I set out with the intention of exploring the relationship between the personality of the child and the personality of Lara Croft.

For me the most striking thing about the letters and the interviews was the overwhelming and sustained enthusiasm of the pupils for this project. Enthusiasm for the game, admiration for Lara Croft and the novelty of having their pleasure "legitimated" by the school seemed to be major factors in this enthusiasm.

Of the three issues identified as concerns: violence, addiction and reinforcement of gender stereotypes, the last issue came first with pupils. This is probably dictated by the choice of game. The Tomb Raider trilogy consists of games in which the violence is mainly defensively directed against attacking animals rather the protagonist seeking out human targets. Pupils were unlikely to spontaneously raise the issue of addiction to the game beyond saying how much they liked it. Lara Croft is a controversially sexualised figure and dominates the publicity for the game.

None of the parents raised the issue of addiction to video games, if they were concerned it was with ‘addiction’ to TV and video. When I asked my class what their favourite passtime really was, "Hanging out with friends" came top with no serious rival. This might be linked to playing a video game with a friend who had a playstation or a PC. It might equally be linked to a new CD or a video or more frequently with nothing in particular (or perhaps nothing they thought it good to discuss with a teacher). They gave every impression that being with their friends was more important than whatever activity they were involved in.

An example of the public discourse surrounding the game is the joke on ‘Have I got News for You’ (05 06 99) in the context of a discussion on literacy, "The good news is that 90% of 11 year olds will reach level 4. The bad news is that it is level 4 of Tomb Raider." Books are contrasted with video games. The games are seen as a problem which suggests why much of the research is psychological analysis of the sexism and violence.

Books are a privileged medium both in the curriculum and in public discourse. The sexism and violence in books are an issue but the overwhelming image is of their educational value. There is little perception that pupils need to be able to ‘read’ these texts. Pupils are well aware of this discourse and will use video games as a badge of rebellion against authority, seeing books as a conformist medium.

Although perceived as an adolescent male fantasy, Lara can be reinterpreted by pupils as an exponent of ‘girl power’. Her clothes may be skimpy but this is perceived as an expression of her independence and desire to wear what she wants. She is seen to engage in ‘masculine’ activities and not to need a boyfriend to help her out of difficulties.

The violence against animals is a major concern of pupils but there is evidence that the ‘personality’ involved in violent acts in the game does not affect the ‘personality’ in real life situations. There is a lot of concern expressed for the responsibility of the player to keep Lara alive and pupils stressed the fact that when playing Lara they act in self defence.

There is some evidence that pupils perceive their own action through Lara in the game and this facilitates their dispositional attribution. In other words seeing themselves on the screen reflected through Lara makes it easier for them to make judgements about themselves.

In some cases, for example in relation to their self-perception of cleverness, this is at variance with their ostensible declared self-perception.

A lot of Sherry Turkle’s research (Turkle, 1995) related to the degree of reality of the scenes which users create in multi-user domains. She made reference to the account of "a rape in cyberspace" which opened up the debate about the relationship between events in RL and the pseudo-events in cyberspace. The nature of those events is not essentially changed if the user is interacting with other humans or intelligent agents indistinguishable from humans.

None of my pupils thinks there is a little Lara in the machine. However, their personalities can be seen to interact at different levels with the ‘personalities’ provided by the artificial intelligence incorporated into the gameplay. In effect they are playing games with other humans at one remove via the intelligent agents created by those humans.

It is particularly interesting to find pupils have a positive image of cleverness in relation to the game. This is partly because, as David put it, "she is only as clever as we can make her." In a school situation where serious concern has been expressed over pupils having a negative image of ‘swots’ this positive image of the practical game-winning skills of solving puzzles is an indication of a positive educational benefit. This is not to say that the actual skills developed in the game are necessarily useful, but the positive identification with ‘cleverness’ can only have a benficial effect on the child’s self-image.

The self-perception hypothesis put forward by Bem (1970, 1972) suggests that in forming an image of ourselves we can act as an observer of our own behaviour and make the same kind of dispositional attributions we would make about someone else. The game is almost uniquely suited to this activity. By seeing Lara as ‘clever’ and their own behaviour as ‘clever’ the prejudice against cleverness is broken down spectacularly.

In a normal class discussion some of the very same pupils would decline to join in or put up their hands. They report the reason that they do not do so is that they do not want to seem clever. So the game provides one way of looking at that concept which breaks down that thinking.

In an interview with Howard Rheingold, Sherry Turkle said "People fantasize about escape into their virtual bodies only to be shocked by the degree to which their real bodies are present in their simulations." (Rheingold 1998) Although Turkle refers to Multi User Domains, the degree to which pupils can ‘customise’ Lara Croft is one of the reasons for the convergence. Lara is only clever if the user is clever.

I would also point out that the perception of Lara as clever by teenage girls and boys militates against the view of Lara as simply a sex object to be manipulated by teenage boys. In fact my pupils also saw the way Lara dresses as a reason for referring to her as independent.

Whereas Epstein and Johnson saw pupils’ sexualised interpretations of school uniform as oppositional to the official culture of the school (Epstein and Johnson,1998), my pupils see Lara’s dress alongside her ‘non-feminine’ violence as an expression of individuality. Comparisons were made by my pupils between Lara and the Spice Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as individuals who were clearly in conflict with authority.

None of this means that Lara (or the Spice Girls or Buffy) is not a male fantasy object but it does suggest that it is possible for my pupils to use her as an ‘object to think with’ in exploring their attitudes towards aspects of their own personality. From the point of view of Eidos - a capitalist concern in a patriarchal society - the profits continue to roll in however pupils are using Tomb Raider, whether they are reading in oppositional messages or taking things at face value.

The issue of control was also interesting. The ‘rape in cyberspace’ was carried out using the equivalent of the ‘puppet’ command which enables one user to make another ostensibly issue messages or perform actions. It is difficult to convey to those who don’t get involved in MUDs just how unnerving this is!

The control of Lara Croft is nothing like as complete although one wonders about a game which allows boys to kill Lara off by drowning her in her own swimming pool. At the end of Tomb Raider 2, Lara returns to her home and goes into the shower room. She says to the user, "Don’t you think you’ve seen enough?" and then blasts him with a shotgun. Lara retakes control at this point and the phallic symbol (or at any rate symbol of power) of the gun is turned on the user.

It is clear to me that the nude-raider sites are a reaction against her independence and an attempt to impose a different stereotype on her. There was a rumour circulated in usenet that anyone who played TR2 all the way through without losing a life (a virtually impossible task) would get to see Lara naked and would not be shot at in the final scene. There are no figures available of how many adolescents tried to achieve this but the joke was on them.

Pupils identify with Lara’s fitness, although she is clearly much more agile than any of my pupils. As an avatar in a fantasy world she can perform moves which are very useful in the game and no small amount of skill on the part of the player is needed to learn how to elicit those moves. They can thus vicariously engage in sporting activities beyond their real life abilities but which do depend on their skill in the game.. There is skill involved but it is not athletic skill.

This is an important antidote to the perceived image of the game player as a ‘geek in glasses’ and has been emphasised in the current TV advertising for Playstation which stresses how tough players have to be.

The view of the personality as a unitary entity is hard to sustain in circumstances where pupils see themselves as different when inside the game and in real life. They are not under the illusion that Lara is real but rather that she represents an idealised projection of one of their personalities into an exciting world.

Lara can be seen to represent a kind of transitional object for these pupils, enabling them to move forward in their exploration of gender roles and their role as children in relation to (and in conflict with) adults.