In Shira Chess’s book “Play Like a Feminist”, she makes a compelling argument that feminists should engage more with video games, both as players and creators. She contends that the video game industry is dominated by a “toxic gamer culture” that caters to a narrow audience of presumed straight white male players, resulting in a homogenous pool of games that often perpetuate sexist, racist and homophobic tropes. Chess believes that the only way to “annihilate the toxic cultures, mediocre products, and public reputation of this industry” is for more feminists to play games, demand better representation, and create more diverse games themselves.
With this framework in mind, I want to examine the 2018 action-adventure game Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the third installment in the rebooted Tomb Raider series featuring iconic protagonist Lara Croft. Developed by Eidos-Montréal and published by Square Enix, the game is available on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
On the surface, Lara Croft seems to fit Chess’s first criteria for a feminist game: a canon woman protagonist who cleverly and determinedly fights her way through harrowing challenges. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara is portrayed as highly intelligent, resourceful, and physically capable as she races to stop a Mayan apocalypse that she inadvertently triggered. The game does allow players to inhabit a powerful feminine perspective.
However, playing the game through a feminist lens as Chess encourages reveals some troubling issues that align with her critiques of the industry. While this version of Lara is less overtly sexualized than her earlier incarnations, she still conforms to conventionally attractive, thin, white, young, able-bodied feminine ideals – the “heterosexist beauty standards” that Chess argues gaming often reinforces. The game’s marketing also leaned into Lara’s sex appeal, with one notorious promotional tweet inviting players to “discover Lara’s defining moment as she becomes the Tomb Raider.”
More problematic is the game’s plot, which centers on Lara’s attempts to fix her own blunder of setting off a Mayan apocalypse. As critic Dia Lacina points out, this positions Lara as a “white savior” figure, barging into an indigenous culture, making things worse despite being warned, then expecting to swoop in and save the day. The optics of a white woman trying to “save” brown people from their own cultural artifacts is uncomfortable at best, racist at worst. This dynamic fails Chess’s intersectional criteria.
The gameplay also undercuts Lara’s supposed empowerment in ways that resemble Chess’s criticisms of video game culture’s lingering sexism. Much of the game involves brutalizing Lara – she is constantly wounded, impaled, grunting in pain, killed in gruesome ways if the player fails. As Chess notes, true feminist agency requires more than just a woman doing cool things in between being brutalized. Putting Lara through such gendered violence for player titillation feels voyeuristic rather than empowering.
So how could Shadow of the Tomb Raider become a better feminist text by Chess’s standards? For starters, the developers could have made Lara’s character more intersectional and less of an idealized white femininity – a key tenet Chess advocates for. Imagine if Lara had a disability, or was a woman of color, or was queer. The plot could have ditched the white savior narrative and maybe partnered Lara with indigenous people as equals, embracing the diversity Chess champions. And dialing back Lara’s pain for the player’s pleasure would make her feel like a more genuine agent, combating what Chess describes as gaming’s “never-ending flow of…digital women being sacrificed, over and over again.”
At its core, Tomb Raider has always struggled with the tension between presenting Lara as an empowered woman action hero while also appealing to the straight male gaze that Chess diagnoses as a core problem in gaming culture. The reboot series, including Shadow, has made some strides but still falls short of feeling like a truly feminist text by the criteria in Chess’s book. If the developers took Chess’s ideas to heart – letting go of hegemonic masculinity, diversifying Lara’s identity, and granting her real agency beyond sexualized violence – then maybe future Tomb Raider games could become truly empowering feminist statements that “destroy the video game industry” and rebuild it into something more inclusive.
