This weekend, I spent a good amount of time playing the new Tomb Raider. The times I wasn’t playing? I was pretending to be Lara Croft. But that is beside the point.
The reboot was released March 5, but is based on a series originally released in 1996, which was followed by movies, books and even amusement park rides. The games follow Lara Croft, an adventurer in search of ancient relics. Even though a woman wrote the scripts for the first few games, there has been an age-old debate of whether she is a dynamic female heroine or just a creation of sexual objectification for male players.
I think it’s a little of both.
I enjoyed nearly every part of the game. The gameplay was relatively short compared to most, but the storyline was straightforward yet captivating. The characters were well developed and Lara was pretty darn cool. You spend the game defeating some of the locals and trying to escape from a mysterious island Lara is stuck on with her crew.
The game is played in third person. I am pretty partial to third-person games, but you can’t help but notice that this angle gives you an eyeful of Lara the whole time. She’s clad in a tight-fitting tank top — she’s less busty than the earlier games, but it’s still pretty noticeable — and even tighter pants.
Executive producer Ron Rosenberg even said that “when people play as Lara, they don’t really project themselves into the character ... they’re more like ‘I want to protect her.’ ”
Oh really, Rosenberg? I beg to differ. I felt 100 percent like Lara throughout the whole game, and I would have felt the same even if she were a man. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I “just wanted to protect” the character.
Whether it’s first or third person, I usually feel pretty tied to the main character.
Lara is also a character that is easy to connect to. She isn’t a trained assassin, a soldier, a robot or any of the other characters we typically play as. She’s an archaeology graduate student on an expedition to find a lost kingdom with her friends. She gains all of her experience with weapons and fighting on the island.
One of the most controversial bits of the game was an anticipated rape scene, as hinted at in the trailer. In the game, the first person she personally encounters does start to feel her up a little bit, but she kills them before there is any serious touching. It doesn’t go farther than him sliding his hand down her side.
To me, that isn’t the bad part. Rosenberg was later reported saying that he thought this scene was great, because “she is literally turned into a cornered animal. It’s a huge step in her evolution: she’s forced to either fight back or die.”
Living in a day and age where a woman in the United States has a 1-in-5 chance of being raped (it’s about 1-in-4 for girls in college), and where more than half of sexual assaults aren’t reported, this is a deadly statement.
Even though Lara’s offender was a stranger just trying to stop her from escaping, two-thirds of sexual assaults are committed by a person that the victim knew. Rape isn’t always a forceful and violent act, and often comes in the form of an unwanted sexual encounter. Every victim may not be able to fight back like Lara did. We can’t refer to these women as “cornered animals,” because they could be you or me or anyone else you know, not just a gun-slinging adventurer in a video game.
Overall, I did enjoy the game, aside from the few feminist failures in the design. Lara, in my opinion, is a strong and dynamic heroine throughout the game. It’s not her fault that the people that designed her may have had some objectifying ideas for her.
Sophie Kruse is a freshman studying journalism at Ohio University and a columnist for The Post. Have you played Tomb Raider? Email Sophie at sk139011@ohiou.edu.
