Until Dawn, Or Can We Please Hold Video Games To Higher Standards?

Thanks to the remake, I finally got a chance to play this much-hyped PlayStation title on my PC nearly a decade after it first came out. This piece, however, has nothing to say about the technical quality of the remake - don't expect commentary on the frame rate drops and occasional lag, crashes, the ethics of attaching an exorbitant price tag for what is clearly a dysfunctional product, or whether it was necessary in the first place. Rather, this is an expression of surprise at the fact that such a garbage piece of media has somehow managed to attain cult status with a movie in the works and (now) a remake. 

Let's get this out of the way first: Until Dawn does nothing more than port a campy teenage slasher to the world of video games, replete with all the sexism. It recycles tired slasher cliches and clothes them in a new digital skin (a very swanky UE 5 powered ultra-high quality textured skin). The sexist tropes are perhaps my single largest issue with this game that bears the paw prints of the Heterosexual Caucasian Male all over it (and I suspect it is their ilk that this is also most popular with). The minds behind this venture claim that through their game, they wish to do away with the misogyny that haunts the genre and subvert tropes.  

"That old-fashioned misogynistic attitude feels very dated now. This is a balance between four guys and four girls. It’s not like the girls all die and they all die horribly. We’ve avoided the traditional phallic stabbing. It just doesn’t feel contemporary."  

The only issue is, absolutely nothing in this game remotely points to that intention.

• Two men discuss 'being a gentleman, before going in for the kill.' Though there is an option to not respond enthusiastically to this conversation, at best you end up in weak agreement.

• The questionable dialogue gets worse where you are given the option to goad a hesitant girl into having sex with you regardless of her misgivings.

• Most of the women are written terribly to the point of being a borderline parody - every other line they speak is laden with innuendo and the promise of sex for their partners for much of the opening hours.

• There is a cringe inducing sequence where two girls fight over a current / past romantic interest, with 'bitch', 'slut' and 'whore' liberally thrown into the verbal mix of assorted insults.

• A woman spends a large amount of time running around, exploring and evading a killer in nothing more than a towel.
  

The innuendo, most of all, made me feel extremely uncomfortable. There is something inherently disturbing about grown men writing (barely legal) young women who often have nothing but sex on their mind. What makes it worse is that this is not done to serve a greater purpose, such as giving the audience a window into someone's mind for a deeper character study. The reason seems to be little more than to conform to all slasher cliches they can possibly fit into one game. The sexualisation of the soon-to-be victim, and her state of nakedness, serves to cement her vulnerability in the players' minds, and gives the male protagonists a reason to step into the saviour role.

A common point I've seen is that the game is a homage to classic slasher tropes, and as a result is going to have certain character archetypes. That may be the case, but does paying homage to any genre mean a mandatory inclusion of outdated tropes? It is decades of these attitudes that have shaped society that we see around us today. You only need take a look at the persistent sexism in Bollywood and its lingering effects on the country's shared consciousness, both in cinema and real life, to understand how far popular media's portrayal of women can affect real life. 

Horror films, especially slashers, have always had an issue with gender, sexualisation of and violence towards women. Do we really need to import this verbatim to slasher games now? Unsurprisingly, there is no shortage of comment threads where men use demeaning terms for the women of Until Dawn, not hesitating to rejoice in their gory deaths. Couple this with video compilations of towel-clad Sam, or Jess undressing for sex, and gamers are saying the silent part out loud about why these tropes are as popular as they continue to be.

Until Dawn's understanding of mental health is just as bad as its treatment of women, if not worse. It follows a straightforward logic: take a mentally ill individual off their meds, and they will go crazy. Terrifying visual and auditory hallucinations will ensue, and the person loses touch with reality - oh, what's that? He was taking SSRIs? Depression and schizophrenia aren't the same thing? Eh, who cares.

Games can be a medium for anything from a literary masterpiece (yes, Disco Elysium) to the simplest point-and-click bureaucratic simulators that offer poignant political insights (Papers, Please!). When I think of Until Dawn, I think of the millions of dollars and hundreds of hours spent writing, shooting, editing, voicing, and producing an international collaborative effort that in turn goes on to be consumed by millions of gamers. What are we creating, and what are we as a community rewarding?