(See told you I’d come back to this)
Edit: Here’s part 1 if anyone is interested thank you to Tumbleweed in the comments for reminding me.
I believe that characterisation is one of those pesky things modern gaming is still having trouble integrating into current generation games effectively. In the golden age it wasn’t so much of a problem — the only real story you had was usually laid out on the back of the box, or conveyed through on-screen text crawls, like in the early RPGs such as the Final Fantasy series. The reason for this was (I assume anyway) that most video games back in the days of the NES and Sega were so bloody weird that adding detailed plot synopsis and character motivations to explain just what the hell was going on would have taken a few leaps in logic.
For instance, if developers had to go into a lengthy in-game explanation of why a fat middle age plumber from Brooklyn is the obvious choice to save a princess from a fire breathing dragon and his fearsome army of turtles (not that a fat middle aged plumber couldn’t do that of course), I dare say it would make the game so convoluted that it would detract somewhat from the overall experience. So gamers were just sort of expected to accept it, and that’s what we did.
For a while this worked. However as gaming has evolved and pushed hard for realism — most notably the FPS genre which, whether we like it or not, has become the dominant video game format in the 21 century — developers have had to come around quickly to the idea that sooner or later they would have to give characters believable motivations and personalities. This is a tricky thing to do (for instance, the makers of the new Uncharted game admit, in one of their featurettes on the extras disk that comes with the game, that they came up with the set pieces first then worked the plot around them) so most developers usually fall back on using a set of archetypes that have worked well in the past. Like gruff soldier, cocky mercenary or stoic badass. So what’s happening is games are going for maturity in terms of themes and environments but are filling them with flat 2-dimensional stereotypical male leads.
This leads to a lot of male characters in games often coming off as the kinds of guys who you wouldn’t want to spend more than 5 minutes with in real life, let alone control for an entire game. Two names that spring instantly to mind, from two of the most profitable franchises in modern gaming, are Nathan Drake from Uncharted and Marcus Phoenix Fenix from Gears of War. The publishers insist on making these guys the heroes of their respective titles, even though they don’t do anything that could be described as particularly heroic, often treat the people around them like shit, and aren’t particularly relatable or likeable. It also gives me pause to wonder if this what the people that make these games think I want in a male lead. Even worse than that is, is this what people who don’t play games and are critical of the impact they are having think I want in a male lead?
Maybe I’m wrong to call this attitude misandrist in the strictest sense (I only said maybe) but it does seem limiting in terms of the kinds of roles men can take on in video games and seeing as an overwhelming majority of video game protagonists are men the fact that there isn’t more diversity can be kind of disheartening.
For some more reading on this subject here are some links of interest
Extra Punctuation: Manly vs Macho in Gears of War
Extra Punctuation: Uncharted 2
Charlie Brooker’s article on Modern Warfare 3 for the Guardian
I have to disagree with your analysis of Mini-Tidus, AKA Hope. He’s not angsting over perceiving himself as weak, though in the beginning Lightning (and some of this is because of her own guilt/whatever complex she’s got because of what happened to her little sister) may certainly regard him this way.
Hope doesn’t spend all that much time being unsure in his abilities, he’s pretty eager to prove himself and gains confidence in what he can do as the story progresses, and remembering that it’s all taking place in a very small period of time (The part where he and Lightning are in that canyon is like, the very night after the events in Cocoon at the start of the story), it seemed pretty reasonable to me.
In fact, the vast majority of his angst is about how he should deal with his feelings about the events in the very beginning death and Snowe’s involvement in such. He might not be a cocky bastard, or anything but what unsure-ness he does have meshes with the game and does not seem to fit the description of “[not] fit[ting] the gameplay and setting”
No comment on Squall. Damned if I remember anything about that game.
As for Squall, his issue was never about self-esteem and more about kinda being a jerk and opening up to people. And barring anything outside the game itself, Cloud seemed pretty confident about himself until he found out his memories weren’t exactly his, and even then it’s not like he spent the rest of the game angsting about it. Well, he did kinda spend sometime incapacitated though considering what he ended up like that it makes sense. At least, that’s my own impression of it anyway–he was hardly the character most detractors made him out to be.
Though I’ll be honest I say that I’m not an expert on FF in general compared to other series.
I think Luke fon Fabre from Tales of the Abyss is a much better example. Dude is basically an arrogant jerkass in the beginning of the game until a certain event causes him to pretty much lose all that self-confidence, and he never quite recovers from it even in the end. [How the game goes about doing it however is a case of YMMV. I definitely loved the many ideas it had but how they were executed is one of the reasons I have such a love-hate relationship with the game]
@Nezumi: This was my experience with the Pokemon series and one of those Final Fantasy games for PS3 (my brother’s PS3, not mine–I think it was FF13). That’s fairly recent. It’s one thing to be able to run off and kill monsters on the side to become a powerhouse, it’s quite another for the game to say that you aren’t at a high enough level to progress so you need to go kill some monsters for a while until you are. The only reason I put up with it in Pokemon was because each route had new monsters for you to capture–I don’t want to have to do any level-grinding just for level-grinding’s sake. It’s ok as an optional thing, but forcing it on the player is just stupid.
@Hugh: In some things, it’s true. In others, Western civilization is Doing It Right and Asia is Doing It Wrong. Also, bear in mind that this is a generalization referring to the most common games, and that there are almost always exceptions to those.
That Guardian article linked was sadly very homophobic.
However, I do agree that it’s actually bloody senseless to have to play as a character who is basically a shallow stereotype of a guy. I avoid many FPS games because of those elements.
@The_L: There’s no Final Fantasy game [the recent ones anyway] that requires you to be a certain level to beat. Low level runs are pretty common. In fact two games in the series discourage grinding in general, 8 has bosses [and enemies as well] that scale in power as you level, which doesn’t have much of an effect on your stats as much as junctioning does and 13 has limit to how many abilities you can get in the Crystalsomething each chapter until a certain point, although there’s no downside in grinding. And in 13′s case, setting up the right paradigms is definitely the key to winning a lot of fights than outright grinding.
A lot of recent console RPGs really aren’t the grindfests people make them out to be, since they pretty much have several ways to go at a battle, like the option of turning down the difficulty to something easier or rearranging the type of skills you have. Didn’t really mean to go into a tangent there, but that’s one of my biggest pet peeves.
I feel like, if we’re talking about games that portray men negatively (maybe not as a class, but as an individual) then we should talk about a few games that did it right.
Two games come immediately to mind – Heavy Rain and the upcoming game I Am Alive.
In Heavy Rain, one of the playable characters, Ethan Mars, is a loving father to his two sons and loving husband to his wife. I don’t want to ruin the story, but I will say that Ethan’s dedication to his family is the main driving force behind the trials he endures in the game – and it was refreshing to see a man portrayed in a light that showed him as someone motivated by either money, power or (sexual) love.
Secondly, the protagonist in the unreleased game I Am Alive is said to be a husband separated from his wife and daughter after a massive disaster wipes out most of humanity. The gameplay, from what I understand, revolves around him re-uniting with them and protecting/providing for them.
(Aside: I worry about how weak and/or helpless the wife may be in I Am Alive. I will be disappointed if she is portrayed as a weak, helpless 2-Dimensional character with little capacity for caring for the daughter. In general, I am mostly disturbed that every work of fiction tends to portray either the husband or wife as the “main character” and often paints their spouse as flawed, weak or flat. This is universally true in video games, as far as I have experienced.)
Ugh. Edit: “it was refreshing to see a man portrayed in a light that showed him as someone motivated by something other than money, power or (sexual) love.”
A character who has existential issues, because he believes in rules as rules (ie he’s very much UNchaotic – he’s preaching the very definition of lawful, with his constant UPPP (aka UP3) thing).
The UP3 is a sort of agreement that Earth’s “empire” have that anyone who enters into contact with a ‘lower’ civilization (not able to do space traveling enough to meet other civilizations on their own) will not divulge in one way or another, their own civilization’s technology or knowledge of such.
I meant Fayt in Star Ocean: Til The End of Time.
I want to give a little love to Valve, here, by pointing out that Team Fortress 2 averts the hell out of this problem. There are nine (possibly eight; jury’s still out on Pyro) men on the team, and each has a distinct personality and style. Best of all, they all get to be FUNNY. They also found an inventive solution to the problem of the token black character being a cheap stereotype with a stupid accent; they made him a ridiculously unexpected stereotype with an outrageous accent.
On the other hand, I’ve just started playing Left 4 Dead, and it’s got a little bit of the opposite problem. The three men have distinct, though not complex, personalities, and the closest one to being a jerk is Francis, and even so half his lines are about helping out teammates because it’s a cooperative game. Bill is gruff with an underlying lovability, Francis complains about everything but has a certain zombicidal joie de vivre, and Louis mixes optimism with exasperation quite charmingly. And Zoe is… The Girl. I literally couldn’t tell you anything about her personality without referring to the comics.
Not to defend Left 4 Dead too much as I have …. negative things to say about it, but Zoe is a bit of a genre savvy nerd. If you pay attention to her lines, she tends to comment on the weaknesses and the behavior of the dead, from time to time.
Zoe is a bit of a genre savvy nerd.
Hmmm. Fair point. I may have been a bit quick to write off her characterization.
I wish I had found this blog earlier.
There is a japanese series of shooter games made by, essentially, one guy. The game series is named Touhou Project and is famous for, well, having only female characters.
This isn’t in itself very… Radical or unique. I mean there are other games with only female characters. The main thing about Touhou, however, is the design of the characters. While they’re all young and basically as pretty as ZUN, the developer, can draw them, they’re also clearly not being sexualized. Atleast not in any conventional way I know of. Swimsuits or bikinis? No. Ridiculous super-heroine style outfits? Nope. The closest the game comes to a “sexy” design is one of the characters who has a mini skirt.
There is plenty – with “plenty” being the understatement of the year – of porn of these characters floating on the net and on japanese conventions, but the official artwork and the comic books officially approved by ZUN are all perfectly “clean”.
Because of this an interesting effect is that none of the characters are “token girls”. Every character has some kind of personality, though some are more bland than others. One male character was later introduced in an illustrated novel (commonly referred to as “light novel” in Japan) and this character, Rinnosuke, wasn’t treated as one would except that male character to be in a setting with ONLY FEMALE CHARACTERS. He runs a little store selling random stuff.
It’s basically a setting that reverses the common principle that every important character is male and every female is some male’s love interest.