Being Lara Croft, or, We Are All Sci Fi

Should you happen to find yourself captivated watching slender Lara bound lithely through Tomb Raider’s dark, moist-looking caverns, you will do so without quite forgetting that Lara is, in a sense, you. Like the stranded Marine in Doom, the progenitor of first-person shooters, Lara awaits your input before she makes her decisions. Lara and Doom’s Marine both look where you look, and their bodies intrude on the screen to stand in for yours. A primary difference is that the sole bodily presence of Doom’s Marine is a hirsute arm, gripping a phallic, super-lethal weapon that bobs stiffly in time with his stealthy walk. I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t rather be Lara. She is far more nuanced. Self-possessed in her hip-swaying walk but spry and potent when she leaps and scrambles, she has the build of a rock-climber and the carriage of an elegant socialite. —Mike WardBeing Lara Croft, or, We Are All Sci Fi (Pop Matters)

As Mike Vitia notes in a recent comment, this pre-Jolie article is dated now, but it’s well worth reading. Thanks for the suggestion.

I do find it limiting when I consider the set of assumptions that cinema experts bring to videogames. For example, Ward here waits until near the end to dicsuss the controls (keyboard in this case, when most dedicated players are probably using a hand-held controller).

6 thoughts on “Being Lara Croft, or, We Are All Sci Fi

  1. What about those early tank simulations? Both joysticks forward for move forward, one joystick forward to turn in that direction, one forward and one back to rotate quickly, etc.

  2. There are definitely games where a pad is better. Any platform game (Mario, etc) is better with a controller. I played the Tony Hawk games on PC, and they are infinitely easier to master with a pad.

    Your dual joystick setup sounds interesting….tried playing Robotron on it yet?

    An intersting side note on joysticks…there are only a few arcade games that ever used the dual joystick setup:
    Robotron, Smash TV, Karate Champ are the ones that come to mind. I wonder if there were complaints from users that this interface was “too hard”.

  3. Any serious first person shoot player uses the old keyboard and mouse pair. Handheld controllers don’t allow for extremely fine corrections in aim like a mouse does, and trying to move the characters body with the goofy little joystick on a handheld control while aiming with a simlarly kludgy joystick is not intuitive or easy.

  4. I guess it depends on the game, and upon what specifically is happening during the game.

    I have a two-joystick controller, one of which I mapped to the mouse; but now that you mention it, during the running-and-jumping sequences, I do find myself reaching for the mouse to point me in the right direction. I do use the keyboard for things that I can’t fit on my controller (which has about 10 buttons), but I don’t use it for motion — I map one of the joysticks to use for strafing and such.

  5. In Doom, I most people I met preferred to use both the mouse and the keyboard (the mouse aims, the keyboard is used to move and strafe, which is moving directly sideways). I’d like to see someone play Doom on the computer JUST using the keyboard – aiming would be…time consuming.

  6. Handheld controller… I guess if you’re playing on a PS, but I never use a controller when playing games on my PC. I prefer the keyboard. Maybe I’m outside the norm? (Hmm. That’s probably a given.)

    I wonder what the preference is for most players (for PC games).

    Will have to read the article, but I’m always wary of folk using Mulvey indiscriminately (she was writing, after all, about a very particular moment and style of cinema).

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