bit. Less attachment equals less emotional involvement equals a less-good game. You useless, cretinous morons.

Fairly obviously this is a decision that’s driven by marketing (“Teenage boys buy our games. Teenage boys like tits. Therefore, our games need more tits! Brilliant!”) rather than, y’know, actual evil, but that doesn’t make it any the less disgusting that the second game’s most aggressive, in-your-face, self-assured – OK, I think the word I’m struggling for here is empowered - female character has been turned into a passive, preening safely sexy ornament.

I freely acknowledge that a certain genres of rock music are unrepentantly unreconstructed and that a degree of sexism and objectification remains par for the course in some cultural backwaters. I understand that there could be a defence made that Neversoft are just, like, holding up a mirror to the world, man, and that we should blame the tale, not the teller.

My reasoned counter to this argument runs something like this: fuck you.

My slightly more reasoned counter to this argument runs something like this: fuck you, you cheap, cynical arseholes.

My so-reasoned-it-hurts counter to this argument runs something like this: I don’t believe for a second that constant drip-feed of bums and boobs is anything but shameless pandering to the very lowest common denominator. So fuck them.

Furthermore, this is a computer game, it’s not fucking reportage. The game’s developers had plenty of choices as to what aspects of the rock world they were and were not going to portray – we’ve not yet seen any prog excess, for example, or Alice Cooper / David Bowie-style theatrics. The various evolutions of 25-plus years of punk and goth remain massively underutilised. So yeah. There really are a metric fuckton of different venues and characters the series hasn’t explored yet. Most of the possible choices they could have made regarding the game’s style and content wouldn’t be demeaning half their potential audience and insulting the rest. So fuck them.

Furthermore furthermore, even if the developers really were dead-set on showing the infinite variety of rawk by portraying the nasty knuckle-dragging idiocy of, say, a Kid Rock video, there are ways of doing so without being as hateful and misogynistic as the hamster-faced chimp himself. If there’s an iota of irony anywhere in the sea of sexed-up character models, groupies, and gyrating strippers then God help me I can’t see it. The game’s entire tone is leering and hubba-hubba and I really, really don’t like it. So fuck them firmly with a broken bottle on the end of a boarding pike.

If I seem really angry about this, it’s largely because I’m really angry about this.

Let the record show that I’m hardly a prude. I like women in general and the female form in particular. But I don’t think the way Guitar Hero III treats women is harmless. I don’t think I’m being oversensitive, I don’t care that it’s just a game and I don’t think that I’m taking it all too seriously. I hate how the term “politically correct” seems to have become a pejorative, how flouting it has become something of a badge of honour. Fucking hell, is it THAT much of a hardship to be show a little self-awareness? Is it THAT unreasonable to try and treat groups of people who generally have a pretty shitty time of it with a modicum of sensitivity and respect? Is it THAT big and clever to be offensive for no better reason than that you can?

Here’s the bottom line, then - I strongly object to having to wade through the tawdry nonsense to get at what’s still a pretty good game beneath the bullshit. It genuinely saddens me to realise that a mainstream developer working on something as high-profile as the Guitar Hero series thinks it’s remotely acceptable to present women as devices for male gratification.

So fuck you, Neversoft. Thanks for one more nail in the “Gamers Are Drooling Neanderthal Shitwits” coffin.

Edit - 12/2/08

Seeing as the Internet seems to be largely coming up a blank on pictures to illustrate the point I’m making, here’re some I prepared earlier.

Apologies as usual for my crappy photos-taken-of-the-TV screenshot style. I think they’re just about clear enough for you to see what I’m banging on about. First two pics are Casey Lynch from Guitar Hero 2, the second two are the same character in her GHIII incarnation, hard as it may be to believe:

Admittedly, some of the difference between the two can be attributed to the jump from the PS2 to the XBox 360 but still, I think the change in look, style and mannerisms is pretty clear even in these crappy shots. Somewhere between the two games Casey’s dyed her hair, had major plastic surgery and gotten work as a fetish model.

I think I speak for us all when I say for fuck’s sake, Neversoft. Grow up.