Overall (9/10): As a fully realized character, SHODAN stands head and shoulders above the rest. She loses points, though, for that whole being evil and mass murdering thing.
The Look (10/10): It’s hard to fault SHODAN’s look. It’s creepy, yet beautiful in an eerie, Geiger-esque way. When she’s working hard to intimidate you, as she does in SS2 when you finally realize you’re talking to a machine and not to a human survivor, she uses her abilities to good effect, projecting multiple copies of herself until your entire field of vision is filled with the glory of SHODAN. That’s the way to do it.
Attitude (10/10): As mentioned at length above, SHODAN has the most positive attitude of any digital woman. She faces setback after setback — marooned on a planet in the middle of deep space, thwarted by both her creator and her own offspring, and hamstrung by a turncoat little cyborg — with aplomb, never losing her cool. She just finds a workaround every time. That’s gumption.
Intelligence (10/10): I refuse to make an “Artificial Intelligence” joke here, but truthfully, SHODAN is a computer, after all, so her intelligence goes without saying. Sure your character manage to outwit her at crucial points, but she’s got a lot more balls in the air at any one time than just your character. She has a whole station to run or a whole species to eradicate!
Stance (NA/10): She doesn’t have an actual body, so to speak, so it’s tough to judge her stance, but as mentioned above in “The Look”, she certainly knows how to be intimidating.
Voice (10/10): This is where SHODAN really shines, especially in SS2. Voiced by Terri Brosius (wife of Eric Brosius, who composed the music for System Shock), SHODAN displays her emotion by sounding unemotional. Even when masquerading as Dr. Polito (or, as she likes to call her, “the Polito Unit”), SHODAN can’t disguise the impatience and condescension in her voice. After revealing herself to you, SHODAN drops the gloves completely and her voice becomes more and more modulated, as a chorus of voices, each running at different speeds, joins in to harangue you for whatever you’re doing wrong (dawdling, dying, whatever).
Scripts: (10/10): SHODAN is perfectly fleshed-out, and her scripted dialogue superbly communicates both her character and her presence, using just her voice. Sure in the first System Shock she displays a kind of reverence for you as her creator, but in SS2, she considers you just a worm, and she tells you so, a lot. She exhorts you to hurry up, belittles you, demeans you, and wastes no opportunity to tell you how much better and more advanced she is. SHODAN: the mother-in-law you hope you never have.
Marketing Efforts Towards Women (9/10): SHODAN is the star of the System Shock games. She is on the cover, yet you will never find a SHODAN pin-up (unless it’s fan art), or SHODAN’s head grafted onto the body of a Playboy Bunny in order to sell more games. With that said, I’ve never seen an attempt at gendered marketing, either for or against, but I think that says a lot about the game and the developers. When your villain is female, there’s probably a big temptation to use the “b” word in marketing efforts, but if that happened, I didn’t see it (please post in the forum and let everyone know if you saw an ad like that).
Articles on WomenGamers.Com solely reflect the experiences and perspectives of the author(s). Feel free to agree or disagree in the accompanying forum thread.
