The Damsel Fights Back

‘The Damsel Fights Back’ is a 3D computer game full of action and adventure about a woman on a quest to save her husband who was too weak to escape from his male kidnapper. This story-line reverses the ‘Damsel in Distress’ cliché that has been widely used in gaming history, like Donkey Kong (1981) and the most recent, Double Dragon Neon (2012) which both involve a male protagonist trying to save the life of the damsel. This is a global story line and is the basis of many more games played around the world.

I am here to fight back against this cliché. This is something very rare and is seen in only few games around the world like Super Princess Peach (2006) where the female protagonist fights to save a male plumber.  This cliché is spoken about in the series, ‘Damsel in Distress: Tropes Vs Women in Video Games’.  Rachel, the female protagonist in ‘The Damsel Fights Back’ will look similar to this character below from Wolverine.

(Image: http://moonfirecharms.com/2013/07/26/the-wolverine-review/)

 She is tremendously smart and needs to figure out clues in order to proceed. Rachel will work hard through the obstacles in Melbourne’s big city, using her super powers to find her husband and fight the men who kidnapped him.

This production process will follow the Hollywood studio system like many games, starting with developing and then manufacturing, publishing, distribution and retail. Hopefully Nintendo will be this up and I will get at least 20% of the profits.

Raessens (2005) believes that games are participatory media and that there are three domains of participation- “Only gamers can jointly construct events and actions through the fourth characteristic, connectivity” (Raessens 2005, p. 374). This means that gaming is very different from other media like television and reading newspapers due to participation.

One of the domains of participation Raessens (2005) presented is interpretation. Interpretation of the media by gamers, according to Start Hall (1980, cited in Raessens 2005, p. 375) can be a dominant reading, where my audience will agree with my view of the importance of a female protagonist, the negotiated reading, where some gamers may believe my game is good in representing females but either way it doesn’t matter, and the oppositional reading where the gamer thinks that sexism is good in games and males play a better protagonist.

The second domain of participation according to Raessens (2005) is reconfiguration where my audience will be ‘…invited to give form to these worlds in an active way by selecting one of the many pre-programmed possibilities in a computer game” (Raessens 2005, p. 380).
The third domain of participation is construction where gamers playing my game will be able to add “…new game elements” (Raessens 2005, p. 381).

References

Raessens, J. 2005, ‘Computer games as participatory media culture’, Handbook of

Computer Game Studies, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, pp. 373-388