The Presence of Female Designers in French Video Game Industry,1985–1993

La femme qui ne supportait pas les ordinateurs

La femme qui ne supportait pas les ordinateurs (The Woman Who Hated Computers) was created in 1986. Its designer, Chine Lanzmann, is the niece of documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. Like her uncle, Chine Lanzmann tried to demonstrate how oppressed a minority can be within a specific society. Whereas Claude Lanzmann was obsessed with the annihilation of Jews during World War II, his niece explored the annihilation of female presence in male-dominated virtual space.

The game itself refers to Internet stalking within Minitel, a French online service during the 1980s. Among its various features, Minitel allowed users to communicate in discussion groups. In the mid-1980s, French feminists tried to unveil the liberating potential of up-to-date technology. Between 1984 and 1987, they managed a female-oriented magazine—Elletél—the objective of which was to make feminist ideas in cyberspace more popular (Rokeghem, 1984). However, research that Leroux and Pépin (1986) commissioned showed that the French cyberculture rapidly had become a male-dominated realm with a hostile attitude toward female players.

La femme aimed to deconstruct the aggressive techniques that males utilized in online discussion groups. After launching the game, the player confronts the aesthetics of Internet chat during that time. A monochromatic screen with a parser below invites the player to “tell me the name of your charming personality.” When the player enters his or her name, an unknown person poses the question of whether he or she is a woman. If the player types “no,” the interlocutor flees in panic. To complete the game, the player must answer that he or she is a woman; then, the interlocutor tries to interrogate the player, asking whether she is blond, married, or intelligent. In this situation, feelings of discomfort grow. Finally, the other person introduces himself as Ordine (ordinateur is French for “computer”), a machine that tries to seduce the player and dominate her.

The game’s second stage opens with a break-in by a computer hacker named Comby who shuts Ordine down. At first, Comby seems to be a lifesaver, but during a discussion with him, it becomes clear that he is another stalker. Observing the player character from the window of another building, Comby boasts about his love conquests in private discussions with other internauts: “They say I am here to flirt. I hate this term. I prefer ‘seduction.’” The uncomfortable predicament of being seduced becomes rougher when Ordine takes revenge on Comby and murders him remotely with an electric shock. After that, Ordine frames the player for the murder. Depending on the next choices, the player can discover one of the six endings, each of which is unfavorable for her. For example, in three scenarios, an assassin can kill her, the computer can electrocute her, or even if Ordine is accused of the murder, a police officer replaces this computer with a new one.

Regardless of the ending, the player finally becomes detached from the first-person perspective (the chat screen) and confronts a screen depicting her character being electrocuted from a distance. Hence, both the game’s voyeuristic computer “camera” and immersive aspects are deconstructed. The player realizes that this bond with the female virtual avatar—as well as the chat itself—was only simulated. At the same time, La femme suggests that women, with their identities revealed, cannot easily survive in the male-dominated Internet realm. This rhetorical approach that Lanzmann demonstrated was met with outrage, as a Tilt review illustrates:

The novel begins well, with humour. The computer displays the colour from the beginning: It asks about your appearance and about a possible competitor. For a good understanding, it is better to be alone in front of the keyboard. Chine’s style is extracted. Even too much. Writing an oral language is one of the most challenging exercises ever. It is not the “ah, ah, ah” on three lines and suspension and exclamation points that enrich the mess. Not to mention some gross spelling mistakes, the weakness of the parser, which ignores the circumflex accent, and the programmer’s carelessness in forgetting here and there the blanks between two words. Details, but they end up irritating. The display also admits a weakness. The text appears line by line, and the set skips at each new line. The eyes quickly ask for mercy. (Desmedt, 1986)

Même les pommes de terre ont des yeux

Clotilde Marion, the author of Même les pommes de terre ont des yeux (Even Potatoes Have Eyes), shared her thoughts on male dominance more indirectly. As she states in a Tilt interview:

What concerns the intrigue, I would like to absolutely avoid falling into the eternal cliché of blond “damsels in distress” to find an actual setting. I thought of South American dictatorships. (Marion, 1986)

At first, one can assume that this overtly political game features no women. Even though the player character’s identity remains unknown and leaves room for interpretation, almost no female characters appear in the game. However, as Marion said, she developed the idea for the game while peeling potatoes (Marion, 1986). This seemingly insignificant statement by the designer makes sense in the context of gender representation. In Même les pommes, the independent characters are divided into two major groups: junta troops and poor revolutionaries. In each of these groups, the men dominate. The only female character in the game lives in a house with her baby. Moreover, she is only one of several characters in the house who pleads for food, understood here as the titular potatoes. Although the male characters occupy positions of power, the woman in Marion’s game remains in a private, domestic context.

Moreover, Même les pommes also poses the question of whether the political is more important than the private. The player can achieve a noble goal—overthrowing a junta—but only while using the same undemocratic methods that the junta used. During the game, the player can gain public support in three ways: feeding the crowds, making speeches, and using her army to force the ruling general to step down.

The speeches are particularly hard hitting. Having arrested the general, the player can obtain the former ruler’s speeches of radically different ideological origins. The liberal one, “J’accuse!” (“I Accuse!”), is the title of Emile Zola’s speech against the nationalist and anti-Semitic battue directed at Albert Dreyfus. Conversely, the game includes the conservative “Je vous ai compris” (“I understand you”) speech from Charles de Gaulle, who assumed full power after France’s presidential election in 1958 after rapid constitutional changes that left-wing politicians viewed as a coup d’état (Mitterrand, 1964). In addition, another speech includes the populist phrase “Les patates sont cuites,” which paraphrases the French colloquial expression “Les carottes sont cuites” (“It’s all up”) and connotes an inevitable failure. Indeed, an eventual success—conducting democratic elections—is illusory because the player enforces democratic changes through a coup.

Méwilo

Female marginalization returns as a theme in various titles by Muriel Tramis. She programmed her debut game, Méwilo, with assistance from Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau. Born in the French region of Martinique, Tramis attempted to visualize the history of her ancestors, who were stigmatized during centuries of slavery on the island. The game’s background was derived from an anecdote that emerged during the Martinican slave revolt in 1831, as follows:

Plantation masters saved their gold in the worst way. They got their most faithful slave to dig a hole and then killed and buried him with the gold in order that the ghost of the unfortunate slave would keep the curious away from the treasure. (cf. Donovan, 2010, p. 127)

Just as the antagonism between Black and White becomes subtle in Méwilo, such are the boundaries between the “virtual” and “real.” On the one hand, the game reconstructs historical locations in Saint-Pierre, such as the Rue de Victor Hugo, the local Notre Dame Cathedral, and the panorama of the city, each based on authentic postcards (Oli, 2015). On the other hand, the illusion of taking part in an immersive game experience becomes questioned when the player enters a shop in the Rue de Victor Hugo. Based on the appearance, the player can recognize the shop owner as the digitized version of Muriel Tramis herself. Moreover, when the player clicks on a cage with a bird inside, the programme displays the address of Coktel Vision, the game’s publisher.

Fascination

Having designed Méwilo and another game about slavery in Martinique—Freedom (1988)—Tramis turned toward the production of erotic games that were published under the label of Tomahawk. She authored three games of eroticism: Emmanuelle (1989), Geisha (1990), and Fascination (1991). They all received mixed reviews in France and were panned by Anglo-Saxon critics. For example, Christian Roux writes in the positive review of Fascination that the game drives a male player into a “disturbing identification crisis with a heroine whose role he has to take over” (Roux, 1991). On the other hand, in a retrospective review of the same game by Richard Cobbett, one can read that Fascination features “the stupidest ending of any game in history” (Cobbett, 2011).

In Fascination, the player impersonates a female, dark-skinned French stewardess Doralice. During her stay in Miami, Doralice is entangled in multilevel intrigue around a sexual potency medicine that turns men into sexual beasts. In practice, Fascination plays better than it says: The very description of the action is reminiscent of a mediocre pornographic film. However, there is a method in this madness.

Participating in a complex criminal intrigue, the player has to take a female point of view—not only by directing the female hero Doralice but also by observing the game through her eyes. Of course, Doralice figures not only as a subject but also as an object of the gaze. In the first location, while ordering her to take a shower, the player can observe the heroine bathing nude. However, to paraphrase Diane Carr, although Doralice’s “physicality and gender invite objectification, yet she operates as a perpetrating and penetrative subject within the narrative” (Carr, 2002, p. 175). Admittedly, someone could answer that Fascination abounds in other erotic representations (posters, paintings) with women exposed to the male gaze. It is impossible not to agree with this opinion. It should be stressed, though, that in Fascination, the culturally dominant male sex answers for these pornographic performances. Before we warrant this assumption, it is worth noting that Doralice resists male domination.

Fascination’s protagonist reflects the interwar cinematic model of the femme fatale, a woman who threatens male existence. Doralice’s ability to undermine the masculine rule reveals itself with all its strength. She not only frees Lou Dale, another woman trapped by Kenneth Miller—a psychopathic consumer of potency drug—but also successfully traps him. When having sex with Miller (during which she takes a dominant “cowgirl” position), Doralice puts him to sleep using chloroform. Nor can she be overwhelmed by the Doctor, a mad scientist trying to spread the drug and thus cause a wave of aggression against women.

The last playable scene of Fascination takes place in prison. Having left this prison, the heroine—as well as the player—learns that she participated in a “life-size murder party.” Cobbett’s common sense tells us to reject this ending as an exceptionally bizarre preview of Fincher’s The Game (1997). However, the American director’s film, which also features a murder party organized to humiliate a self-confident businessman, also showed a macabre development of the action that is contradicted by the following birthday party. What distinguishes Fascination from The Game is a sharp criticism of the capitalist power structure, which the United States represents by no accident.

African American feminist bell hooks (1984) notes that capitalism in her home country makes it easier to exercise symbolic power over women. However, capital, according to hooks, also causes an ideological stratification between privileged White feminists (representing the establishment) and much less well-off Black women. In addition to the nightclub bartender Sharon, the Black Doralice is the only dark-skinned female character in the game; in the case of both sexes, the White characters prevail. It becomes evident that the White establishment does set the rules of the murder party, of which the protagonist has become a part. It is also this establishment that places pornographic images of women in the game space, even in the newspaper Miami Tribune. Doralice, leaving the area of the murder party, symbolically abandons the status that de Beauvoir (1956) describes as “wallowing in immanence” (p. 572). However, the sexual freedom obtained by Doralice does not mean that the structures of power are compromised. As Michel Foucault puts it: “In order for there to be a power relationship, at least a certain dose of freedom…is always needed on both sides. If power relations exist in every social space, it is because freedom is everywhere” (Foucault, 1984). The protagonist of Fascination, although managing to preserve her life in a macabre murder party, is incapable of undermining the fundamental rules governing its world. Her fight against sexual repression “represented nothing more, but nothing less…than a tactical shift and reversal in the great deployment of sexuality” (Foucault, 1985, p. 131).

Lost in Time

The negative response to Tramis’ erotic games discouraged Tramis from subverting computer pornography. Instead, she turned to educational games, making use of increasingly popular full-motion video techniques. However, the critique of White male domination in the public discourse was still present in another game created by Tramis that also featured Doralice as a player character. Lost in Time, whose graphics are composed of handwritten backgrounds with recordings of “live” characters superimposed on them, synthesizes Méwilo’s postcolonialism and Fascination’s antimasculinist content.

The game once more puts the player in the role of Doralice who now leads a peaceful life on an unnamed land. The breakthrough moment occurs when she finds a shipwreck from the 19th century. Then, she becomes stunned and enslaved by a White slave trafficker named Jarlath. Doralice awakens in the past, next to a slave from the Yoruba tribe who later proves to be her ancestor. The player needs to liberate the slave, return him to his family, and prevent Jarlath—an envoy from the past—from killing Yoruba, thus from making it so that Doralice will never be born. The whole sequence of events reconstructed by the player resembles several other games dedicated to time travel. However, what differs in Lost in Time is the deconstruction of male symbolic dominance.

Having liberated herself and Yoruba, Doralice finds herself on the island of St. Cristóbal. There, she meets someone who can be easily called a collaborator. Makandal (interestingly, played by Tramis’ husband René-Guy), a Black slave trader, contributes to enforcing colonialism on the island, even if he betrays his blackness in this way. Here, collaboration is shown as a transracial alliance against women. A passage drilled in a mountain that Makandal enters contains an inscription on which Doralice comments: “This inscription asks all women to go away. Is Makandal afraid of women?” The character of Makandal shows the complexity of “Black/White” dialectics. This reminds the player that dark-skinned women confronted “sexual exploitation [both] from inside and outside of their families and…by white as well as black males” (Hine, 1989, p. 914). Black women during the times of slavery faced universal violence on the part of males, regardless of color.

However, this does not at all justify the main perpetrators of violence: the White masters. During the end sequence, the player confronts Jarlath, who hates women just as Makandal did. The only way to defeat Jarlath is to give him an orchid, the smell of which makes him sneeze and fall into an abyss. The scene itself looks campy, but it is not without reason that Tramis chose the orchid as a crucial subject driving the plot forward. Endersby (2016) notes that orchids in Western countries have been culturally associated with seductive, predatory women (p. 162). Yet ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus “recorded the apparently contradictory claim that orchids both promoted erections and caused impotence” (Endersby, 2016, p. 18). Therefore, one can easily note that Tramis’ Lost in Time plays again with the cultural trope of femmes fatales. The orchid that Jarlath receives questions his manliness and his position of power, condemning him to death.