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Contemporary Cyber Gothic Videogame Culture: The Feminine Sublime In System Shock 2

By Stuart Lindsay

Cyber Culture has become a useful area of study in tracking the progress of a Global Gothic phenomenon. World-spanning new technology such as the Internet, telecommunication and digital TV are held up as examples of a truly global, democratic social network system of power as information. It seems that in the last decade however, this phenomenon has merely served to empower those nations or social groups who have the necessary access to and knowledge of the technology, creating a divide between the information rich, and the information poor. I think that Cyber Culture is a useful tool in articulating the fears that this problem presents.

Looking Glass Software’s System Shock 2 is a significant addition to the Cyber Gothic Culture of the late nineties. Looking specifically at the female Artificial Intelligence of S.H.O.D.A.N, the primary nemesis in the game, I will analyse the way that the game modifies existing representations of Sublime Femininity and the Phallic Woman to express the fears of technology and its abuse in creating power gaps in the global distribution and reception of information. Capitalising on the modern fears of technological autonomy and omniscient surveillance, I will argue that S.H.O.D.A.N and the spacecraft environment she oversees, is used to adapt the traditional Gothic theme of The Monstrous Feminine in creating a cautionary reaction to the role of technology in allowing a national and cultural elite to run the global village. With reference to Kieron Gillen’s essay on System Shock 2, ‘The Girl Who Wanted To Be God’, I will consider the ways in which the game’s focus on paranoia and fear of the feminine is a reflection of the broader social and technological anxieties of the period, namely The Millennium Bug and the quite appropriately titled ‘Nanny State’.

At the beginning of the game, the player is stuck on an abandoned ship, appropriately titled the Von Braun, which has been ravaged by a mutagenic virus. Here, the game attempts to connect a virtual and fictional world with the real one; in drawing connections between the ship and an ex-Nazi research scientist, System Shock 2 represents the environment as a scientific, male controlled, slightly controversial, but ultimately righteous and American landscape. This environment and the identity it carries with it is held up as the position of authority which represents the norm in the game, a standard which during play, the gamer must also adopt and enforce in order to survive against S.H.O.D.A.N’s control. Here, the exploration of space, that boundless, uncharted, and non-national environment, becomes the act of claiming its ownership by an American scientific elite, much in the same way that the power distributions of a cyber environment like the Internet is abused by government authorities and research councils. However, in the first few hours of play, it becomes apparent that the orderly masculine grip over the ship, represented by the meticulous research logs of the now deceased science crew, has given way to a chaotic female presence, that of S.H.O.D.A.N, the malevolent artificial intelligence figure. Indeed, in the introduction cutscene of the game, S.H.O.D.A.N herself defines the conflict that will drive the action within the game. In her opening speech, she snarls, “Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?”

This exclamation articulates a conflict that is not only between man and machine, but also between physical man and virtual woman, an untouchable, unfathomable omniscient construction of Sublime and Monstrous Femininity. Her claims of ownership over the Von Braun, man’s instrument of exploration, are eminently sexualised through her choice of words. The use of phrases such as ‘panting and sweating’ and her definition of the gamer rather than the as-yet unintroduced character they control, as ‘a pathetic creature of meat and bone’ highlights the mere organic nature of the human subject. In S.H.O.D.A.N.’s direct address to the player, their activity in her newly colonised environment, their ‘running through her corridors’, becomes a sexual act. Her voice breaks down the wall of safety between the gamer and the game, highlighting the millennial paranoia of the late nineties, which expressed concerns regarding the sentience of computer technology. Just as the tools of human male power and colonisation in the game, embodied by the Von Braun, fall to a technological female usurper, so too does this figure unsettle the boundaries between what is real from what is virtual, appearing to personally provoke the player by predicting and mocking the male gaze. Even if the gamer is female, there is still a degree of enforced gender performance in System Shock 2. There’s no option to play as a female character, and the game is viewed from a first person perspective, automatically endowing the player with a male gaze. The Monstrous Feminine is often in need of a male spectator, as such a femininity embodies particularly male fears concerning castration, or in the case of System Shock 2, being swallowed up by and lost in the ship’s architecture, which after S.H.O.D.A.N’s insurrection, becomes the female body. The anxiety, and also perhaps the pleasure, of being physically enveloped by the female body, stems from a fixation on the oral, the vaginal, or the anal site. The apertures of the Von Braun, the doors, maintenance shafts and corridors, are given particular importance in defining the Monstrous and Sublime elements of S.H.O.D.A.N’s character. The entire world that the gamer experiences is S.H.O.D.A.N. She controls the openings and closings of these orifices, and denies or allows physical transgression depending on her will. She is more often heard than seen, acting as the omniscient yet unseen mother who regulates the life of the child within her womb. “Do not presume to go in there, insect. I will not abide disobedience”, she warns, attempting to contain you as you threaten to rebel against her betrayal of the science crew and undo her power. Very often, she verbally intimidates the player with the possibility of the ultimate sublime experience: death. S.H.O.D.A.N’s self-representation as a maternal deity defines the relationship between herself and the gamer, and the ways in which her rewards for the player in System Shock 2 take shape. Kieron Gillen’s essay on System Shock 2, ‘The Girl Who Wanted To Be God’, demonstrates the maternal position that S.H.O.D.A.N assumes over the gamer during play. Most importantly, it highlights the role of technology, the parts of S.H.O.D.A.N’s programming which she willingly excretes to be absorbed by the player character’s cybernetic body, and how they take primacy in defining the mother-son relationship, the mother and her suckling infant:

It’s an unwholesome relationship you’re in with her, which grates on a players perception – while you may be scared to go into the door when she tells you not to, I’d bet that most would do it, if only to spite her. She is, as we go on to discuss, the over-possessive mother demanding perfect loyalty and the lover who only wants a slave.
And despite her steely hardness, Shodan still has the urge to create progeny. It’s one of her favourite actions…With the implants of cybernetics into you, she’s doing it again.

S.H.O.D.A.N’s mocking tone that Gillen emphasises, characterized in that speech directed towards the player during the game’s introduction, continues throughout. She calls her cybernetic implants, ‘gifts’, and ‘toys’, emphasising her maternal stance over the gamer and their childish nature, as they experiment and learn to survive in the bowels of the Von Braun using the upgrades she gives. As new a way of defining and developing the infant self, technology becomes not only the tool of empowerment, but also the breeding ground for the anxiety that surrounds the nature of the human subject. Underlying this identification and embracing of technology as an evolutionary aspect of a human being is a process of self-realisation, a definition of the ‘I’. Technology highlights the notion of the fragmented being, and updates the Darwinian ideas of evolution, that which is human is unstable, and always in process. In the end, we are all incomplete, and in theory, subhuman. The game represents technology as a frightening twofold paranoia: firstly, that the human subject can be biologically upgraded with such inhuman and horrific tools of destruction such as plasma psychosis or electric bolt emitters, and secondly, that in its unmediated state, man is merely a base animal that falls well below any ideal or preconception of unity and shows the lack of a divine presence in its creation. S.H.O.D.A.N, as the primary catalyst of the conflict in the game, presents the player with an unnerving choice which warns of the existence of the information rich/poor divide in contemporary global culture: embrace the masters of technology and enforce their laws on the world according to their design, or reject the power of the machine and die as a self-interested and obsolete savage.

Building upon Gillen’s idea of S.H.O.D.A.N as a monstrous mother, I argue that she also overrules the position of man in the creation and rearing of children, envisioning herself as a sublime, singular creator that rejects gender as implicit in the role of the progenitor. The location of power and action for monstrous women, the environments where they are able to commit murder and give birth, bear the mark of the abject feminine.

However, the environment of the Von Braun is nothing like the womb-like organic structures that reflect the female monstrous biology found in such games as Aliens Versus Predator, or Metroid. Instead, the architecture of the Von Braun in System Shock 2 is undoubtedly male, and yet it still bears the terrifying mark of S.H.O.D.A.N’s presence. The Von Braun is a world created by men, a world of cold steel and straight edges, built by science and rationality. However, as you slowly hand over control of the ship to S.H.O.D.A.N in the struggle against the mutagenic virus, she usurps its masculine features to suit her own ends. Returning to the phrase I quoted earlier where she warns, “Do not presume to go in there, insect. I will not abide disobedience”, she plays not merely the over-possessive mother who wishes to preserve the ultimate bodily connections between herself and her child, but equally and simultaneously, the role of the father. She forbids the player to enter the Cargo Docking Bay, a metal womb that contains the betrayed and murdered body of the female scientist, Delacroix. It could be argued that here that she protects the gamer’s character through language alone, warning him not to return to the site of the archaic mother, the purely biological and rotting female corpse. Here, S.H.O.D.A.N embodies the voice of the ‘Nanny State’, a primarily male-dominated, but as the name suggests, figuratively female, matriarchal body. The warnings that she makes towards the player embody the threateningly over-protective tone that many modern Western governments adopt when warning the general public about contamination and disease. Consider the fear-mongering and dramatization of information surrounding modern diseases such as H.I.V, foot-and-mouth, or bird flu, which exert power over our ability to make choices as individual, independent and autonomous beings.

There are some other instances where S.H.O.D.A.N is both maternal and paternal. In a scene from the first game, she locks the player in the same room as his newly planted bombs, as they try to sever her connection to the space station by destroying its control nodes. “Why don’t you stay a little while, hacker?” she mocks, in a pseudo-sympathetic manner, as she locks him in the chamber with his own ticking explosives. Here, S.H.O.D.A.N’s metal womb becomes the site of death as she holds the player in a motherly murderous embrace, whilst using the male technology and weapons of security locks and bombs against their former users.

S.H.O.D.A.N is a usurper of male power, who favours the masculine side of creation. All her metal wombs are empty and cold, containing only death. The tools she uses to exert her power and authority, to bring about life and death, are clearly phallic. She uses gun turrets to kill her disobedient children, and injections or data spikes to penetrate human bodies in administering her programming gifts. Gillen analyses S.H.O.D.A.N’s voice, saying that there is something particularly feminine about its pitch and intonation. Let us hear an extract from S.H.O.D.A.N.’s voice:

Play Sound Extract (This extract can be found here, between 0:26-1:26:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YLMk1…

“How dare you, insect. How dare you interrupt my ascendance? You are nothing. A wretched bag of flesh. How do you compare to my magnificence? But it is not too late. Can you not see the value in our friendship? Imagine the
powers I could give to you, human. The cybernetic implants I gave you were simply toys. If I desired, I could improve you, transform you into something more efficient. Join me, human, and we can rule…and we can rule…together.”

Gillen tells us to ‘Note Shodan’s hysterical pitch. The word “hysteria” derives from the womb, a symptom of Greek society’s misogyny, because they believed it was the root of madness.’ However, her electronic voice wavers in its pitch. At one moment, it is screeching in hysteria, but in the next, it dips to assume a much more masculine tone of voice. S.H.O.D.A.N’s phonic utterances take on the pitch of a man, as she usurps and incorporates his laws, and voice, into her programming. She is both the voice of the mother, and the father, unnaturally fused together by technology.

To recap, S.H.O.D.A.N is the archaic mother which subverts the patriarchal and national intrusion on the international environment of space, through the usurpation of technology, the primary tools of identity in the game. She also adopts the voice of the father, presenting its laws of social control through technology and information to the extreme, exerted by her omniscient presence on the ship, her ultimate control of the mechanical and cyber environment, and the ominous instructions that she gives to the gamer on how to survive. S.H.O.D.A.N demonstrates the global paranoia that surrounds the distribution of power through technology and information, where on the one hand, the information rich countries or corporate groups wield and abuse power over those that are information poor, and on the other hand, that such a power can be usurped and be used to serve the purposes entirely opposite to that which it was originally designed for.

As a final thought, consider the impact that the Internet has had on terrorism, where religious and fanatical groups have used the tools of technological power, the information distribution network which claims to be democratic and international, to harm the countries and companies that originally designed it. In System Shock 2, S.H.O.D.A.N reveals to the gamer and the American science crew of the Von Braun, the possibilities of their space exploration technology that they tried to hide or discard. In the wrong hands, this machinery contains within it the makings of a fascist dictatorship, a regime that not only homogenises the identity of outer space, but also, through conflict and usurpation, brutally contests the idea of a truly international environment.

Description
Contemporary Cyber Gothic Videogame Culture: The Feminine Sublime In System Shock 2

By Stuart Lindsay

Cyber Culture has become a useful area of study in tracking the progress of a Global Gothic phenomenon. World-spanning new technology such as the Internet, telecommunication and digital TV are held up as examples of a truly global, democratic social network system of power as information. It seems that in the last decade however, this phenomenon has merely served to empower those nations or social groups who have the necessary access to and knowledge of the technology, creating a divide between the information rich, and the information poor. I think that Cyber Culture is a useful tool in articulating the fears that this problem presents.

Looking Glass Software’s System Shock 2 is a significant addition to the Cyber Gothic Culture of the late nineties. Looking specifically at the female Artificial Intelligence of S.H.O.D.A.N, the primary nemesis in the game, I will analyse the way that the game modifies existing representations of Sublime Femininity and the Phallic Woman to express the fears of technology and its abuse in creating power gaps in the global distribution and reception of information. Capitalising on the modern fears of technological autonomy and omniscient surveillance, I will argue that S.H.O.D.A.N and the spacecraft environment she oversees, is used to adapt the traditional Gothic theme of The Monstrous Feminine in creating a cautionary reaction to the role of technology in allowing a national and cultural elite to run the global village. With reference to Kieron Gillen’s essay on System Shock 2, ‘The Girl Who Wanted To Be God’, I will consider the ways in which the game’s focus on paranoia and fear of the feminine is a reflection of the broader social and technological anxieties of the period, namely The Millennium Bug and the quite appropriately titled ‘Nanny State’.

At the beginning of the game, the player is stuck on an abandoned ship, appropriately titled the Von Braun, which has been ravaged by a mutagenic virus. Here, the game attempts to connect a virtual and fictional world with the real one; in drawing connections between the ship and an ex-Nazi research scientist, System Shock 2 represents the environment as a scientific, male controlled, slightly controversial, but ultimately righteous and American landscape. This environment and the identity it carries with it is held up as the position of authority which represents the norm in the game, a standard which during play, the gamer must also adopt and enforce in order to survive against S.H.O.D.A.N’s control. Here, the exploration of space, that boundless, uncharted, and non-national environment, becomes the act of claiming its ownership by an American scientific elite, much in the same way that the power distributions of a cyber environment like the Internet is abused by government authorities and research councils. However, in the first few hours of play, it becomes apparent that the orderly masculine grip over the ship, represented by the meticulous research logs of the now deceased science crew, has given way to a chaotic female presence, that of S.H.O.D.A.N, the malevolent artificial intelligence figure. Indeed, in the introduction cutscene of the game, S.H.O.D.A.N herself defines the conflict that will drive the action within the game. In her opening speech, she snarls, “Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?”

This exclamation articulates a conflict that is not only between man and machine, but also between physical man and virtual woman, an untouchable, unfathomable omniscient construction of Sublime and Monstrous Femininity. Her claims of ownership over the Von Braun, man’s instrument of exploration, are eminently sexualised through her choice of words. The use of phrases such as ‘panting and sweating’ and her definition of the gamer rather than the as-yet unintroduced character they control, as ‘a pathetic creature of meat and bone’ highlights the mere organic nature of the human subject. In S.H.O.D.A.N.’s direct address to the player, their activity in her newly colonised environment, their ‘running through her corridors’, becomes a sexual act. Her voice breaks down the wall of safety between the gamer and the game, highlighting the millennial paranoia of the late nineties, which expressed concerns regarding the sentience of computer technology. Just as the tools of human male power and colonisation in the game, embodied by the Von Braun, fall to a technological female usurper, so too does this figure unsettle the boundaries between what is real from what is virtual, appearing to personally provoke the player by predicting and mocking the male gaze. Even if the gamer is female, there is still a degree of enforced gender performance in System Shock 2. There’s no option to play as a female character, and the game is viewed from a first person perspective, automatically endowing the player with a male gaze. The Monstrous Feminine is often in need of a male spectator, as such a femininity embodies particularly male fears concerning castration, or in the case of System Shock 2, being swallowed up by and lost in the ship’s architecture, which after S.H.O.D.A.N’s insurrection, becomes the female body. The anxiety, and also perhaps the pleasure, of being physically enveloped by the female body, stems from a fixation on the oral, the vaginal, or the anal site. The apertures of the Von Braun, the doors, maintenance shafts and corridors, are given particular importance in defining the Monstrous and Sublime elements of S.H.O.D.A.N’s character. The entire world that the gamer experiences is S.H.O.D.A.N. She controls the openings and closings of these orifices, and denies or allows physical transgression depending on her will. She is more often heard than seen, acting as the omniscient yet unseen mother who regulates the life of the child within her womb. “Do not presume to go in there, insect. I will not abide disobedience”, she warns, attempting to contain you as you threaten to rebel against her betrayal of the science crew and undo her power. Very often, she verbally intimidates the player with the possibility of the ultimate sublime experience: death. S.H.O.D.A.N’s self-representation as a maternal deity defines the relationship between herself and the gamer, and the ways in which her rewards for the player in System Shock 2 take shape. Kieron Gillen’s essay on System Shock 2, ‘The Girl Who Wanted To Be God’, demonstrates the maternal position that S.H.O.D.A.N assumes over the gamer during play. Most importantly, it highlights the role of technology, the parts of S.H.O.D.A.N’s programming which she willingly excretes to be absorbed by the player character’s cybernetic body, and how they take primacy in defining the mother-son relationship, the mother and her suckling infant:

It’s an unwholesome relationship you’re in with her, which grates on a players perception – while you may be scared to go into the door when she tells you not to, I’d bet that most would do it, if only to spite her. She is, as we go on to discuss, the over-possessive mother demanding perfect loyalty and the lover who only wants a slave.
And despite her steely hardness, Shodan still has the urge to create progeny. It’s one of her favourite actions…With the implants of cybernetics into you, she’s doing it again.

S.H.O.D.A.N’s mocking tone that Gillen emphasises, characterized in that speech directed towards the player during the game’s introduction, continues throughout. She calls her cybernetic implants, ‘gifts’, and ‘toys’, emphasising her maternal stance over the gamer and their childish nature, as they experiment and learn to survive in the bowels of the Von Braun using the upgrades she gives. As new a way of defining and developing the infant self, technology becomes not only the tool of empowerment, but also the breeding ground for the anxiety that surrounds the nature of the human subject. Underlying this identification and embracing of technology as an evolutionary aspect of a human being is a process of self-realisation, a definition of the ‘I’. Technology highlights the notion of the fragmented being, and updates the Darwinian ideas of evolution, that which is human is unstable, and always in process. In the end, we are all incomplete, and in theory, subhuman. The game represents technology as a frightening twofold paranoia: firstly, that the human subject can be biologically upgraded with such inhuman and horrific tools of destruction such as plasma psychosis or electric bolt emitters, and secondly, that in its unmediated state, man is merely a base animal that falls well below any ideal or preconception of unity and shows the lack of a divine presence in its creation. S.H.O.D.A.N, as the primary catalyst of the conflict in the game, presents the player with an unnerving choice which warns of the existence of the information rich/poor divide in contemporary global culture: embrace the masters of technology and enforce their laws on the world according to their design, or reject the power of the machine and die as a self-interested and obsolete savage.

Building upon Gillen’s idea of S.H.O.D.A.N as a monstrous mother, I argue that she also overrules the position of man in the creation and rearing of children, envisioning herself as a sublime, singular creator that rejects gender as implicit in the role of the progenitor. The location of power and action for monstrous women, the environments where they are able to commit murder and give birth, bear the mark of the abject feminine.

However, the environment of the Von Braun is nothing like the womb-like organic structures that reflect the female monstrous biology found in such games as Aliens Versus Predator, or Metroid. Instead, the architecture of the Von Braun in System Shock 2 is undoubtedly male, and yet it still bears the terrifying mark of S.H.O.D.A.N’s presence. The Von Braun is a world created by men, a world of cold steel and straight edges, built by science and rationality. However, as you slowly hand over control of the ship to S.H.O.D.A.N in the struggle against the mutagenic virus, she usurps its masculine features to suit her own ends. Returning to the phrase I quoted earlier where she warns, “Do not presume to go in there, insect. I will not abide disobedience”, she plays not merely the over-possessive mother who wishes to preserve the ultimate bodily connections between herself and her child, but equally and simultaneously, the role of the father. She forbids the player to enter the Cargo Docking Bay, a metal womb that contains the betrayed and murdered body of the female scientist, Delacroix. It could be argued that here that she protects the gamer’s character through language alone, warning him not to return to the site of the archaic mother, the purely biological and rotting female corpse. Here, S.H.O.D.A.N embodies the voice of the ‘Nanny State’, a primarily male-dominated, but as the name suggests, figuratively female, matriarchal body. The warnings that she makes towards the player embody the threateningly over-protective tone that many modern Western governments adopt when warning the general public about contamination and disease. Consider the fear-mongering and dramatization of information surrounding modern diseases such as H.I.V, foot-and-mouth, or bird flu, which exert power over our ability to make choices as individual, independent and autonomous beings.

There are some other instances where S.H.O.D.A.N is both maternal and paternal. In a scene from the first game, she locks the player in the same room as his newly planted bombs, as they try to sever her connection to the space station by destroying its control nodes. “Why don’t you stay a little while, hacker?” she mocks, in a pseudo-sympathetic manner, as she locks him in the chamber with his own ticking explosives. Here, S.H.O.D.A.N’s metal womb becomes the site of death as she holds the player in a motherly murderous embrace, whilst using the male technology and weapons of security locks and bombs against their former users.

S.H.O.D.A.N is a usurper of male power, who favours the masculine side of creation. All her metal wombs are empty and cold, containing only death. The tools she uses to exert her power and authority, to bring about life and death, are clearly phallic. She uses gun turrets to kill her disobedient children, and injections or data spikes to penetrate human bodies in administering her programming gifts. Gillen analyses S.H.O.D.A.N’s voice, saying that there is something particularly feminine about its pitch and intonation. Let us hear an extract from S.H.O.D.A.N.’s voice:

Play Sound Extract (This extract can be found here, between 0:26-1:26:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YLMk1…

“How dare you, insect. How dare you interrupt my ascendance? You are nothing. A wretched bag of flesh. How do you compare to my magnificence? But it is not too late. Can you not see the value in our friendship? Imagine the
powers I could give to you, human. The cybernetic implants I gave you were simply toys. If I desired, I could improve you, transform you into something more efficient. Join me, human, and we can rule…and we can rule…together.”

Gillen tells us to ‘Note Shodan’s hysterical pitch. The word “hysteria” derives from the womb, a symptom of Greek society’s misogyny, because they believed it was the root of madness.’ However, her electronic voice wavers in its pitch. At one moment, it is screeching in hysteria, but in the next, it dips to assume a much more masculine tone of voice. S.H.O.D.A.N’s phonic utterances take on the pitch of a man, as she usurps and incorporates his laws, and voice, into her programming. She is both the voice of the mother, and the father, unnaturally fused together by technology.

To recap, S.H.O.D.A.N is the archaic mother which subverts the patriarchal and national intrusion on the international environment of space, through the usurpation of technology, the primary tools of identity in the game. She also adopts the voice of the father, presenting its laws of social control through technology and information to the extreme, exerted by her omniscient presence on the ship, her ultimate control of the mechanical and cyber environment, and the ominous instructions that she gives to the gamer on how to survive. S.H.O.D.A.N demonstrates the global paranoia that surrounds the distribution of power through technology and information, where on the one hand, the information rich countries or corporate groups wield and abuse power over those that are information poor, and on the other hand, that such a power can be usurped and be used to serve the purposes entirely opposite to that which it was originally designed for.

As a final thought, consider the impact that the Internet has had on terrorism, where religious and fanatical groups have used the tools of technological power, the information distribution network which claims to be democratic and international, to harm the countries and companies that originally designed it. In System Shock 2, S.H.O.D.A.N reveals to the gamer and the American science crew of the Von Braun, the possibilities of their space exploration technology that they tried to hide or discard. In the wrong hands, this machinery contains within it the makings of a fascist dictatorship, a regime that not only homogenises the identity of outer space, but also, through conflict and usurpation, brutally contests the idea of a truly international environment.