New Cycle: Humanity on the Brink

New Cycle entered early-access a few days ago and I was tempted enough to take a look at the latest in an ever-growing niche of mid-size city-builders. What I found was a startling, melancholy requiem for humanity, teetering on the brink of disaster, yet stoically carrying on, perhaps in vain. 

New Cycle fits into a genre of colony-management and/or city-building games that operate at the scale of individual citizens and buildings. At the far end of the city simulation genre you have, of course, SimCity and Cities: Skylines, which set as their target a mimesis of the North American urban-suburban sprawl configured around freeway interchanges and zoning laws. At the other end of the simulation genre is the Sims franchise, which simulates the daily lives of individual people, their ambitions and trials, along with the exact placement of dining tables and stairs inside each home.

Aloy’s Heroic Feminism in Horizon: Forbidden West

 

The image above represents two of the first results in Google when searching “Horizon Zero Dawn feminism” and clearly depicts how any art criticism works. On one hand we have an example touting Horizon: Zero Dawn (HZD) as a breakthrough, and on the other, as a disappointment. As it ever was, and probably always will be – but where does that leave us when looking at the sequel, Horizon: Forbidden West (HFW)?

The criticism of “Matt C.” from Digitally Downloaded noted above centers on the assessment of Aloy as the female equivalent of a space marine trope who doesn’t feel multifaceted and human. She is, he says “robbed her of any sort of sexual identity." 

In erasing the entire concept of sexuality, [from the game world] Horizon denies Aloy – and every other character in that game – any sense of sexual identity and agency. That’s fundamentally at odds with a pillar of feminist ideology. (Digitally Downloaded)

Matt C. is also critical of the Nora tribe’s matriarchal system of leadership, saying that the game does little or nothing with it, and certainly does not explore or interrogate the differences between the matriarchal Nora and other tribes in the game.

This criticism is misguided, and unfortunately narrows the concept of feminism in media to merely the task of an overt discussion of sexuality and sexism as plot points. This reminds me of the tendency in the games industry to reduce the speaking opportunities of women in the industry to panels about being a woman in the industry, rather than speaking to their technical, creative or professional expertise. This view suggests the ideal (perhaps only?) feminist action that a woman (real or fictional) can take is to talk about female sexuality or otherwise being female.