Hiding in Plain Sight: The Gendering of (In)Action in Alien: Isolation

Last October, Sega released Alien: Isolation, and much of the discussion around the game has dealt with its pacing, its level of difficulty, its relationship and faithfulness to the film franchise, and whether or not the game is successfully scary. Relatively little discussion has occurred, however, regarding the manner in which gender is represented in the game—something that, it seems to me, should be conceived of as significant, as Alien: Isolation is one of those rare games in which the main character is a woman.

I was really excited to play the game when it came out, especially since I, being fairly obsessed with Alien, was interested in the fact that the game allows us to think about what happens to Ellen Ripley’s daughter Amanda. But what happens to Amanda, I have come to realize, is emblematic of a larger issue—namely, the manner in which women are rendered invisible, and not just in video games or in the Alien films or in the horror genre but, more broadly, in a lot of different narrative and media forms. And specifically, it would seem that the way we are expected to play Amanda, the way we are told Amanda must navigate her way through the narrative of the game in order to reach the end and survive, is predicated on Amanda’s gender. The actions we take in Alien: Isolation, then, allow us to think about the ways that action—and inaction—become gendered.

The game, a survival horror stealth game played from a first person perspective, focuses on Amanda’s search to find information regarding the fact that her mother has been missing for the past fifteen years. This search leads her to Sevastopol Station, on which the flight recorder from the Nostromo (her mother’s ship) is being held. Upon arrival at Sevastopol, Amanda finds the station in disarray—the crew has been reduced to small, paranoid, and violent groups of scavengers, the android workforce abruptly kills people on sight, and (most terrifyingly) the towering Xenomorph of the Alien franchise prowls the broken-down halls of the deteriorating station. Finding herself in the midst of such an ominous and chaotic environment, Amanda’s main goal is simply to stay alive—to avoid being shot by a scavenger, strangled by an android, or impaled by an alien—and to escape the space station.

This survival-oriented narrative results in fairly passive gameplay. Much of the time spent playing Amanda involves hiding in storage closets, crawling through vents, and crouching behind desks—all in the name of avoiding detection. While I understand the fact that, as a horror game (especially one that descends from the Alien series), Alien: Isolation might seek to increase the suspense and eeriness of its narrative through the strategic use of fear-based objectives like hiding and escaping, what I find difficult to grasp is why such objectives must be played through the figure of a woman.

Perhaps one reason is the manner in which fear has often come to be constructed on the basis of gender. Within the realm of film—and horror films, in particular—gender-based representations of fear seem to be especially prevalent (which Carol Clover discusses at length in Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film). Slasher films, for instance, rely on such representations through their featuring of terrified female victim-protagonists; the extended narrative of the Alien series—of which Alien: Isolation, although it is a video game, can be considered a part—also makes use of such fear-driven storylines and character development. And yet, the interplay between fear and gender in these horror narratives is not necessarily as cut and dry as it may, at first, seem because even though fear may be gendered feminine, the fact that victim-protagonists like Amanda are able to heroically rescue themselves also seems to allow them to inhabit more traditionally masculine spaces as well. To be sure, Amanda Ripley seems to occupy both gendered spaces—feminine abject terror and masculine self-rescue—throughout the game, as the objective of her continual hiding is, ultimately, one of resilient survival. But while Amanda’s embodied blurring of such gender binaries may seem promising, it is nonetheless apparent that Amanda embodies fear, and it would seem that Amanda’s female body has been deemed necessary for just such a representation of terror. As such, the use of the female form, here, just like the use of female victim-protagonists in the horror genre in general, seems to be a calculated choice in the representation and perpetuation of the gendering of fear.

It seems to me that such gendering is especially revealed through the way Amanda moves around Sevastopol Station and the actions she takes throughout her journey. Unlike characters in more action-based first person perspective games (like first person shooters), Amanda rarely has the opportunity to actually shoot anything. The androids are extremely difficult to kill (and often kill Amanda before she has a chance to retaliate), the Alien is impossible to kill, and the game specifically directs players to avoid detection or find a way around groups of human scavengers so as not to provoke them in a fight; Amanda, on the other hand, is surprisingly easy to kill, since she only seems to be able to take very light damage before meeting an untimely demise. Amanda’s biological difference is specifically invoked in such situations; indeed, one character, in directing Amanda to find a way around a group of scavengers, bluntly says, “You’re smaller than me—you’ll make less noise.” Thus, Amanda, through her gender, is rendered biologically smaller and weaker, thereby designating the actions of hiding, crouching, ducking, and crawling to be biologically relevant objectives.

And further, the weapons (if we can call some of them that) that Amanda acquires throughout the game enhance such gendering. Amanda does not acquire a revolver for the first couple hours of gameplay, and even when she does, it is completely ineffective against the Alien, mostly ineffective against the androids, and inadvisable against the humans (as the noise may draw the Alien near). In the second half of the game, she does acquire a flamethrower, which, at least, hinders—but does not kill—the Alien (and often does not kill the androids before they have a chance to kill her). Most of the weapons that Amanda finds or crafts (from scraps found around the station) are distraction devices, such as flares or noisemakers that Amanda can throw down a hallway to distract her foes so that she can escape in the other direction. And, significantly, the main device Amanda uses is a motion tracker (modeled off the version used in the films) that allows her to detect the approach of a foe so that she might quickly duck into another room or hide in a cupboard—in other words, so that she might remain unseen. What is interesting to me about all these weapons and devices is the fact that they represent the action of a game, and in Alien: Isolation, it would seem that the prevailing action is hiding in fear and seeking to remain undetected and invisible.

Again, yes, I understand that it makes a lot of sense to spend a good chunk of time hiding and cowering and running away in a game that aims to be terrifying, but I cannot help wondering (because I am an inherent fuddy-duddy and proud of it)—does the game presuppose that everything that is happening in it is scarier because it is happening to a woman? Or, to put this another way, would we be as scared if the character we were playing were a man instead of Amanda? And if the character were a man, would we expect the game to have him die as easily as Amanda, be able to find and use a gun sooner and more often, run head-on into the fray against the Alien horde? I honestly don’t know, but what I do know is that Amanda is not the only female protagonist in the horror genre, and such a representational pattern—a pattern in which the seeming fragility and vulnerability of the female body is highlighted and influences the way we think about the narrative unfolding in front of us—bears consideration.