Gender-Role-Moral Subversion in Fable 2

Lionhead Studio’s Fable II offers game players a full immersion experience in which players can choose to play as a man or woman. Outside of combat skill choices, players also have the option to marry, have children, and live a morally upstanding life or heroism. On the other hand, players may choose to drink, gamble, become obese eating decadent food, or corrupt themselves to veritable embodiments of evil. One of the outstanding features of Fable II’s third person perspective is for every choice the player makes, the consequence is a visual index read on and through the visual representation of the player’s on-screen character. This feature actively pushes what the player may or may not be comfortable with seeing, and identifying with.  Eat one too many cream tarts, and the character’s waistline rounds. Drink one too many beers, the character, sick and woozy, stumbles through the tavern. However, the game also encourages stepping outside of traditional gender and social modes to unlock Demon doors (behind which are treasures to be had), or to win achievements points. The game seems intent on subverting how the player probably behaves in accordance to real life rules. As the article, “Women and Games: Technologies of the Gendered Self,” points out “technology encourages [gamers] to enact new definitions of the gendered self” (686). Moreover, with a game like Fable II, the encouragement goes beyond gender identification, exhibiting and exploring their “potential” as social performers in the relatively “safe” place setting of Fable II’s virtual Albion. This further proves the articles argument that “the salient factor for power gamers...appears to involve choice and control” (686). The multiplicity of potential selves Fable II offers is daringly inviting.

In terms of gender reconstruction, Fable II offers not only the choice to choose a gender performance, but it also promotes a fluidity of gender within the characters. Playing as a female hero, the melee combat skill enables the character to perform a masculine representation as the character adopts traditionally physical masculine traits—bulging muscles, stockier frames. Alternatively, the sexy/”kicking butt” representation is also achievable.

Even if this representation is the preferred (it is for me because I can be heavy and middle age in reality), Anne Marie Schleiner observes the importance for girls to play these games. She writes, “It is important for women to not to be excluded from...the positions of influence in the larger information sector that will be increasingly tied into an “education” in gaming/computer-geek culture” (224). For Schleiner, regardless of the manner girls play video games, the important thing is that they play. Fable II also pushes normative associations with heterosexual male aggression and shooter-action style game play. Schleiner argues that through games like Tomb Raider and Fable II  “queer female gaming subjects also delight in the abject annihilation of her foes, in the adrenaline rush of combat...that rupture the body surface of ‘the other’” (224). Most endearing about Fable II is its gender fluidity. It highlights the performative nature of gender that most people wear like outfits. In game play, players can purchase a sex change potion and change into the opposite sex, thus performing different genders as the whim strikes. Cross-dressing, Goth-dressing, or just outright fashion faux pas are easily performed, as are social functions commonly associated with either feminine or masculine gender performances. Male and female heroes dye their hair, their clothes, wear facial hair, or get tattoos; they may gamble, fight ala gladiator style in a tournament, or become polygamist. Further, Fable II’s fairytale quality, set in a remarkably beautiful fairytale landscape stimulates the spirit of imagination, dreaming, and becoming.