Dracula: The Last Sanctuary and Female Gamers

In Dracula: The Last Sanctuary, Jonathan Harker embarks on an adventure to find and kill Dracula as his wife has become infected by the vampire. His wife, Mina, was a young schoolteacher who also knew shorthand and other skilled trades that women rarely knew. However, she was the obedient Victorian woman until she is bitten by Dracula and fed his blood. Dracula gave her what Jonathan Harker could not: knowledge, power and sexuality. With this, Dracula’s bite symbolizes the infection of modernity in a traditional society. Mina has turned into a new modern woman who is defiant to traditions held in the Victorian era and sexually powerful.

In the PC game, Harker traces Dracula to sewers, crypts, graveyards and abandoned buildings while his wife is supervised by a doctor. The scenes in the game when Mina is present are highly sexualized. Her dress is untactful and she is portrayed as daft and unsophisticated. However, in the book by Bram Stoker, she is the reason the men are able to fight Dracula. In addition, her intelligence and domineering personality is the reason why Dracula wants her as his partner. Without her intelligence and her ability to think quickly, the men would not have been able to kill Dracula. In the game, Mina is not as intellectual as she is portrayed in the book. The sexualized and weakened image of Mina might be unacceptable to women gamers who have knowledge of the book and knowledge of Mina’s actual importance.

It does make sense, however, for the women to be hyper-sexualized as Dracula’s bite creates sexual desire. It’s a part of the history of Dracula. Also, this image of women markets to male gamers as seen in various other video games. Mina’s character is weakened from the book to the PC game as she plays the damsel in distress. Her character is objectified, not classy or tasteful. For games like this one and many others, women typically don’t want to pay forty to fifty dollars “on a product that tells [them] that [they are] a brainless piece of trash and that any value [they] may have as a human being is to be based upon [their]sexuality” (http://spooky.ms11.net/index.html).

Although there are moments of this game that demeans to women, the game is overall decently written and thorough. Historically, it does have it’s flaws but it is designed off a book from the nineteenth century. It needs to make appeal to the modern gamer of the twenty-first century where sex and gender aren’t quite taboo. Dracula: The Last Sanctuary is a decent game for all sexes although it does have its flaws.