Rewriting Lara Croft

Pretty much every woman gamer I’ve ever met has had some kind of a relationship with Lara Croft since they started playing games. It’s not always a positive one; for me, playing the first few Tomb Raiders when I was still quite little, Lara was an awesome action heroine whom I idolised in my head like I’m sure many little boys once idolised Indiana Jones: she was smart, capable and adventurous. But for others, as the series declined prior to Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider: Legend, Lara Croft became symbolic of the video games’ prevailing failure to offer up real characters rather than cardboard cut-outs with huge guns/muscles/breasts.

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Over the years I fell out of love with Lara; she’d become a pair of boobs with a couple of guns attached.

For still others, like Rhianna Pratchett – the British writer behind Mirror’s Edge, Overlord and, of course, Crystal Dynamics’ upcoming Tomb Raider, and formerly a gaming journalist – it’s been a love-hate relationship. “I still rate the bit in the first Tomb Raider where the T Rex comes round the end of the valley and roars as one of the most awesome gaming experiences, and I still adore Tomb Raider for putting that in my life,” she says.

“But over the years I fell out of love with Lara. I think in the press I wrote about my dissatisfaction with her, and how she’d become a pair of boobs with a couple of guns attached. Once I was buying something in GAME and the cashier decided to strike up a conversation with me about how much bigger Lara’s boobs had gotten between the last two games. It just wasn’t the right angle on several levels, that.”

Crystal Dynamics has undone a lot of that damage with three excellent Tomb Raider games since 2006, but it’s in the upcoming reboot that Lara is really coming into her own as a character. In the hour or so of the game that the developer has shown to journalists so far, we’ve seen a heroine who is at once bravely resourceful and vulnerable without being the least bit helpless or pathetic, a survivor in an impossible situation. She also feels genuinely human for perhaps the first time, showing emotion beyond her usual cavalier, action-heroine confidence, and shown alongside her friends and the people she loves rather than alone underground.

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We’ve kept some of the most interesting aspects of her – the archaeological background, her geekiness – and we’ve brought back what was always there, but buried.

It seems that both Rhianna and Crystal Dynamics see this new Tomb Raider as a make-or-break moment for the series and the character, a chance to reverse any damage done and restore Lara as a properly three-dimensional character rather than a sex object. “Actually being able to get my hands on Lara and go back and change the past a little bit was a challenge, but I was getting a chance to shape Lara the way I would have liked to have seen her done in the first place,” Rhianna says. “I felt: oh my god, I’m taking on Lara, but you have to get over that quickly, you can’t keep feeling that pressure.”

Rather than rebuilding Lara from scratch, however, Rhianna and the Crystal Dynamics creative team found that a lot of the humanity that they desired for Lara was already there, latent in her character. It just needed drawing out. “It was certainly fun working out which bits of old Lara we were going to keep, and which we were going to move on and why,” she recalls. “We’ve kept some of the most interesting aspects of her – the archaeological background, her geekiness – and we’ve brought back what was always there, but buried. She’s always had friendships. We are bringing out things that were always in her character beforehand, but they’ve never been tested in this way before, and suddenly she’s discovering things about herself that she didn’t know were there.

“I think possibly one of her problems is that she’s always had the tech, the money, the answers and the quips for everything, and I think that makes her feel a little bit unrelatable. We’re coming back [from that], looking at a character who doesn’t have all the answers, who is 21 and acts 21, and goes through that change throughout the game. I wanted to bring some of the warmth back to Lara, as someone who is a friend, who’s caring and empathetic, and is more human.”

One aspect of Old Lara that’s still very much in place is her fascination with archaeology, and her adventurous passion for of exploration and discovery – which is what sends her delving into tombs in the first place. “There are some amazing things that she discovers [on the island] that fuel her passion,” Rhianna says. “I wanted to bring out that geeky love of something in her character, and make the most of that. More in the movies than in the games, Lara became an unapproachable ice queen littering the world with the carcasses of planes crashed into mountains and things like that for the hell of it, and I wanted to rein that in and build up that human side a bit more.”

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I think people assumed that the character was suddenly being built in this scene, whereas character is not built in a fleeting moment, it’s a continuous process through tests and challenges and action and reaction.

Other aspects of her family background are different, however. In the new Tomb Raider, 21-year-old Lara still comes from a very wealthy family, but her parents are missing (the game doesn’t really explore why) and she won’t touch the money because doing so would be a tacit admission that they aren’t coming back. Instead of dipping into her inherited wealth, she’s working several jobs to put herself through her archaeology studies at University – not at Oxford or Cambridge, as you might expect for a girl so faultlessly posh, but at UCL in London. There’s no luxurious, secret-stuffed Croft Manor to run around, breaking series tradition – the whole game is confined to the island, and how they came to be there.

After E3, of course, the conversation around Tomb Raider was dominated by a scene in the trailer that appeared to show Lara fighting off an attempted rape, and a certain producer’s astonishingly misguided comments surrounding it, leading to a spiral of backtracking and denial that led many commentators to question the motive behind showing Lara in this light: does a heroine really have to have a run-in with sexual assault in order to be defined as a character? It was a frustrating time for Rhianna; she hadn’t been announced as the game’s lead writer yet, and yet – like many people who had played the scene in context – she was itching to come out and defend the game.

“It was frustrating that I’d seen it all and I couldn’t talk about it. It’s about context,” she says. “I do really understand why people were upset, and I think if I were a journalist I’d be like ‘hey, what’s going on here?’, so I completely understand where people are coming from. It was borne up on a tide of anger that had already been generated by things like E3 booth babes, Anita Sarkeesian, the Hitman trailer – all of those had built up. It was really unfortunate that scene got described the way it did, it certainly wasn’t intended that way. But I hadn’t been announced at that time, and Crystal realised it would have been silly to just push me out there.

“I think people assumed that the character was suddenly being built in this scene, whereas character is not built in a fleeting moment, it’s a continuous process during the game, through tests and challenges and action and reaction. It wasn’t in those fleeting moments.”

I’ve said this before, but when you play that scene in context, it’s difficult to see it as a cheap flirtation with the concept of sexual assault in video games. Instead it’s a moment of mortal danger that drives Lara to her first kill; the scene is uncomfortable, sure, but it’s supposed to be, and when you’re struggling with the controller in order to save her from psycho militiamen, it’s about as far away from titillation as video games get. It’s about what it means to take a human life, and what could drive someone to do so.

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It’s not a story about being female, but about being human and being put in an extreme situation and feeling vulnerable and scared, not because you’re female, but because you’re human.

Rhianna agrees. “It’s a shame that got lost, because I thought it was something really interesting to talk about, something different, and it got swept aside by other things that absolutely were in the scene, were part and parcel of it, but were put in because it felt very honest for the characters in that moment – it wasn’t done for titillation and it wasn’t prolonged. It was uncomfortable because it should be uncomfortable.

“Even in the previous demo when the guy was chasing her through the caves, and grabbing at her feet, and people were saying it was a rape simulator even then,” she claims. “When you have a female protagonist and a male antagonist, is that just a connotation that always comes up in that situation?”

The point that was missed by post-E3 discussion of the game was that Tomb Raider isn’t actually about the fact that Lara is a woman; that’s in no way the focal point. “It’s not a story about being female, but about being human and being put in an extreme situation and feeling vulnerable and scared, not because you’re female, but because you’re human,” Rhianna emphasises. “I believe she reacts in the same way as a young man would, put in that situation.

“[Her evolution] is a little bit like Sarah Connor, looking at how her character goes from friendly put-upon waitress right through to ‘You’re terminated, f***er’. She doesn’t realise what she’s capable of, and that’s brought out through the events of the game. She’s not necessarily comfortable with what she has to do, and she wrestles with that throughout; her internal journey is every bit as difficult as anything she’s going through on the outside. She’s not fully the Tomb Raider at the end, but you can see she’s on that path.”

The evolution of Lara Croft has in many ways mirrored the troubled course of character development in games on a wider scale. She has been, at different times, both one of gaming’s most convincing lead women and, as Rhianna puts it, a pair of boobs with guns attached. We’ve come to expect greater sophistication from games’ stories and their stars in the 16 years since Lara first wielded a pistol in each hand, and the involvement of narrative designers and writers like Rhianna from the early stages of games’ development is a sign that things are starting to change.

There’s still a lot that we don’t know about Tomb Raider. How can the progression between a Lara retching in horror over her first under-duress kill and the Lara we saw thocking arrows into skulls with wilful abandon at E3 possibly be believable? How is character built throughout the game, and how does that affecting but controversial scene fit into the larger narrative? But talking to the people involved in this game inspires confidence; the intentions, at least, are certainly there.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games team in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.

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