This panel is about Lara Croft and the changes she went through during the three generations of Tomb Raider. I just finished my undergrad and this project was my semester-long seminar paper. The title for the paper is “A Semiotic Analysis of Lara Croft: Exploring Three Generations of the Tomb Raider Video Games”. Obviously this is a very academic-based paper, but the presentation I would present would have everything in lay language, and I would include more fun information about the Tomb Raider Games and less dry academic theory.
The Abstract for the paper: This research conducts a semiotics analysis of Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider series using Roland Barthes’s Myth to better understand gender representations in video games. The data for this study uses the 11 games from the Tomb Raider series on the PC platform—Lara Croft’s original form. This study finds that the narrative of women in video games has changed over a 20-year period and shows that Lara Croft is socially constructed to look feminine, but act masculine.