Thomas was alone.

Thomas was alone came out in 2012 and received an indulgent amount of credit for featuring empathetic and empathy-producing 2D quadrilaterals, narrated by an omniscient British man. It plays like a combination of N++ puzzles, Stanley Parable sarcastic meta-narrative, and one of those "Everything I need to know I learned in Kindergarten" posters.

You meet the characters sequentially. Thomas, a small red rectangle (2nd from right below), is only alone for a few levels. He's a friendly, lonely, excitable neutral, the baseline against which the others are defined. Next is Chris, the squat tan square, who's a misnamed, cantankerous little turd who views Thomas' skills with whiny envy. Then along comes John, that lanky yellow fellow at far right, with an arrogant personality to match his incredible jumping. He comes across as an affable 18-year-old white boy from private school who's really good at lacrosse, but not evil and hey he might grow into himself. As each character joins the troupe, the player uses them to solve increasingly difficult puzzles, combining each of their unique skills to navigate the platforms and perils. Chris can fit in small spaces, John can leap across chasms, they all can climb on each other, and the whole thing generally functions like a playable Tower of Hanoi. The meta-narrative, of a group of Artificial Intelligences that awaken and fight their way out of their code and into the wider world, is a sweet and humanistic parable.

​​So far, so good. But. Look, I've heard great things about this game. Anita Sarkeesian loves it, reviews rave about it, it's this collaborative, empathetic piece that manages to evoke a whole lot of emotion and humanity from a set of puzzles and leaping, two-dimensional quadrilaterals. I was so looking forward to a game focusing on togetherness, showing the evolution of human-like intelligences into a group of helpful friends. But, like the young woman in the Onion article who is forced to take a short half hour break from feminism in order to enjoy a television show, I could only enjoy this game when I divorced it from its broader social/gendered context. And then I found that I simply couldn’t.

The next character is Claire. She's that big blue square and the first female character, introduced falling off a crumbling tower while the narrator says "So this is how I die, thought Claire." But when the tower collapses and Claire falls into the water hazard at the bottom she realizes she's "a superhero!" who can traverse the water the others cannot. Ok, cool, hooray for Superhero Claire! But all the girl-power positivity in the world cannot obscure the fact that Claire's function is to help, not to leap. Thomas, John, and even stupid Chris are the adventurers. Slow, cumbersome Claire can barely jump and only springs into action when the others need to be ferried across the water.

Then there's another female shape, Laura, and it gets worse. She's the horizontal pink bar whose power is bounciness; the others jump on her in order to get higher than they'd be able to alone. But she's also a terrible jumper herself and she's followed by an ominous pixel cloud. If not for Chris falling in love with her, the others mutter, they'd rather leave her behind. Eventually, the pixel cloud surrounding her, like a biblical curse of Eve, destroys the characters one by one.

And hey, this might seem ridiculous, because it's not like everyone isn't a helper. Everyone helps! Everyone needs help! It's a very cooperative game. But, dear god, the way the game treats the female skills and personality traits vs. the male ones floored me. Claire and Laura are fundamentally helper functions (a feature emphasized later in the game when more evolved grey characters shaped like the males leap through clouds of blue and pink to gain the abilities of Claire or Laura as necessary). The female characters themselves are awkward and cumbersome but necessary for the group to succeed—their buoyancy and bounciness enable the others to conquer the level, but they are rarely more than objects to be utilized. Claire’s superhero rhetoric, rather than sounding empowered, seems to protest too much. Deep down, she doesn’t really believe it, for the simple reason that it’s just not true. Claire isn’t treated like a superhero; she’s treated like a life jacket.

The male characters, on the other hand, are valued for their individualism and athletic ability, how they are able to jump and move around the space. Only at the end of each level, when each character needs to get to a specified place, do the male characters go back and help the weaker females. Personality-wise, too, everyone gets their own traits, but Claire and Laura assume that everyone hates them, they're going to die, they're about to be abandoned. Whereas the males get more individualistic personalities, ones that are not based quite so much on other squares’ opinions—Chris is envious and lovelorn, John is arrogant and then humble, and Thomas is excitable but lonely. It was hard to ignore the sense that, even when transposed into tiny rectangles with artificial intelligences, the gender roles were inescapable.

Somewhere around chapter 6, the characters change (because Laura’s pixel cloud has temporarily eaten everyone from the first group), and this sequence was the one that completely broke my heart. One of our new characters is Sarah, and she can double jump. Understand that the double jump is one of those video game mechanics beloved across genres—with it, a character can leap and then leap again already airborne. It’s a little enhancement of real-world physics that makes game environments feel conquerable and you, the player, feel capable and heroic. Sarah knows how special she is, leaping across chasms even John wouldn’t be able to manage, and she’s planning to use her abilities to make it to the “fountain of data,” a mystical source of infinite knowledge. Thomas rejoins the game; Sarah preaches to him the gospel of the fountain and helps him through several levels that would have been impossible for him without her. They seem to be getting close. Finally, the darkness brightens and a white column of shimmering data invites the squares to climb to the top of the level and merge with the fountain.

Except not Sarah. She’s blocked from the column by a thick black bar, her ending outline demarcated at the foot of the level. Thomas is the square allowed to climb to the top and access what turns out to be the internet. Sarah is silent for several levels, and then the narrator says: “Sarah was deflated. She had not even gotten close to the fountain, but she could tell from Thomas' expression it had been important. Sarah knew her destiny was now to support him.” You know, clearly the game did succeed at evoking emotion, because that screen broke me a little.

It’s hard for me to tell if I’m reading too much into this, if I was primed to see sexist patterns and so therefore I did. After all, all of the characters go on journeys. All of them sacrifice themselves eventually to facilitate the birth of a new community of AIs. It’s the way they go about those transformations, though, that felt punishingly sexist. Claire realizes she’s never getting out and thinks “but there must be other AIs out there, unaware of their situation. Was there a way to help them?” Laura’s helpfulness is even more explicit: “Laura had been born special. She understood that now. She had been created to help others. If her bounce could be passed on, then this would all have been worthwhile.” Compare these realizations with that of Thomas: “Thomas liked the idea of being an architect. He wanted to modify the world to help others....he'd do things differently. He'd empower the AIs above.” Thomas also wants to help—but he’s going to do it actively, by modifying the world, by thinking big. He hasn’t been “created to help others,” he’s here to change the world (which will, by extension, help). This shift in emphasis is key—men encouraged to change the world, women encouraged to help them do it.