Lara Croft: action hero, Tomb Raider as quest narrative

Lara Croft: action hero

One consequence of the unusual cross-media penetration enjoyed by Tomb Raider has been the transition of Lara Croft from the object of a substantial advertising and marketing campaign, to the vehicle for the promotion of another product. There is even some potential irony in the choice of product that ‘her’ digital image is used to promote, an energy drink that markets itself on its ability to revitalise a flagging human constitution. The Lucozade campaign, which appeared in the United Kingdom throughout 2000, blatantly acknowledges something that is implied again and again in the games themselves: Lara Crofts fictionality. And in its television manifestation at least, it does so by offering another layer of knowing fiction. In the advertisement a player halts a game to attend, presumably, to some human need or other. The action stops, as it must do, when he leaves his console. But the game-world is not frozen as a consequence of the lack of human input. Lara Croft and her digital adversaries are not frozen on screen, but take a well-deserved break. She drinks the product she is endorsing and, refreshed, is ready to continue with the drama upon the return of the player. Several observations spring immediately to mind. Lara Croft is presented, here, no matter how archly, as having a form of existence independent of the player. In this context she is not associated with that other fictional world of the series of games which operate within and through their own internal logic (and in which she is an ‘archaeologist-adventurer’), but with another fictional alternative entirely, and one carrying another set of expectations, that of film.

Even though the live-action film version of Tomb Raider had yet to go into production, ‘Lara Croft’ was already acknowledged as a role to be played. The advertisers did not choose to have Lara Croft played by a human actor: this digital Lara Croft is a digital actor. Not only does this conceit that Lara Croft is some kind of ‘cyber-babe’ starlet, as she has sometimes been characterised in the popular press (even appearing in ‘glamour’ shots alongside ostensibly real models in Loaded magazine) presumably help to shift units, but it also emphasises the manner in which she has come to escape some of the more narrow confines of the computer game as the preserve of adolescents and the socially dysfunctional. Somehow she has entered into a wider public consciousness as icon and image as familiar to a certain age group as any number of Hollywood starlets. She might still be most recognisable to small boys and young men, but she was certainly one of the first widely recognisable ‘characters’ of computer fictions. The game's publishers had recognised this aspect of their creation as early as on the blurb on the box of Tomb Raider //, on which the phrase ‘starring Lara Croft’ appears five times immediately beneath the main title.

Some of the implications of this intensity of cinematic allusion for Totnb Raiders realism and its relationship with other fictional forms are clear. Ms Crofts antics are no more ‘real’ than those of any other feature film action hero. She, and the chainsaw-wielding muscle man who is initially chasing her before the action is halted, are only acting. Their mutual antipathy is a fiction. The vicious Dobermans that had also joined the chase are only playing a role. This advertisement plays with the conventions of the knowing self-consciousness of so much contemporary film, television and (particularly) advertising where the seriousness of any genres claims to be replicating a plausibly realistic other world are deliberately undercut and rendered problematic.

The player within the world of the advertisement might be ‘fooled’ into thinking that he has control over the actions of the game's hero, but we, the viewers, are given a privileged sight of the ‘true’ nature of the hero as actor playing a role within a particular kind of fiction, the action movie. He is, in a limited sense, ‘directing’ the action in a fashion of which he does not appear aware. Which is where, of course, things get a little complicated. Alongside all this playful manipulation with the expectations of various fictional forms, there is little chance of anyone mistaking this Lara Croft for a ‘real’ human being. Tomb Raider stars Lara Croft playing the role of... Lara Croft. Her features are stylised, even within the enforced angularity of the available technology, and her body shape (as has so often been noted) is implausibly engineered to cater for the assumed fantasies, if not expectations, of a largely male adolescent audience. There are obvious reasons why the advertisers choose to make the player of the game ‘he’ rather than ‘she’. The euphemistic phrase ‘featuring an enhanced Lara Croft’, again from the box notes of Tomb Raider, refers to a form of‘enhancement* that would be familiar to any Californian cosmetic surgeon. But it is not her Active nature as a visual construct with an exaggerated body image produced through the mapping of digital information that is foregrounded here, but her Active nature as another example of the action hero that we recognise from film. An audience familiar with Lara Crofts computer game incarnation might be amused, entertained, or indifferent to the shift across media and the blurring of boundaries between her performance within game/televisual/cin-ematic conventions, but they would hardly be shocked. There has always been something of a cinematic quality to Tomb Raider.

The most obvious debt that the Tomb Raider games themselves owe to film is indicated in the title of the series, and if that is lame and scripted wise-cracks that pass for humour in the action movies of Arnold Schwarzenneger, Bruce Willis etc. In some ways they are similar to those often tiresome pauses between frenetic action in which plot is explained slowly and carefully to both protagonist and audience in a certain kind of action movie. In addition there is often evidence of a display of the programmers technical virtuosity, an attempt to push the limits of what is realisable within the technology of the moment that generates the same aesthetic appreciation as the finely realised illusion of the skilled draughtsman or painter, or, to draw a closer analogy, the purely technical level of achievement that has contributed to the success of computer-animated films such as Disney’s Toy Story (1995) or Toy Story 2 (1999), or Pixars Antz (1998) and still informs discussion of each successive wave of movies of increasing technical sophistication.

One partial example of such an FMV cut-scene should suffice to demonstrate their essentially cinematic quality, as well as their often derivative character. Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation opens with a level designed to introduce the player to the major possible moves that the protagonist can make. An adolescent Lara Croft jumps and runs and climbs according to the instructions of a substitute father figure, the self-styled archaeologist-adventurer Werner Von Croy. For once, and presumably because of her tender age, she is denied the arsenal of weapons she usually has access to. Upon completion of the level, in which Lara Croft and Werner Von Croy have raced to recover an item known as the‘Iris’ from a temple complex in Angkor Wat, control of Lara s actions is removed from the player and an FMV sequence rolls. In a manner reminiscent of the squabbling between the two Doctors Jones in the second Indiana Jones film, Lara Croft shows caution about pulling the lever that will expose the Iris from its concealment within a globe-like structure, while Werner Von Croy is impatient and calls on his greater experience and maturity to persuade her to do as he commands. This is how what follows is described on one of the many unofficial Tomb Raider sites that exist on the Internet:

Lara pulls the lever, and the globe opens like a sliced orange revealing the Iris as a walkway descends to create a path from the outer ledge to the center of the now open globe. Von Croy walks out to the center of the now opened globe and reaches to pick up the Iris.

Von Croy: ‘Have faith in experience child and you will learn more than simple ...*

Von Croy stops talking as the entire structure trembles. Lara struggles to stay on her feet and says: ‘As you were saying?’

An earthquake tips Werner Von Croy over, and his leg is caught on one of the segments of the globe. He is left dangling in space as the globe segments begin to close. Lara Croft at first attempts to run away, then has a moment of conscience and makes a futile effort to help, and finally barely escapes as the temple is sealed with Werner Von Croy still trapped inside the globe. One last plaintive cry of ‘Werner’ and the action fades. Cut to a long sequence in which a ‘mysterious’ female figure investigates ruins in the desert until the legend ‘Egypt, present day’ appears on screen.

What we have here, then, is immediately recognisable as a method of plot establishment and advancement that makes the most of some of the graphics capabilities of the game engine in the replication of a cinematic experience. The camera had been active throughout the cut scene, mood music had set the forbidding scene, and the geometric form of the globe had enabled some fairly impressive, and yet not too complex, animation. In story terms, Laras maturity is marked by her recognition of the fallibility of her men-tor/father figure and her spotless moral credentials are established as she looks back on the apparent entombment of Von Croy with as much regret as the programmers’ limited visual palette and the girlish voice-over can generate. A rivalry and grudge is established between Werner Von Croy and Lara Croft (for we know he is not dead, just as we know Ira will escape at the last moment) that wil drive a particular kind of plot forward. As a bonus, the cut-scene also provides a logical explanation for the walking stick and limp that join Von Croys middle-European accent and his wire-frame glasses as sure signs of his villainous status.

Whether this is simply ‘bad' fiction, or undertaken with tongue firmly in cheek in the spirit of parody or pastiche, is largely irrelevant. Indeed, what it foregrounds most forcefully is the weakness of FMV as the delivery system of an interactive or collaborative (human and computer) form of fiction. Instead it suggests that what one gets in contemporary computer games is a level of dialogue that is laughably predictable, and a mobilisation of clichés that might make even some of Hollywood’s finest action movie directors squirm.

Of all the more cinematic digressions from gameplay, however, the cut-scenes are probably the least interesting in formal terms as game-fiction gives way to a form of ersatz movie-making in which the player has minimal investment or involvement. One area where cinema and gameplay merge without the abrupt, complete and extended loss of player control, and the associated elimination of the illusion of freedom of action, is in the movement of the in-game camera and angle of shot, and the use of the sound track to heighten tension. At its simplest, this sees the vision of the protagonist and/or the player directed towards some otherwise missable space or object, or a shift in background music or noises alerts the player to the imminent arrival of an adversary. At its most complex, entry into a new area sees the in-game camera move away from the protagonist and engage in the kind of long travelling shot usually to be found in big-budget Hollywood productions. Even in miniature, such as during the ‘death-slide’ sequence of Tomb Raider //, when the full depth of the canyon below is revealed in a sweeping camera shot, this can be impressive. Through such sequences the player might, again, enjoy a privileged view of otherwise obscured levers, blocks, doorways, or traps, and plot points might be made, but the effect is often primarily one of the generation of aesthetic enjoyment, and the dropping of hints about how to proceed is combined with an often spectacular technical realisation of the game world. The sight of a low-flying Stealth Bomber passing at close quarters in the Area 51 section of Tomb Raider III, for example, does not merely signal the kind of adversaries the player is about to face, but is undeniably impressive in and of itself.

At its most successfully realised, such as in the Venice section of Tomb Raider //, such a merging of cinematic visual realisation with gameplay interaction by the player results in the production of something akin to a personal mini-movie, a cinematic vignette that is only produced as a result of, or reward for, player interaction. Such moments conceal the shift from active to passive participant ‘in’ the action. Having explored the limits of Venice and opened doors and cleared obstacles in the standard fashion of such games, the player is left in a position where he or she must race a speedboat through the canals in a race against the clock before the exit to the next area is closed. The debt that the level designers and programmers owe to the cinematic exploits of James Bond become obvious as the speedboat clears two ramps to land on a line of gondolas, swings through a narrow passage and hurtles through the levels exit gate to the accompaniment of the last few chimes of the bell that had signalled the countdown. Although there are alternative methods of movement from the Venice canals area into tions a little later in this chapter), none are as aesthetically pleasing or so fully demonstrate one possibly unique kind of fiction that can be created within such game-fictions. It is the initial concealment of this series of discrete moves, the piecing together of clues as obscure as any found in detective fiction, with all the readerly pleasure that accompanies such delayed disclosure within text, that leads to the final reward of the fully realised sequence. Unlike the cut-scene FMV sequences there is no single trigger that transforms player into viewer, and this moment of gaming cinema requires the continuing active participation of the player if it is to be successfully realised.

Tomb Raider as quest narrative

For all the claims made here that one can see the first stirrings of a new fictional form within Tomb Raider, it should not be forgotten that it owes just as much, if not more, to other forms of game as it does to other forms of fiction such as film. One basic genealogy that also highlights the ‘fantasy’ rather than ‘realist’ roots of the game might trace a line of descent from those fantasy wargames played with cast-metal miniatures of ores and dwarves and dragons, through table-top role-playing games, making the leap into its first digital incarnation in the text-based adventures that appeared on such early dedicated games machines as the ZX Spectrum (and who will ever truly forget the frustration of playing the pioneering Spectrum adventure The Hobbit (1982), and being told, yet again, that ‘Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold’?) Text-based adventures suffered in comparison with more visually sophisticated games, and the virtually static ‘point and click’ adventures that emerged out of adventures like The Hobbit seem to have been all but superseded by Turtib Raider diid its imitators.

In many ways Tomb Raider conforms to the generic conventions of the folk tale, and particularly the quest narrative, and wears many of its folk tale credentials on its sleeve. Lara Croft may not be a Jack, or even a Jill, but she has much in common with the princely heroes of many quest narratives. She is, after all, an orphan of aristocratic stock, the daughter (so the basic back-story to the games to be found in the manuals informs us) of Lord Croft. She lives in the contemporary equivalent of a castle, even if her mansion has a swimming pool rather than a moat. In several of the games in the series she ‘starts* from this point (it is the equivalent of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelations Angkor Wat training level in both Tomb Raider ¡1 and ///), before moving on to an extended quest which might be broken down into a series of smaller folk tale quest narratives or plot fragments. Despite the more or less contemporary trappings of the Tomb Raider series (usually to be found in things you can shoot things with, or things you can drive) and its otherwise unstable ‘historical* locations (a distinctly contemporary Area 51, what looks like a near future/post apocalypse.