"The Fall Of The Omnipotent Video Game Hero" or "Ralph Fiennes Is Pretty Rad"

[Seil]

So I had some time to kill tonight, and the only thing open in my small town was the local grocer. While perusing the magazines, I saw this season's M on sale, with Ralph Fiennes on the cover. It read "The Somewhat Tortured Genius Of Ralph Fiennes; A serious fellow goes for a romp in The Grand Budapest Hotel." Well, I like Ralph Fiennes, and I liked The Grand Budapest Hotel, and it was only $6, so I bought it.

It's a men's fashion magazine filled with ads and articles about Calvin Klein and shoe designers and pretty people wearing yellow plaid. Okay - I'll admit fashion is an art form, albeit one I don't understand. However, there were some genuinely interesting articles in the magazine, including:[WARNING: SPOILERS FOR Max Payne 3, The Last Of Us, and COD: Spec Ops]

In the opening scenes of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, an adult man named Joel, who is controlled by the player, leads his daughter through the burning streets of a zombie apocalypse, only to find himself unable to save her from being gunned down by a soldier. The rest of the game follows the haunted hero as he tries to protect another young girl, Ellie, from the same fate as they tramp across a ruined America. Think Children of Men meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in video-game form. Protecting Ellie becomes Joel’s obsession. Not for her sake, and not because she might be humanity’s savior, but for purely selfish and redemptive reasons: to prove he can protect her; to prove he is still a good father; to prove he is still a good man.
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Despite being played by men and women in equal measure, video games have long been construed as a masculinist enterprise. Most are designed by men, with a male audience in mind, and nearly every blockbuster features a male protagonist. The few games with leading women, such as Dontnod’s Remember Me or Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider, present them more as sex objects than active subjects, there for the (assumed) male audience to gawk at while pressing buttons. Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto V, a game with three protagonists, has not a single leading woman.

“The concept of being masculine was so key to this story” is the line Rockstar cofounder Dan Houser gave The Guardian.

It’s a poor excuse, one trotted out all too often by the male-dominated industry in response to any question concerning the dearth of significant women in games. But given the boys’-club atmosphere, video games are a fascinating place to see dominant ideals of masculinity played out.

Up until the past few years, the representations of masculinity we have seen in games were traditional: manly men protecting their women, children, and homelands with muscles and firearms. Video-game story lines, moreover, have largely taken place within the genres of sci-fi, fantasy, action, and Western, all of which offer their brawny heroes ample opportunities to make conspicuous displays of old-school manliness: In Super Mario Bros., Mario saves the princess; in Halo, Master Chief saves the Earth; in Time Crisis 2, a cop team blasts through terrorists to save both the world and the girl.

The preponderance of macho saviors in video games reflects their overrepresentation in other media. There’s no shortage of films, novels, comics, and songs that give men the role of protector and possessor.

But in video games, retrograde masculinity has found an almost natural home. Video games, after all, are about doing something—pressing buttons to create effects in virtual worlds. Few actions are as simple to design as those that are physical: pulling a trigger, throwing a punch, making a giant leap. It’s easy for video-game makers to represent normative ideas of what it means to be a man.

Despite all that, something new has been afoot in recent years. We’re not seeing a broader representation of masculinity: The vast majority of games (the Modern Warfare trilogy, for just one example) still feature muscular fellows who triumph in the end. But a few recent games are critiquing the dominant view of masculinity in subtle ways, presenting players with heroes who find that their guns and biceps prove insufficient for the challenges thrown their way, who try to protect what they hold dear, only to see it slip from their control.

The posture of this new hero slumps a little; his winking confidence is starting to droop; his facial hair is less a beard and more of an instantiation of apathy.

As suggested by the experiences of Joel in The Last of Us, who spends an entire game mourning the daughter he failed to save, the old masculine ideal is becoming less of a crown and more of a burden.
Sorry, bro.

The trope of a male protagonist who, like Joel in The Last of Us, undertakes a quest for revenge (or justice) after suffering the horrendous death of someone close to him is certainly nothing new. In story after story, a terrible event sends the hero on a journey that gives him a chance to find himself and prove his strength. Think of Mad Max or Dirty Harry, in the movies. In comics, similarly, the Green Lantern springs into action after finding his girlfriend’s corpse shoved into a fridge by his nemesis, a story element that has given rise to the shorthand phrase “Women in Refrigerators,” a term meant to signal this all-too-common story device. But in recent games, the tone of this narrative is different, darker. Protagonists like Joel still seek revenge and redemption—but now they don’t always find what they are looking for.

Or take Max Payne. In the series of games that shares the title, Payne is a superhuman character, able to leap through the air in slow motion while firing two pistols with pinpoint accuracy. He takes down terrorists and crooks and corrupt cops by the roomful. Yet he proves unable to save anyone or anything he loves.

When Rockstar’s Max Payne 3 begins, Payne is already at rock bottom. Across the previous two games, his wife, baby, and girlfriend have all perished, despite Payne’s efforts to save them. We encounter him as a drunk and a drug addict, his hair unkempt, his face grizzly. He is working as a private security guard for a rich Brazilian man whose wife is promptly kidnapped on Payne’s watch. Throughout the game, despite all his action-hero feats, Payne is unable to meet the challenge. Regardless of how skilled the player behind the controller is, the woman will die.

Payne is strong and capable, but those attributes are useless for the events he and his player are faced with. Toward the end of Max Payne 3, the woman he has been chasing is shot in the face as he stands by, useless.

“Martin Walker” is no “Max Payne,” but it is still a good, strong name. He is the protagonist of Spec Ops: The Line, which, on first play, seems to be a conventional military shooter, part of the subgenre of shoot-’em-up games that usually depicts American or Western armies saving the world from communists or terrorists through superior firepower and tactical knowledge. Spec Ops: The Line, however, flips this. It begins with three American men walking into a near-future Dubai, which has been utterly destroyed by a sandstorm, with the hope of saving those trapped there. What unfolds is a brutal series of events that sees Walker (not to mention the player at the controller) responsible for hundreds of deaths, while saving no one.

Walker goes mad. He hallucinates, and the player is unable to tell what is real and what isn’t. Walker is so obsessed with being a hero, with being a man, that he destroys everything while saving nothing.

There are many other recent games in which a character’s best attempts to be a traditional protective figure prove insufficient, where the scripted story defies the player’s best attempts to set things right. The leading men of Gears of War, Grand Theft Auto IV, L.A. Noire, The Walking Dead, BioShock: Infinite, and Splinter Cell: Conviction all face similar conundrums. Players might play these games well; they might shoot all the enemies; they might make all the “right” decisions; but the story will, regardless, take the player deep into losing territory. Characters and players alike come to these video-game scenarios with a tried-and-tested masculine skill set—only to find it lacking.

It’s the tragedy of modern manhood played out again and again. These days, the games tell us, being a man, in the old sense, is not enough. These days, global financial crises reveal the fickle stability of man-as-breadwinner. These days, unmanned drones and more than a decade of futile military interventions have emasculated man-as-protector. These days, dozens of other identities—other masculinities, other genders, other ethnicities, other sexualities—have challenged the myth of a dominant masculinity to a near-breaking point. Men are still the most privileged people in our society—undeniably—but that does not lessen the force of the blow that comes with the realization that the mythical properties of manliness are just that: a myth.

Such anxiety comes through vividly in The Last of Us, Max Payne 3, and Spec Ops: The Line. This sense of futility, of impotence. Of growing up in a world in which being a man is not as straightforward an endeavor as previous generations of movies and games have promised. “I’m a dumb-move guy,” Payne muses toward the end of Max Payne 3. “That’s my style, and it’s too late in the day to hope for change.”

What we are seeing in this complicating of the male stereotype isn’t necessarily a conscious critique by game developers. They are, in the end, still making action games about men for a young male audience. Rather, we are seeing the modern man’s frustrations at the constrictions of such a narrow identity, rendered in high-def detail. We are seeing the realization that dominant notions of manliness are incompatible with the world of 2014.

It’s no longer enough to be a strong man with a beard who is really good at shooting or punching things—nor should it be. A more diverse and nuanced array of characters and perspectives is essential if video games are to be recognized as a legitimate cultural form. Plumbing the depths of the old notion of masculinity is but the first step in realizing that masculinity is not, perhaps, a one-size-fits-all identity. Joel, Martin Walker, and Max Payne are the rear guard. But the futility of their tragic stories isn’t something to pity; rather, it’s exciting. It signals an acceptance that perhaps masculinity is more complex than we have made it out to be.

which isn’t to say we’ll be seeing fewer video games about guys saving the world—but the old-style heroes no longer rule this cultural sphere. The heartfelt Papo & Yo, for one, presents a vulnerable side of masculinity, telling the story of a boy with a drunk and abusive father; it is based on the childhood experiences of its designer, Vander Caballero. Meanwhile, Gone Home, one of the most critically acclaimed games of the past year, puts the player in the role of a young woman exploring her family’s house and history—not “saving” or “conquering” anything, just exploring.

Games like these suggest a future in which developers will tell nuanced stories, creating games that allow players to explore intricate ideas of self and society, where the hero’s identity is challenged and stretched.

[Solid Snake]

Last of Us takes a good hard look at masculinity, but it's doing so in the context of a game that gives its women characters personality and agency. Joel's sorry ass is saved by Ellie just as often as he saves her, Ellie makes some of the story's most important decisions on her own, Tess' role is instrumental in instigating the journey and her relationship with Joel is always a two-way street, and there's both gay and ethnic minorities littered throughout the cast (including Ellie) who defy stereotypes. Last of Us is definitely still a story that's putting a magnifying glass to the tropes of masculinity but it's often doing so to subvert the stereotypes, that's the kind of story with a male protagonist we need more of in the industry.

By contrast, Grand Theft Auto V is basically patriarchal stereotyping played straight. Every female character in the game is paper-thin and exists solely to enrapture or infuriate the male characters. The men are the only ones with even the tiniest morsel of depth. Michael's character is written so the (presumably male) gamer identifies with him -- despite being a murdering, chauvinistic psychopath -- and finds his wife and his daughter annoying, because they're caricatures. Trevor's mere existence is an affront to the integrity of the industry (sorry, all of y'all who like him.)

We absolutely need more games to star women and minorities and it's ludicrous that the industry is still dominated by white men. But, given that it stars a white, male protagonist, Last of Us still did things a lot better than its competition. Blows Max Payne and most the other games mentioned in this article out of the water, at any rate.

[Ryong]

I'd like to add that I'd like to also see female characters that don't fit into either "completely powerless" or "STRONG, INDEPENDENT, REQUIRES NO HELP WHATSOEVER FROM ANYONE".

Heck, just better writing for characters in general.

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Originally Posted by Ryong

Heck, just better writing for characters in general.

This, and the themes being handled well.

Hopefully we'll see more of a nice diversity of flavors in gaming both 2D and 3D and more respect for each. And hopefully not a continuously depressing tone of "you accomplished nothing at the end" becoming the next big thing.

[mauve]

I do find it interesting that the latest trend in videogames is to have conflict both internally and externally, and not just in the standard venues of emo teen angst or the desire to beat the villain and live up to their family name and face FULL LIFE CONSEQUENCES.

At this point I'm not sure if this will just be a short-lived trend riding on the success of The Walking Dead and Last Of Us, or if this will continue to evolve. I personally think the success of the former was the inspiration for this movement, although it's certainly not the first game to go that direction. But so many people commented on the deep emotional sucker-punch delivered by that franchise, and I think other studios listened.

Like others have mentioned, I'm happy to see this depth in character writing. Sure, there's a time and a place for games with flat characters and one-dimensional motivations: I like Super Mario Bros Wii, and that game's only point is to save the boring princess and pretend you didn't mean to thow Player 2 off that cliff to their death. But realistically-motivated and well constructed characters are vital to good storytelling, which as we have seen is just as effective in videogames as it is in books, film or tv. I look forward to seeing how this trend continues.

Even the rebooted Tomb Raider franchise, which in terms of gameplay felt like Dante's Peak:The Videogame to me, went out of it's way to redefine Lara Croft into something other than "Chick with big boobs and lots of guns, and something about pseudoarchaeology." New Lara had emotions and hesitations and semi-realistic reactions to things. It wasn't perfect, but it worked to define her as a relatable character.

[synkr0nized]

Originally Posted by Mauve Mage

Even the rebooted Tomb Raider franchise, which in terms of gameplay felt like Dante's Peak:The Videogame to me, went out of it's way to redefine Lara Croft into something other than "Chick with big boobs and lots of guns, and something about pseudoarchaeology." New Lara had emotions and hesitations and semi-realistic reactions to things. It wasn't perfect, but it worked to define her as a relatable character.

I've been enjoying it. In addition, of the characters in her group she often seems like the only one with any survival instincts and capability to adapt, despite being thrust into the position and situation. I like that I feel like the more I do and encounter rewards me with seeing the character grow through the experiences rather than just get points in some kind of skill tree.

I also really, really like the bow, but that has nothing to with anything in this thread.

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

We absolutely need more games to star women and minorities and it's ludicrous that the industry is still dominated by white men. But, given that it stars a white, male protagonist, Last of Us still did things a lot better than its competition. Blows Max Payne and most the other games mentioned in this article out of the water, at any rate.

That is understandable, but only a topical bandaid fix to the underlying issue. Diversity for the sake of diversity, if you will. The video game industry itself is extremely toxic towards anyone who isn't white (and generally male). Fix the root of the problem and the rest will be easier to move in the right direction.

[Bard The 5th LW]

I like it when female characters are just people like anyone else. There are a lot of things about Tomb Raider 2013 that bugged me, but Lara's portrayal was pretty solid to me because she was just a person, and the fact that she was a girl was rather irrelevant on the whole.

I do kinda wish she removed her earrings though, given the whole 'survival' thing.

[Magus]

I have to defend GTA V here--the three main characters are deeply flawed individuals whose masculinity and aggression lands them in deep shit. Michael is driven entirely by his own ego--his rage at his wife's infidelity (which he has caused himself by being a listless and aggressive sociopath) causes him to destroy a multi-million dollar house. His temper has also alienated his son and daughter. Trevor obviously has to live in the ass-end of nowhere due to the incompatibility of his psychopathy with civilization. And Franklin endlessly attempts to take the easy way out of his social circumstances by turning to the criminal underworld--he thinks he can impress Tanisha by throwing money around and driving fast cars, but she sees through his phoniness, and he's left sitting in an empty mansion, his real goal completely unobtainable.

All of them are also secretly vulnerable--Michael has a grandiose vision of himself as an old-school gangster, but he's really a failure on the inside. Trevor has an incredibly strange homoerotic attachment to Michael, and massive abandonment issues. Franklin, as mentioned, is dismissive of his culture and friends, and the rejection of them in pursuit of wealth leads to outward success but inward emptiness.

[greed]

Originally Posted by Magus

I have to defend GTA V here--the three main characters are deeply flawed individuals whose masculinity and aggression lands them in deep shit. Michael is driven entirely by his own ego--his rage at his wife's infidelity (which he has caused himself by being a listless and aggressive sociopath) causes him to destroy a multi-million dollar house. His temper has also alienated his son and daughter. Trevor obviously has to live in the ass-end of nowhere due to the incompatibility of his psychopathy with civilization. And Franklin endlessly attempts to take the easy way out of his social circumstances by turning to the criminal underworld--he thinks he can impress Tanisha by throwing money around and driving fast cars, but she sees through his phoniness, and he's left sitting in an empty mansion, his real goal completely unobtainable.

All of them are also secretly vulnerable--Michael has a grandiose vision of himself as an old-school gangster, but he's really a failure on the inside. Trevor has an incredibly strange homoerotic attachment to Michael, and massive abandonment issues. Franklin, as mentioned, is dismissive of his culture and friends, and the rejection of them in pursuit of wealth leads to outward success but inward emptiness.

The problem with the messages here are the terrible execution of everything outside of the three of them, which massively undermines any sort of message. Michael not connecting with his family is made somewhat irrelevant cause his family is terrible, Trevor being an outsider because of his sociopathy is undermined by basically everyone in Los Santos showing little to no empathy themselves, and Franklin abandoning his old friends is undermined by the most worthwhile person from his old peer group being Lamarr.

GTA5's big problem writing wise was not giving anything real worth or emotion and just being unrelentingly cynical about everything. It's just really pretty boring and immature and not very funny or interesting.
Also being absolutely abysmal at writing women.

Gameplay wise I struggled with it because it was missing a lot of the advancements the genre has had in the SR games and Sleeping Dogs which made it feel really clunky and dated to play even if it looked fantastic.