Abstract
The presence of women within videogames has progressed to a state where narratives about the empowerment of women are becoming popular; however, such games still invite a number of gendered stereotypes. Housed in the genre of adventure games, The Walking Dead: Season Two and Life Is Strange appear to follow in the spirit of this emerging women’s revolution but inevitably reestablish traditional presentations of sexism in the treatment of their endings. In particular, the presentation of the infamous Trolley Problem and its inherent utilitarian framework is an incendiary moment wherein these games mark rebellious women as necessary sacrifices for the greater good and the continuation of the community. This article explores these two specific moments of sacrifice at the conclusions of Life Is Strange and The Walking Dead: Season Two and engages with tensions between the status quo and the resistances that challenges these norms.
Keywords
There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: one of the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence—that is, the individual—pure and strong. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not with reference to her; she is incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other. Congregations genuflect Black robes brag gilt epaulettes Freedom’s phantom’s gone to heaven Gay Pride’s chained and in detention KGB’s chief saint descends To guide the punks to prison vans Don’t upset His Saintship, ladies Stick to making love and babies I removed the flag not only in defiance of those who enslaved my ancestors […] but also in defiance of the oppression that continues against black people globally. I did it for the fierce black women on the front lines of the movement and for all the little black girls who are watching us. I did it because I am free. #BlackLivesMatter
These endgame mechanics within this genre regularly represent themselves as a version of the Trolley Problem (Foot, 1967). The Trolley Problem is a popular thought exercise and meme, where active and inactive choices are made in order to save less or more lives. The original 1967 Trolley Problem by Philippa Foot is presented as a trolley hurtling toward a group of five individuals fallen on a track; however, an agent is able to pull a lever to save the five but condemn an individual on the adjacent track to die. In the form of a meme, the Trolley Problem rose to popularity at the end of 2014 with another resurgence in 2016 (Know Your Meme, 2016). The meme poses itself as a game that continues to complicate the circumstances until it becomes more and more complex. As indicated by the popularity and gamification of its meme, the proliferation of the Trolley Problem as a narrative device at the end of adventure games may very well stem from its successful encapsulation of a nexus between ethical dilemmas, interactivity, and playfulness. The Trolley Problem sets up a relationship between utilitarianism and binary choices in games by encouraging the option of killing the one in order to save the five as the greater ethical action. To prevent the most harm from occurring echoes the utilitarian doctrine to minimize pain and maximize pleasure (Mill, 1861/2001, p. 10). Thus, the utilitarian framework of the Trolley Problem presented in such game endings suggests that the moral imperative is to save the greater amount of lives. Utilitarianism also structures the binary choice as one with a definitively ethically good choice, against another alternate, less ethically good, or even immoral option.
The poor treatment of women is an equitable tension when placed in the context of the historically poor representation of women in games (cf. Jenson & De Castell, 2009; Sarkeesian, 2013; Summers & Miller, 2014; Williams, Martins, Consalvo, & Ivory, 2009). To meet the call made by MacCallum-Stewart (2014) for game studies to move the discussion of representation beyond how women are physically depicted in games, in this article, we will focus on how the lives of these women are treated. The final choices in Life Is Strange and The Walking Dead: Season Two were selected as case studies for the reason that they represent the sacrifices of rebellious women as fated, natural, and for the greater good. In our case studies, when the lives of women are placed against the greater good, the bias toward utilitarianism in these games palpably underscores sexist attitudes. The fates of these women in turn reflect the two prominent representations of women in the games of damsels in distress and hostile forms of sexism (cf. Sarkeesian, 2013; Summers & Miller, 2014). Following the two case studies, the article will return to critiquing the Trolley Problem and its utilitarian biases, reproduced in the endgames of Life Is Strange and The Walking Dead: Season Two, and unpack their problematic nature by situating these games in specific historical and cultural contexts.
Case Studies: Femme Fatality
Life Is Strange is an adventure game that follows the life of Max Caulfield, a young teen photography student who can rewind time to alter events. The Walking Dead: Season Two follows Clementine, a young girl who is growing up through a zombie apocalypse. Max and Clementine are provided with close relationships to rebellious women who are outspoken and proactive in their approach to the gameworld. For Life Is Strange, this role model is the character of Chloe Price who is an old childhood friend of Max and an antiestablishment rebel, queer, blue-haired, punk rocker. In The Walking Dead: Season Two, Jane occupies this same role of independence and critique of character action; for Clementine, Jane is a teacher and role model of how to survive.
Notably, both Chloe and Jane are estranged from the communities that they are housed within: Chloe has dropped out of high school and takes Max on adventures to the fringes of Arcadia Bay; Jane comes in and out of the community and takes Clementine along to her secret locations. These representations are neither to be deemed as good nor bad, as such terms imply a “stability of meaning” (Shaw, 2015, p. 41) but are readable as characters railing against the system, who radiate vivacious personalities, display the desire to achieve independence, and offer an alternative to societal expectations.
The discrimination of women is magnified in the final Trolley Problem offered at the end of both videogames presenting a choice to let their friend die or to destroy their community. Players must choose in Life Is Strange between letting Chloe die and killing the townsfolk of Arcadia Bay. In The Walking Dead: Season Two, the player must choose to let Jane die or to kill the patriarchal figure of Kenny. In both Trolley Problems, players are forced to choose between their friendship to fellow women or a sense of duty to the community and patriarchal status quo.
Unfortunately, most historical and contextual discrimination toward rebellious women do not come out of discussion for these games with a large majority of players citing Kenny as an obvious choice for The Walking Dead: Season Two (20% of players chose to stay with Jane) and many players for Life Is Strange being unable to save Chloe over Acadia Bay (47% of players chose to save Chloe). The statistics for the popular ending reflect a preference to play through the fated sacrifice of Chloe and Jane. Since most players will choose what they believe is insinuated as the good or victorious ending (Consalvo, Busch, & Jong, 2016, pp. 5-6), therefore, these statistics also point to which ending might be perceived by players to be the good ending framed by the gameworld. The sacrifice of Chloe and Jane placed against the community brings into tension the existence of these rebellious women as conflicting with society and, in turn, unravels underlying sexist attitudes toward rebellious women.
Life Is Strange: bae > bay
In the high school bathroom of Blackwell Academy, an emperor butterfly lands on a bucket, a heated argument erupts, and a gun is fired—thus begins the chaotic rippling effects of Life Is Strange. The avatar of Max Caulfield is an 18-year-old, Caucasian, awkward, and reticent Polaroid enthusiast studying photography, as well as a sudden and unsuspecting master of time travel. In the cataclysmic bathroom scene, Max reaches her hand out in distress and inexplicitly reverses time. Turning back to the moments leading up to the gunshot, in this alternate universe, Max hammers open a fire alarm to scare off the shooter and prevent the death of Max’s soul mate Chloe Price. Across five episodes, Max reverses time to change the events of the past, present, and the future.
Despite the choices given periodically throughout Life Is Strange, the game is predominantly linear. Many choices and narrative tensions in the game center on the task of saving the lives of other characters, from bad decisions, to injury, or death. As noted by de Miranda (2016, p. 5), the writers encourage a sense of attachment, a “nonsolipsistic relationship,” between Max, the player, and the other characters of Arcadia Bay—the game encourages attachment to Max and her relationships with others through the mechanics of character interaction and dialogue choices. To put the particular narrative device of savior into the context of the historical representation of women: As far back as the mythology of Perseus and Andromeda, the figure of the damsel in distress depicts women as sacrificial lambs waiting to be—or unable to be—rescued by a man (cf. Sarkeesian, 2013; Summers & Miller, 2014). Many characters in Life Is Strange are fated to fall into crisis unless Max Caulfield interferes. While Life Is Strange subverts the savior of this story from the traditional male hero to the role of a woman heroine, Max Caulfield, the damsel in distress, Chloe Price, is still constantly required to be rescued: 7 times to be exact.
To push the damsel in distress point home, Life Is Strange presents a final choice to the player to choose to save Chloe (which leads to the destruction of Arcadia Bay) or to save the town (and let Chloe die). Framed as a utilitarian decision, this dilemma gives players an incentive to save the town since sacrificing Chloe would quantitatively prevent the greatest amount of harm in saving the greater amount of lives. In order to save the town from a storm manifested by Max’s use of time travel powers, choosing this option reverses time and returns to the original bathroom scene, so as to let Chloe die as it were due to happen without Max’s supernatural intervention. Letting Chloe die and binding her fate to this cataclysmic moment make her death appear natural and inconsequential to the player’s actions. The utilitarian bias of the game is enforced by the consequences revealed in the final cutscene of the game. The amount of time spent on choosing for Chloe to live, as opposed to Chloe dying, reveals a bias in directorial focus—spending 11 minutes on the ending with Chloe’s death compared to the 7 minutes given for Chloe living. The larger message which may be taken here is that rebellious independence can destroy a community and that the right solution is for communities to survive at the cost of freedom, the suffering of minorities, and punishment of trouble makers. Indeed, Chloe’s entire independence can be read as a mistake in the face of her character being fated to die, which positions the player to choose the utilitarian, hate Chloe, antipunk, antiwoman, antiqueer option.
This divide between the community, as if Chloe was the other, is palpable when placed in the particular context of her free-spirited personality, punk dress aesthetics, blue hair, and queer identity—Chloe is undeniably a vivid personification of defiant individuality. Life Is Strange’s sacrifice frames Chloe’s demise as not only fated but also for the greater good. However, if the greater good in Life Is Strange is utilitarian, as we will argue, then the consequences of simply framing the ethical dilemma between choosing to save Chloe and killing Acadia Bay versus save Arcadia Bay and letting Chloe die reveal the game mechanic as a propagation of a conservative status quo. Particularly worrying, if Chloe is to be the other placed against the greater good, then the status quo in question is presumably patriarchal, since the process of othering Chloe Price may indeed feed into reproducing a patriarchal and heteronormative valuation of women and queer folk as only definable when placed against others, rather than existing in their own right as human beings (cf. Butler, 1990, pp. 1–5, 24–25; de Beauvoir, 1949/2010, p. 30).
It seems that the writers have tempered the utilitarian choice of saving Arcadia Bay as the canon ending of the story in which they wanted to tell as artists, since it is bittersweet in its goodbye to Chloe and gives players a clearer sense of closure to the arch of the narrative. Arguably, it is seen to be as if it were a canonical ending due to the fated nature of the sacrifice that shows a deterministic logic of the gameworld existing beyond which ending players choose. Furthermore, this ending can be considered clever in terms of writing and the formation of affective experience for the player. Since the game forces Max to save Chloe constantly from the beginning of the game, Chloe’s sacrificial ending inspires poignant philosophical questions about our own limited autonomy in life as well as videogames and addresses questions of illusionary agency (cf. de Wildt, 2014; MacCallum-Stewart & Parsler, 2007; Tulloch, 2010). The writers have essentially towed players through Life Is Strange so as to meet the conclusion of letting Chloe die from the beginning of the narrative. It allows the players to contemplate if it was all for nothing? but reaffirm that their affective pleasures were worth the journey and gameplay. These diegetic deaths further link with the game’s overall completion, “where the end conditions for play can be understood to be couched in particular problems related to the level of possibility left for the player” (Fordyce, 2013). The need for Chloe to perish is one that is bound with an utterly final ending: death.
This being said, in order to make Chloe’s death cathartically heart wrenching, Life Is Strange also constructs an intense and endearing relationship with Chloe Price for both Max and the player, which has produced an interesting rebellious result in player choice statistics. Against the grain of both social expectations and the encouragement of the game’s creators to save Arcadia Bay by painting Chloe’s death as fated, a significant number of players have passionately voiced their support of saving the bae (i.e., Chloe Price) over the bay (Arcadia Bay)—trending as a hashtag #bae>bay and catchphrase “bae > bay.” Proponents of bae > bay subvert expectations from previous studies which have noted the tendency of players to choose the right choice for the canonical good ending (Consalvo, Busch, & Jong, 2016, p. 6). The emphatic bae > bay response from players confirms at least two things: firstly, in order to see their choice of saving Chloe as a rebellion indicates that players felt pressured by a status quo to save Arcadia Bay; secondly, these players flipped writers intentions in terms of existential pondering—these players were able to seize the opportunity given in the penultimate choice, rather than following what was presumed as the right choice and claim what was meant as an alternate ending as their own through online discussions—thus performing the very autonomy in which Life Is Strange was attempting to question.
The Walking Dead: Season Two: The patriarchal family unit
Clementine is bitten, bruised, and blackmailed throughout her experiences in The Walking Dead: Season Two. One of the only survivors from the earlier season, Clementine, an 11-year-old Black girl, struggles to grow up in a postapocalyptic future populated by zombies and other dangerous survivors. Along the way, Clementine is forced to choose between self-reliance and the community to survive. The Walking Dead: Season Two provides a number of women characters from which the player-character is able to use as role models for their own development as young women. These include the character of Jane and Sarah, which is contrasted against that of Kenny.
Within The Walking Dead: Season Two, the portrayal of Jane originally provides the player-character of Clementine a relationship which is nonmaternal, giving a new relationship dynamic and role model for the young girl. However, much like Life Is Strange, this development changes during play. The role of Clementine moves from one of independence, when alone, to one in groups where she becomes a child again. Jane progresses from an independent character who offers survival tips and helps the community into a cold-hearted woman who is only accepted back into the group after coupling up with Luke and then notably punished for her intimacy. This portrayal of Jane ultimately feeds into the trend of hostile sexism in gaming where women are represented as sexual objects who seek power over men (Summers & Miller, 2014). Clementine, however, progresses from an individual agent into one that is protected by the group, as evidenced by the need of each community to care for Clementine. This trend progresses with the introduction of Kenny (a character from the earlier season) who presents himself as a father figure to Clementine, whether she wants it or not. An initial portrayal of Jane and Clementine who fight for their autonomy through the course of the game ultimately turns this presentation of women into hostile forms of sexism or damsels in distress through the endgame mechanic.
Jane teaches Clementine many of the skills needed for survival in this world, whereas Kenny attempts to protect Clementine but neglects to teach her how to survive independently and essentially forces the reliance of living on a patriarchal figure. Although the game largely condemns women for their independence, it seems a curious thing to allow Jane and Clementine to develop these skills when contrasted against the trend to punish or coddle these two characters. This could be attributed to Jane’s masculine appearance, which provides a visible distinction as to why she is not accepted by either community group, as she subverts the status quo through her gender performativity.
Furthermore, when Jane is contrasted with other female characters—Cristina, Rebecca, Bonnie, and Sarita—Jane appears to be doubly punished for her deviation of normative womanhood, both due to her lack of femininity and her omission in supporting the male characters. Cristina and Rebecca are both presented as instinctive mothers who are pregnant throughout the season—both give the community advice and support their male partners—when these men disappear, so too do these women quickly perish. Bonnie and Sarita, on the other hand, support various male characters through action on their decisions (Bonnie follows orders from Carver; Sarita follows Kenny’s instructions). The pivotal choice at the end of the game appears to revolve around Jane’s estrangement from her femininity, in that she hides the baby of Rebecca, known as AJ, to provoke Kenny into lashing out—this action is seen by characters in the game as ruthless, as many of the characters believe that Jane had killed the baby. When it is revealed that the event was a deception to showcase Kenny’s violent nature to the group, the action is still seen as despicable.
Strangely enough, Kenny, through this confrontation with Jane, becomes the authority on family care, and by extension children (such as the player-character Clementine), and through this authority (which can be read in his masculine actions), he usurps Jane’s presentation of femininity as abhorrent and attempts to kill her for it—Jane is a personification of the other and an affront to traditional values. At this point, it should be clear that the role that Kenny places Clementine in is one that is constantly protected from the world and not one that enables her to interact with it. As much as The Walking Dead: Season Two presents a postapocalyptic future, the solution seems to be (for the writers at least) trapped in traditional values of a heteronormative patriarchal family unit.
This aspect is further brought into contrast when considering the role of Sarah (another young girl a similar age to Clementine) who is protected by her father (Carlos) and the community but is eventually killed by walkers due to her inability to save herself (represented by her gender, mental disability, and the lack of guidance offered). Even though it is not explicitly mentioned, since Sarah is represented as having a mental disability, like many of the other women characters in The Walking Dead, some players expected—or were even eager—for her to die (Struck, 2014). Antithetically, Sarah is dismissed as needing to die due to her dependence on her father for survival, while in the same breath, Clementine’s livelihood is curtailed under the protection of men.
Although there are a number of sexist problems inherent in The Walking Dead: Season Two, the focus for this case study shall be the final choice presented to the player between choosing to kill Kenny or Jane. When the player reaches the climax of the game, choosing to kill Kenny—the father figure—or to let him kill Jane, the method in which these choices are portrayed places one choice as more naturalistic that the other. Jane’s death appears incidental, since what causes her death is for the player-character of Clementine to not act and let the game, and thus Kenny, run its course into the death of Jane. Choosing to do nothing (to not select an option but let the timer run out) also causes the death of Jane and thus presents her death as fated through the very game mechanics. Referring to the Trolley Problem, the lack of action suggests that Clementine (and the player) is absolved of guilt for not intervening, since it could be seen that the natural sequence of events was for Jane to die. This echoes the representation of choice for Life Is Strange both Jane and Chloe are sacrificed for the good of the community.
Contrasting this action with the alternative choice to kill Kenny, the player-character must choose to act against Kenny and shoot him in order to prevent Jane’s death. The player, much like the agent in the Trolley Problem, must choose to shift the trolley to save one of the two possible victims. Although this is not a strict utilitarian problem (since each results in a singular death), the implications of Jane as an outsider to the community insinuate Kenny—the patriarchal figure—as the demand of the normative social good. Furthermore, it exemplifies the consequentialist dilemma of the responsibility of actions and nonaction: shooting Kenny makes the player-character inherently responsible for their actions while choosing to do nothing allows the player-character to provide their own interpretation for what happens. Indeed, even in the choice presented, the two options are to “shoot Kenny” or to “look away”—the use of language here involves the player for whether they choose to act or, again, to absolve the player by allowing them to simply look away. When compared to the direct actions of the player-character to shoot Kenny and save Jane’s life, this provides a stark affective difference in the choice that the player is offered.
Consequent to the death of either Jane or Kenny, the two endings presented, much like in Life Is Strange, point toward a bias that promotes Kenny as the right or, at the very least, canonical choice. When the player chooses to save Kenny, a variety of good results materialize: it allows the chance for Cristina (a character from the start of the game) to be found, for the group of Kenny, AJ (the baby), and Clementine to stay as a family unit, and for a small community, Wellington, to be found by the group. Although Kenny can be separated from Clementine and AJ if the player-character chooses to join the Wellington community, the ending is largely optimistic and jovial—both Clementine and AJ do not have to face the world and are instead safe in the community’s walls. Contrasting this, if the player-character chooses to save Jane, the results are ominous: Clementine and Jane return to a shopping center to settle down and look after the baby AJ; they arrive in the abandoned area, make camp, and are approached by another family group; instantly, there is suspicion from both sides as the game cuts to credits. Even while Jane lives with AJ and Clementine, the ending is far from the relatively utopic ending that saving Kenny presents—with Jane the group appears to only survive, instead of potentially flourishing. Even observing the duration and color scheme of the endings, Kenny’s ending of 12 minutes is explored through a golden splash of colors and starkly contrasts the blue, black, and brown gloom of Jane’s 9 minutes ending. The next season, The Walking Dead: A New Frontier (2016), further extends this notion of bad ending by having a resolution to these character endings: Jane kills herself after discovering that she’s pregnant, while Kenny dies in a car accident. Returning to the notion of fated endings, Jane chooses to kill herself instead of raising a child in a zombie apocalypse, while Kenny dies in an accident unrelated to the demands of his role in the community. The implication is clear: Those with wombs are damned, Jane's inability to perform a woman's biological function damns her – revealing The Walking Dead: Season Two's (gender essentialist, misogynistic, ablest, transphobic, homophobic, and reifying) role of women in society as mothers, or secondary characters.
Discussion: Derailing the Trolley
Unpacking the Trolley Problem and Utilitarianism
Philippa Foot’s (1967) Trolley Problem or “The problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect” explores the differences in the doctrine of double effect. Foot separates between an agent’s intention to perform morally right actions and the foreseen consequences of their actions, primarily exploring the moral weight of the intention and how it relates to its consequences (Foot, 1967, p. 2). In Foot’s (1967) own words, the consensus for the Doctrine of Double Effect is, “that it is one thing to steer towards someone foreseeing that you will kill him and another to aim at his death as part of your plan” (p. 2). As long as the intention is to do good, even though there is a chance something harmful will occur, the intention is meant to carry the ethical intention. Foot sees a problem with this approach and attempts to move away from resting on the intention of doing good (i.e., the doctrine of double effect) toward a more nuanced discussion of the moral burden of actions (p. 4). Essentially, identifying the degree of responsibility an agent has on an event and how consequences are enacted. In this manner, killing one individual in the Trolley Problem can be seen as equally bad as killing five due to the shared responsibility of good and bad actions. Although utilitarianism steers an agent to a choice of saving the five over the one, utilitarianism’s focus on happiness suggests that people who operate under a utilitarian worldview would readily accept the murder of one to save five.
As a general rule of thumb, utilitarianism seems to work as a moral guide—the more people alive the better (Mill, 1861/2001, pp. 10–14)—but when questions about the individual and their ability to provide happiness or mitigate harm to others are raised, the self-evident truth of greatest happiness becomes murky. What if the ethical agent from the Trolley Problem knew that the individual on the adjacent track to the five was in fact responsible for heinous crimes and would undoubtedly commit more? Or alternatively, what if the group of five were already destined to die within the month due to mortal illnesses? These variations and pieces of information, although not absolving the moral difficulties of the ethical choice, to kill one’s life instead of five or letting five people die, can influence agents to lean in one direction or another. Foot (1967), as an example, routinely refers to the Catholic Church’s position regarding abortion and its influence on an agent (p. 5). As a thought experiment, the reductive version of the Trolley Problem with faceless victims may easily lead to utilitarian responses—save the most people—but in reality, such hypothetical dilemmas restrict critical ethical reflection into a game which regards people as merely numbers. Likewise, Life Is Strange and The Walking Dead: Season Two treat the sacrifice of Chloe and Jane as a game, while these ethical dilemmas occur in the real world with implications, authorities, and perspectives which are considered when making ethical choices.
No Unhappiness and No Rebels
At the core of utilitarianism lies the presumption that the status quo is fundamentally good for the community (Ashford, 2000, pp. 421–423). Much like the gamification inherent to the Trolley Problem, the reification (literal translation: “thingification”) of certain lives is typical of capitalist, racist, ablest, transphobic, homophobic, antirefugee, speciest, and patriarchal ideology. By numerically stating that “all lives matter” equally, as it is presented in the Trolley Problem, derails conversations about the historic and continued violence perpetrated by privileged classes. Marx and Engels (1848/1976) themselves considered utilitarianism as “a theory of mutual exploitation” (p. 409), critiquing it as erroneously weighing the greater social good as a collection of individual good deeds (Brenkert, 1981, p. 198). Considering the social as merely a sum of individuals, rather than contemporaneous entities (see in epigraph: Goldman, 1911), defines individuals as private rather than social beings. This alienated definition of human beings protects the notion of private property, the division of labor, and exploitation (Brenkert, 1981, p. 200).
Since utilitarianism is incapable of generating its own telos (an ultimate end goal), it relies on the assumed happiness of the current state of affairs and finds the notion of unhappy resistance as incompatible (Ahmed, 2010; Brenkert, 1981, pp. 203–204). In a letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. (1963) wrote, I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.
The preservation of status quos not only appears in the conservatism of utilitarianism, but furthermore, in nonaction or passive indifference. For Foot, the Trolley Problem can be seen as a consequentialist dilemma, in which action and nonaction relate to the moral responsibility of the agent (Fitzpatrick, 2009; Thomson, 1985, pp. 1395–1396). With such a viewpoint, allowing the trolley to continue its collision course into the five would not necessarily be seen as an immoral act of the agent either. The agent did not cause the event, and as such, the agent is a bystander to the accident (Thomson, 2008). However, through the action of pulling a lever, the agent would become responsible for its consequences. In a sense, apathy would lead to the greatest degree of moral certainty, since an agent’s inaction may circumnavigate having to potentially bare negative consequences of actions—even if acting would have produced a better outcome or lessened harm. From this consequentialist perspective, the temptation to do nothing may seem to be morally permissible. We regard the presentation of moral apathy shaped by the fated deaths of women in Life Is Strange and The Walking Dead: Season Two as being contextually dangerous and irresponsible while seated in a history of the poor treatment of women in gaming.
Feminist Ethics
Most philosophical arguments on ethics, including those depicted in games (Murphy & Zagal, 2011, pp. 193–196), tend to take the social context away from ethical dilemmas. Philosophical arguments attempt to reduce ethical dilemmas to the core concepts of their philosophy—removing the very causes and consequences of performing moral actions to present an argument about whether such rules aid their mode of ethics (Monro, 1979, pp. 47–49). We contend that the discussion of both The Walking Dead: Season Two and Life Is Strange must address the surrounding social context of the ethical dilemmas that they provide. Primarily, the role of young women as the overriding context, since both provide young women as player-characters, and climactic dilemmas that negotiate the choice to save or sacrifice the other prominent women casted in each game. Thus, it is imperative to contextualize these choices within a history of the oppression of moral agency and the limited roles given to women in gaming.
Masculine traditions of philosophy have regarded morality as an internal process guided by the models of theories and beliefs, where actions and consequences are collateral to morality itself (Walker, 2008, p. 8). In gender essentialist traditions, women have been considered inherently less moral beings, emotionally driven, and incapable of being objective or detached (Walker, 2008, pp. 59–64). From both philosophical and gender essentialist traditions, masculinity has homogenized ideals of morality as well as the manners in which morality is contemplated, thus perpetuating the normalization of predominantly masculine principles in social norms and throughout the discipline of philosophy. To be sure, our critiques are not incongruous with philosophical traditions of inquiry but rather see it valuable to consider different modes of moral reasoning as a means of revealing dogma in moral frameworks. Feminist ethics challenge underlying epistemological biases of moral theories such as utilitarianism and consequentialism. Feminist ethics observe all morality, including moral exercises and systems of normative ethics (what we ought to do), as enmeshed with a culture that is shaping and reproducing status quos. Unlike traditional moral philosophy, inquiry with a feminist sensibility is not transcendent or external to our lived experiences but considers people as moral agents who participate, “within the plane of morality, not outside or above it” (Walker, 2008, p. 4).
For example, Carol Gilligan’s (1987/2008) feminist ethics shifts the traditional philosophical focus on justice toward moral imperatives based on a framework of care. To apply Gillian’s ethics of care to the reductionist utilitarianism presented in the Trolley Problem, and reproduced in Life Is Strange and The Walking Dead: Season Two, highlights the ways in which these traditional moral exercises overlook the ethical roles of personal attachment, accountability, and the responsibility of taking action. Instead of questions traditionally guided by attempting to disclose what is just, a model of care accentuates the interdependency of people who exist in webs of relationships, appearing alongside and within the pragmatic moral question of what ought I do? (Gilligan, 1987/2008, pp. 469–471). Linking back to the Trolley Problem, or the “The problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect,” the question of abortion shifts from a perspective of authorities (priests, doctors, and society) to one that occupies the cogent questions regarding the (ir)responsibility of how the parent is affectively attached or detached to the fetus (Gilligan, 1987/2008, p. 470). Care reorganizes the focus of moral reasoning. In this process, an ethics of care sheds light on the common oversights of universal principles in utilitarianism and the Trolley Problem presented in a hypothetical vacuum where agents act alone under the false pretense of objectivity (Gilligan, 1987/2008, p. 476). Feminist ethics demonstrate that a core negligence of the Trolley Problem resides in its intrinsic traditionally masculine detachment of ethics.
Gaming, Ethics, and Contextuality
While the digital realm seems to offer infinite exploration of moral dilemmas—as if it were a mirror to transcend the tangible and give players a vehicle to test all possible worlds—like the feminist considerations of morality, the supposed counterfactual simulation chamber of videogames, inescapably, remains tied to lived experiences and social context (cf. Consalvo, 2009; Oudshoorn, Rommes, & Stienstra, 2004; Salter & Blodgett, 2012; Shaw, 2010, 2015; Steinkuehler, 2006). “Gameplay is contingent and contextual,” argues Consalvo, Busch, and Jong (2016, p. 17), but just as players (claim to) desire choices or actions that matter to the outcome of a game, those choices made are ultimately produced in and through the social systems that players are a part of in conjunction with the technical systems from which games are created.
Drawing on the work of Adrienne Shaw (2015, pp. 39–42), representation has been proposed as important for various reasons (including but not limited to): molding social realities and relationships; reflecting the assumed power dynamics of a culture and, in turn, influencing how we treat one another; the ability to draw an intended audience toward or away from a particular medium by representing certain identities; and from an educational point of view, it has the potential to broaden our own worldviews through seeing those who are unlike ourselves—to put oneself in someone else’s shoes. While it does not cover the complexities of representation and identification—the multiple readings of characters which to a great extent is contextual—only one has to look at the trends of representation in gaming to notice the White, male hegemony (Williams et al., 2009) and predominantly binary portraiture of women characters as either damsels in distress (benevolent sexism) or constructed as dominatrix adversaries (hostile sexism; Summers & Miller, 2014). Seemingly, the characters of Chloe Price (Life Is Strange) and Jane (The Walking Dead: Season Two) appear as women unhoused in either of the ambivalent categories of benevolent or hostile forms of sexism (Glick & Fiske, 1996)—both are gutsy women who are fluid in their gender, who subvert the social expectations of women as being docile, and confidently perform masculine signifiers (cf. Butler, 1990; de Beauvoir, 1949/2010). Although the binary mechanic to be saved (benevolent sexism) or to be sacrificed (hostile sexism) reduces, Chloe and Jane into damsels in distress arranged as sacrifices for the good of the community and punished for their deviation from the traditional roles of women pressured by patriarchal society.
Currently at stake is the marginalization of women in gaming that identifies broader social issues of the patriarchal system. Extensive research has made apparent the particular gendering of gaming, where patriarchal and gender essentialist ideology paints boys and men as the only legitimate gamers, creating a climate of hostility against femininity in the new gaming public (cf. Cassell & Jenkins, 1998; Consalvo, 2012; Kirkpatrick, 2015; Salter & Blodgett, 2012; Shaw, 2013). In the gender essentialist dichotomy of gaming, women have historically been considered as illegitimate or “fake gamers,” which has sharply segregated women from gaming spaces, identities, and practices (cf. Lien, 2013; Margolis & Fisher, 2002; Shaw, 2011). Since the gamer identity is marked as masculine, women voices are treated as unauthorized to discuss games and are routinely threatened by online and off-line harassment (cf. Butt & Apperley, 2016; Golding & Van Deventer, 2016; Massanari, 2016; Salter & Blodgett, 2012). In the context of gaming culture as one which has perpetuated decades of discrimination against femininity, girls, and women, as well as their intersecting identities (Black and LGBTQ+ lives are also focal identities presented in The Walking Dead and Life Is Strange and routinely exposed to prejudice), it becomes a moral obligation to break the cycle by privileging the lives and experiences of minorities, creating spaces of refuge for healing, in order to begin the process of achieving equality. Ultimately, the Achilles’s heel of utilitarianism and the Trolley Problem lies in their base assumption that all people are already treated as equals, which uncritically and unethically disregards historical and current forms of oppressive power dynamics and social inequality.
Conclusion: Consequences
There are a number of points raised by these readings of Life Is Strange and of The Walking Dead: Season Two, ranging from the presentation of these utilitarian Trolley Problem choices and the personal consequences they have for women. At first glance, these types of representation appear to be progressive and liberating, especially when Chloe and Jane are first introduced to Max and Clementine as nonconforming women, but by the end of these two videogames such independence is seen as a disruption of the natural order and so for the good of the community, these rebellious women are doomed.
While the limitations on the women characters in Life Is Strange and The Walking Dead are troubling, a further consideration is the in-game performance of players as being implicit in the propagation of the patriarchal norms presented by these games. Placing the burden onto the player to bear the moral accountability reproduces the notion that it is the responsibility of individuals to create change for the communal good, rather than the responsibility of corporations and companies to make changes in their policies throughout the industry. Treating morality as being produced within individuals, once again, falls into the neoliberalist and utilitarian vision of a greater good which sees its communal good as an accumulation of alienated individual acts, rather than working toward progress as a community. Furthermore, presenting the decision to save or sacrifice rebellious women as a binary choice insinuates that each choice may be two sides of the same coin or deserving of equal consideration. Especially since the sacrifice option is shaped as if it were fated through the narrative and game mechanics, this fated bias has been obfuscated as apolitical in the mere presentation of the choices as viable options for players to save or sacrifice women. While giving choices for players as moral exercises, presenting the sacrifice as fated within the game’s logic reproduces the tired trope of women as sacrificial lambs, damsels in distress, or hostile forms of sexism that sees the death of women as necessary to progress in a game. When the gaming industry has fostered a culture that treats women as outsiders to the community (Kirkpatrick, 2015), the games industry has an ethical responsibility to be critical of the narratives they present, particularly if they are routinely writing the sacrifice of women as being foreordained.
Not only do these games enforce the expectations of domination over women characters in the portrayal of benevolent and hostile forms of sexism, but both the avatars and their rebellious friends have been punished throughout Life Is Strange and The Walking Dead for challenging these expectations. The decision made by the developers to frame the endgames as Trolley Problems—the mechanic inherently sets up a bias to sacrifice one for the greater good—encourages the player-characters to comply with the utilitarian status quo instead of critically evaluating the state of society. While the existence of the alternate opinion does allow players to mobilize against the fated ending, however, when faced with further progression by game developers—particularly by Telltale Games as evidenced by The Walking Dead: A New Frontier—the discussion seems to be firmly in the hands of content creators. Until developers critically analyze the subtext of their narratives and move beyond the Trolley Problem and the sacrifice of women as a deus ex machina, such depictions of women will continue to propagate the patriarchal status quo. Despite the best intentions of the game developers, the moral problems posed in these games are real issues that remain unresolved, needing critical reflection and considerable amount of care around the treatment of presenting choices to save or sacrifice women.
Ironically, in a genre which advertises the autonomy of the playstyle in choosing your own adventure, the naturalization of women sacrifices as being incidental, fated, and ultimately chosen by the player removes the autonomy of these women characters. Overall, games like Life Is Strange and The Walking Dead: Season Two point toward the gradual improvement of representations of women in games from antiquated unidimensional characters. Although these games do not present women as sexual objects, many are still treated as accessories. The male gaze and its presumption of a male audience manifest in the forced dynamic between the player-characters to serve as protectors (Schreier, 2012) for the other women characters.
The impact of replicating the gender performances of benevolent and hostile sexism reproduces the systematic marginalization of women not only in the content of these games but in gaming communities. Such repercussions are shown as a tangible example through the unfolding events of 2014’s Gamergate harassment campaign. Comparable to the Trolley Problem and the admissible option of inaction as a means of evading personal accountability, while extreme actions were assumed by some to be disconnected to the other “ambient affiliated” Gamergaters (Butt & Apperley, 2016) or apathetic bystanders, taking no action against the cases of injustice and abuse facilitated the harassment by sanctioning it as admissible behavior (cf. Butt & Apperley, 2016; Massinari 2016, p. 13). We would like to indicate a potential research trajectory here that reviews the parallels between political activism, apolitical inaction, and our critique of the Trolley Problem.
This research inserts the conversation of the empowerment of women amid the complex tensions of traditional ethical dilemmas that have ignored gender while pivoting on gender-relevant questions of autonomy and social morality. The concentration of our method by specifically reviewing the climactic Trolley Problem mechanics of these two adventures helps to render the problematic relationship between ethical dilemmas, binary choices, and forced endgame scenarios. In this particular method, we see the potential for future research to dissect other endgame dilemmas that present themselves as the Trolley Problem in a similar fashion. Ultimately, Life Is Strange and The Walking Dead: Season Two are videogames that are products born out of the historically patriarchal industry of gaming. Rectifying the marginalization of women in gaming is no simple task—to rebel and act against the status quo is a continuous process—but it is an ethical responsibility and moral imperative to unlearn our socially embedded bigotry, so that we may all participate in a new and more inclusive kind of greater good.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.