Why Duke Nukem Didn’t Work

Dear Reader,

So, “Duke Nukem Forever” came and went, and the reaction was pretty harsh. And if you take a look at the reviews, I think it’s fairly obvious that the distaste was deeper than just broken gameplay: people didn’t like this game, on a personal level. Randy Pitchford and the folks at Gearbox are a talented bunch, and I don’t think anyone blames them for not being able to salvage this train wreck, but the fact remains that DNF will probably always be their least-loved game.

But why the personal reaction? Why the intense, intimate dislike? I have a theory on this, but you’ll need to hit the jump to see what it is.

I think the answer is simple: gender roles have changed. When “Duke Nukem 3D” came out, there was cultural breathing room for type A, old school machismo. At the center of the Duke hypothesis was the idea that you could, in theory, be so balls awesome that women would simply be rendered sex slaves in your presence. Those days are good and over. Even or maybe especially in the world of gaming, feminism has sunk in. We still play as strapping, heroic dudes who score hot looking babes, but said babes are no longer idealized as concubines. More often than not, they are our equals in combat, and they usually spend much of the game rejecting our advances, much to our delight.

"I have no intention of sleeping with you"

Digital ladies are still sexual objects, to be sure, but a lot has changed about what that means. In Duke’s day, the hottest thing imaginable was a Catholic schoolgirl outfit on a drunken stripper, who seemed to orgasm at the sight of you. Now we fantasize about warrior women, tough as nails and hard to get; sometimes, we never even do get them. Trishka in “Bulletstorm,” for instance, spits vitriol at every attempt to seduce her, and is never successfully wooed. “Uncharted” features a dazzling array of beautiful women, but they have their own agendas and goals, and they keep pace with Nathan when the bullets start flying. Jack in “Mass Effect 2″ greets the player’s offers of friendship with, “Sh*t, you sound like a pussy.” And, as any aspiring Shepard knows, if you give in to Jack’s offer of casual sex and bed her early, you kill all possibility of a relationship with her down the line. Even in “Grand Theft Auto,” you have to take the girls on dates now. This is a pretty far cry from a grateful hooker offering up gratis services as repayment for rescue from aliens.

“Duke Nukem Forever” attempted to hold to its past, and suffered for it. Not ten minutes into the game, a couple of giddy (and suspiciously young) ladies are playing telephone with your wing-wang, while Duke retains his typical, dispassionate “of course I deserve this” attitude. As I watched this, I could feel my nose wrinkle, and not just because I’m a stubborn moralist. There was something deeper, more insidious to my reaction: this kind of thing just isn’t cool anymore.

Now some spoil-sports will still wring their hands and insist that women are “sex objects” in video games, but this accusation ignores the fact that men are idealized too. Is Nathan Drake not exceedingly handsome? Is Marcus Fenix not ripped full of bulging muscles? Everyone is a sex object in video games, and they should be. Women are given ample cleavage and an hour-glass figure, to be sure, but this is done for the same reason they let the sun crest over a cliff side right before setting in “Red Dead Redemption:” it looks pretty. Games are visual, and in a visual art form it’s only natural to make things look nice. Call it crass if you like, but sexist? Far from it.

Hooray for amoral sociopaths

There is, of course, one notable exception: “God of War.” Kratos, gaming’s biggest douche bag, holds to Duke’s old standard by plowing through an army of mindless, gasping Greek women who can barely contain their animal desire for him. Just one more addition to a nearly infinite list of reasons why I hate “God of War.” But this is the exception, not the rule, and you’ll very likely encounter plenty of gamers like myself who find it either A) unappealing or B) kind of stupid.

Now, in fairness, “Duke Nukem 3D” was one of the first overtly sexual mainstream games. A lot of its appeal was the simple, illicit thrill of watching eroticism wedge its way into this pixelated territory where it had never before wandered. And since this was before internet porn came and ruined the mystique of sex forever, seeing some boobies in a video game still carried with it a certain weight and power. Now, you can type “vagina” into Google and see more sex than any human being ever should in the space of minutes. So maybe “Duke Nukem Forever” could never recapture that kind of excitement anyway.

But nonetheless, I think DNF illustrates how much gamers have changed in only a few years. Where feminist portrayals of women were in their infancy in the late 80s and 90s, they’re actually the standard now; “God of War” is unusual for departing from it. Most “feminists” probably scoff at video gamed and still consider them sexist, but they’re completely wrong. In many ways, video games have evolved a far more sophisticated view of women than “Twilight,” or the average Sandra Bullock movie. A casual glance at the best-selling games of the decade shows that we have totally accepted an empowered vision of the opposite sex, more so than most of the art that is actually marketed to the opposite sex. Gamers get a bad rap as a bunch of craven animals, but the failure of “Duke Nukem Forever” proves that we may be moving faster towards equality than anyone else.

–AA

initiating slut mode