Girls+and+Gaming+-+Tomb+Raider+Revamp

The topic of gender and games is a popular one as well as being a topic dear to my heart. Being a girl interested in game and hoping to enter the field of game development, I want to encourage girls to be interested in games too. I also happen to be a fan of one of the most iconic female characters in video games, Ms. Lara Croft of the Tomb Raider series. Lara has her fans but also her critics as there are a number of people who are turned off by her hypersexualized avatar in the games even to the point of finding it offensive. I personally don't have a problem with Lara but I can understand where these people are coming from and do agree that there are numerous cases where sex imagery in games and game advertising could and should be toned down. As I pointed out in my presentation on Sex in Video Games, Toby Gard, the original creative design for the first Tomb Raider game as well as Lara's creator, never intended for her to become the sex icon that she did. He in fact left the team on Tomb Raider 2 because he felt he lost too much creative control. Something I did forget to mention in the presentation is that the new Tomb Raider game currently in production is going to be considered a reboot of the series taking us to a time when Lara was still a student studying archeology. Something interesting to note is that they have revamped Lara appearance in response to the many critical attacks on her and the sexualized nature of her avatar, including her signature short shorts. The new Lara Croft is to be dressed in a more functional manner. This game will involve Lara being stranded on an island and having to fight for her survival. Instead of the shorts, she is wearing cargo pants. Her hair is a bit messy being in a loose ponytail rather than her long braid. An interesting note is that they have done testing with participants who were showed images of the common older Lara as well as images of the new Lara and they tracked their eye movements to see what parts of the images they looked at. The results showed that when looking at the new Lara, participants spent less time admiring Lara's breasts and looked more at her eyes and her face. I see this a showing that toning down the sexuality allowed them to look past the fact that she is a woman and see her for the character, the personality, that I and other fans love about her. Being able to see the personality of any character allows us as players to relate to them more.

There was a large GameInformer article on the new game. A scanned copy of it can be seen on this [|page]