Men in Gaming

[thebakedpotato]

Hur dur Feminism, Hur Dur Anita Sarkeesian. Hur Dur Castrate all living males.

Can't really think of anything else to start out with other than that. I was reading the latest article from cracked that stirred this month's sexism thread (The one from last month being mine I think.) and got to the writer's gripe about Ellie crying after murdering a rapist the moment that Joel appears and thought to myself:

1) Ellie is a 14 year old girl who just underwent two of the most horrific and traumatizing experiences one can endure. Clinging to her support system and trying to vent the emotions that come with such experiences would be expected for anyone in that caliber of a situation.

2) lol not for men!

You don't really see men cry a lot in games. And that's not something men can relate to more and more these days. I am reminded of Moviebob's video about GI Joe, how for his grandfather he was a real guy who did some of the same stuff he did, for his father it was a realistic guy with the real tools to do real things, and for him it was a bunch of made up guys who fought made up villains. The model of man in video games is one of a few tropes:

Fatherly badass
Young badass

Part of this lies in the foundation of games themselves:
Games, as an interactive medium cannot really reflect failure and decline without trading something for it in the experience. And that's hard to do both in mechanics and narrative. And that's hard to pull off well. (That moment when all your weapons are taken away except the weak ones)

As an interactive medium, story is second to experience. Having a decent story with shitty gameplay is awfully different from having decent gameplay with a shitty story.

Now, solving these problems have lead to some interesting innovations. Papers, Please put you into the shoes of a paper pusher and Horror games excel at making powerlessness and decline become an experience. Both of which deliver better experiences which makes me think that adhering to these trope like depictions of men sell the gaming industry short.
We just released the most expensive game ever, which already made its money back in preorders. While the film industry had one of the shittier years it ever has been.

We can do better than lapping at Hollywood's generic fill in characters. And we damn well should.

 

[BQE]

One of my all time favorite games, Catherine, had Vincent who was anything but a badass or a hero. He's a nervous coward and the game is all about him!

I am struggling to come up with other examples.

 

[Bertylicious]

I think a lot of it has to do with wish fulfillment and a desire to be, or rather to fantasise about being, super competent/awesome. A character like that is difficult to write well, though not impossible as titles like Planescape Torment teach us, and it is often neccesary for writers to engage those very bemoaned tropes in order to fully draw in the audience.

Did you ever hear about that thing with radio and coconuts? Apparently, so a bloke in the pub told me, people got so used to hearing coconuts being used for horses hooves that when a radio show actually used recordings of real horses galoping they got complaints from people who said it didn't sound right. I expect that if two AAA games released that were basically the same and one featured a standard, patriarch reinforcing, alpha male, stereotype and the other featured a lead who was in some way challenging that the first would out sell the latter.

Games, like any art, will reflect the audience they are intended to serve.

 

[Bertylicious]

One of my all time favorite games, Catherine, had Vincent who was anything but a badass or a hero. He's a nervous coward and the game is all about him!

I am struggling to come up with other examples.

All the ones that leap to the fore are point and click adventure games.

If your gameplay mechanic involves busting out the kung fu or otherwise despatching "lesser" adversaries then your lead is superiour by definition. Even stealth games tend to portray their leads as invincible paragons of skill.

Your only real avenue is the road of unconventional paragons.

 

[Zhukov]

Y'know, I think one of the reasons that many of my favourite characters are female, despite them being rarer, is because they're actually allowed to show some weakness, vulnerability or emotion from time to time without being dismissed as whining pussies.

Jade is allowed to have a bit of a break down when the kids are taken and cry when her friend dies. April Ryan is allowed to freak out when shit gets violent and mourn when she loses someone. Liara T'soni is allowed to be overcome with relief and shed a few tears of release. If those were male characters in the same situations then they'd probably just stand around scowling with their chins stuck out, maybe grunt a bit or say something totally baaaadaaass is a rumbly voice.

So yeah, some non-badass male characters would be nice. Personally I've always wanted to play an unapologetic coward. Could fit well with a stealth game.

 

[thebakedpotato]

One of my all time favorite games, Catherine, had Vincent who was anything but a badass or a hero. He's a nervous coward and the game is all about him!

I am struggling to come up with other examples.

All the ones that leap to the fore are point and click adventure games.

If your gameplay mechanic involves busting out the kung fu or otherwise despatching "lesser" adversaries then your lead is superiour by definition. Even stealth games tend to portray their leads as invincible paragons of skill.

Your only real avenue is the road of unconventional paragons.

That is one of the challenges of the medium.

Honestly it needs to be addressed through better design and mechanics, nothing more, nothing less.

 

[Erttheking]

I agree. When I write I love torturing my guy characters and making them break down and cry just as much as my female characters...come to think of it I love it a little too much but that's a story for another time.

Something that springs to mind when you talk about this is Lee from the Walking Dead

Spoiler

It's a small thing but the way he goes "no...no, no" after he's been bitten just really hits you. He's basically whimpering "...that's not fair..." you can HEAR the despair in his voice, the voice of a man who knows his days are numbered.

Another good one is Solaire from Dark Souls. He was just such and up beat and pleasant person to be around that he became a fan favorite pretty damn quick

Spoiler

Finding him in the ruins of Lost Izalith, broken and defeated, on the brink of giving up looking for his sun and possibly even dying out of that despair...it hits you right where you feel

Yeah maybe trying to make a violent game like a shooter with a sympathetic protagonists is a difficult thing to do, but I don't think it's impossible. I think it can be done. Don't get me wrong, I really would like to see more games like Papers Please (Though let's be honest, even the Inspector from Paper's please is apparently a better shot than everyone in the entire Arstotzkan military) , but gaming is too massive for it to be an either or situation.

I'll just leave off with the words of Big Lebowski

Are you surprised at my tears, sir? Strong men also cry... strong men also cry

 

[MysticSlayer]

Well, a lot of men cry in JRPGs...Of course, they're often taken to the other extreme of being too emotional. Some characters are well-written, but others...yeah.

With that said, a few characters I could think of outside of JRPGs are:

Thomas Conlin (Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault)--He tends to show emotions outside of simply being a badass, but, then again, part of the game is meant to give a slightly more "realistic" portrayal of its soldiers. His speech before the Battle of Tarawa, in particular, shows this the best.

Commander Shepard (Mass Effect 3)--Maybe not the best example, but anyone who plays as Male Shepard gets a chance to see his more emotionally unstable side, even if it isn't the most well-written and you also have the option of playing it as FemShep. Still, his response to seeing the young boy die and his response to losing to Kai Leng show that he's not always upbeat. He also has moments like this in the first game. Can't remember any from the second one. Player responses, of course, play a role in how they see his character during these situations as well.

Those are the two that come to mind the quickest, at least as far as protagonists go. I could probably add many side-characters as well, and this includes from the military genre, which is notorious for the "manly man" stereotype.

One issue that tends to come up, though, is that a lot of protagonists in games are also the silent type, and players are supposed to fill in their emotions with their own emotions. Granted, that doesn't excuse the protagonists that aren't silent, but it does sort of help show why we see men cry so little in games--we're supposed to be the ones crying and just assuming that they are as well.

 

[Savagezion]

Y'know, I think one of the reasons that many of my favourite characters are female, despite them being rarer, is because they're actually allowed to show some weakness, vulnerability or emotion from time to time without being dismissed as whining pussies.

Jade is allowed to have a bit of a break down when the kids are taken and cry when her friend dies. April Ryan is allowed to freak out when shit get violent and mourn when she loses someone. Liara T'soni is allowed to be overcome with relief and shed a few tears of release. If those were male characters in the same situations then they'd probably just stand around scowling with their chins stuck out, maybe grunt a bit or say something totally baaaadaaass is a rumbly voice.

So yeah, some non-badass male characters would be nice. Personally I've always wanted to play an unapologetic coward. Could fit well with a stealth game.

That's a good point you make there Zhukov. I never really thought about it. Perhaps there is something in that as to why I have a tendency to make/play more female characters in games than many of my friends. I honestly come down to about a 50-50 split, maybe 60-40 in favor of women. However, most other guys I know that game have asked me why and I really don't have an answer. I started because of the whole "If I have to stare at an avatar..." thing but now it just happens and I don't even care about what I am staring at.I just know I make a lot of female characters. MMOS, SP RPGs, plus I have always been a fan of Tomb Raider since the PS1. (Have taken a lot of shit for that until recently with the reboot and even taken some for having interest in it.)

A lot of male dialogue is terrible. Many female dialogues are at least relatable or understandable. I gotta say here though, I like Nathan Drake. I like Sully even more but Nate is cool in my book. Nate does have a breaking point. But then Elena or someone is like "quit being a pussy Nate!". Hehe, I love Uncharted. Welp, gonna be playing through them again in the next couple weeks.

Imagine if they made a game about Rumpelstiltskin from Once Upon a Time.

...And a big fat coward.

 

[Erttheking]

"Men don't cry" isn't a videogame trope, it's a real life trope.

The last 10,000 years or so men have been expected to put emotions aside.

Actually that may not be true. Tears used to be a sign of manliness...apparently.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19780_5-gender-stereotypes-that-used-to-be-exact-opposite.html#ixzz2Ctbs29Oa

 

[Headsprouter]

and got to the writer's gripe about Ellie crying after murdering a rapist the moment that Joel appears and thought to myself:

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Wait just one cotton pickin' second.

Isn't this a spoiler for The Last of Us?

Shouldn't there be a warning or something floating about for something like this? Provided this is the right Ellie I'm thinking of. I'm not sure I even know the middle-aged dude's name.

But on topic, I don't like being a badass all the time. I'm not even sure why people enjoy being a "badass" so much at all. When I played Amnesia: The Dark Descent I enjoyed the feeling of helplessness so much that now I'm determined to try as much survival horror games as possible. But to be entirely honest, every single one I see with any sort of gun or weapon, such as Resident Evil just turns me off completely. Being a young guy who's afraid of the dark and whimpers when a monster gargles around the corner is as immersive as an experience can get for me.

Of course nowadays, I just play with the monsters because I just think they're so damn cool.

But anyway, the sooner male characters in video games start being pathetic and terrified, the sooner I'll be the main protagonist. And that would be awesome.

 

[Muchashca]

Hur dur Feminism, Hur Dur Anita Sarkeesian. Hur Dur Castrate all living males.

Part of this lies in the foundation of games themselves:
Games, as an interactive medium cannot really reflect failure and decline without trading something for it in the experience. And that's hard to do both in mechanics and narrative. And that's hard to pull off well. (That moment when all your weapons are taken away except the weak ones)

Just a quick point, but one game that showed decline in a male protagonist really well was Shadow of the Colossus. Although the game had almost no narrative, it showed graphically how the male lead slowly gave his own life for that of his girlfriend.

Deep male characters for videogames do seem to be difficult to write though, without losing the attention of the audience.

 

[Something Amyss]

I have no problem with men in gaming. I'm just sick of all these fake gamer guys co-opting it.

the writer's gripe about Ellie crying after murdering a rapist the moment that Joel appears and thought to myself:

The complaint is that she's constantly a badass until story constraints require her to be emotionally fragile and for a dude to fix her emotional boo-boo. Everything I've seen about the game paints this as accurate, and yet people constantly seem to misrepresent the author of that list's complaint. But then, I'm not sure I expected honest with an opening like "Hur dur Feminism, Hur Dur Anita Sarkeesian. Hur Dur Castrate all living males" even in jest.

 

[Vrex360]

That's actually an interesting point and one that I subscribe to. I remember during the early controversy surrounding the Tomb Raider trailer I heard a lot of guys saying 'oh so why can't a woman be tough AND vulnerable' and 'so what if a woman becomes a hero through a hard and violent experience, is that sexist now?' and I think people people don't understand the real issue either intentionally or unintentionally.
There isn't any reason why a female lead can't be strong and vulnerable in equal measure, hell that's what all good protagonists should be. Likewise a female character being thrown into a dangerous and painful experience and coming out of it scarred and damaged but never giving up is something to admire and respect.
The problem arises however when being beaten or otherwise made to appear emotionally weak or physically vulnerable is something that happens almost EXCLUSIVELY to female characters. You wouldn't get a trailer for a new Halo game that's just Masterchief being beaten, stabbed, attacked by wild animals, falling off cliffs, getting caught in traps and yes being almost sexually assaulted by a platoon of Covenant brutes. And yet seriously go back and watch the trailer for Tomb raider that started that whole mess, that is literally all it is. Lara being brutalized again and again and again in increasingly awful ways in a manner that almost feels like the guys making it are almost getting off to it.

That would honestly be bad no matter what the gender because it looks less like an adventure and more a snuff film starring an iconic hero but the fact that it's a girl, one of the few girls in gaming these days, and we just know the equivalent just doesn't really exist makes it especially problematic. I don't think Crystal Dynamics hates women or get sexual joy from seeing a young woman in pain. I don't think they're Joffrey Baratheon, but most people aren't Joffrey Baratheon and that doesn't mean they can't have poor judgement.
I don't like seeing young women in pain, that's just fact. I figure most people don't, we have a societal inclination to find that sort of thing unpleasant and I think that was the idea. To appeal through shock and horror as a way to get audiences interested while also appealing to an innate desire to protect the helpless female.

Protecting someone is not a shameful thing to do, and being protective of women is not an innately misogynistic thing to do. I imagine most of the guys here if they saw a young woman like Ms. Croft being beaten or hurt and were in a position to intervene and stop it they would without a second thought. Being protective is not a bad thing to be ashamed of and I am not trying to say it is.

HOWEVER the fact still remains Lara Croft was being reinvented specifically to be a hero for a new age and also a hero for the growing female audience to identify with and look up to. With that in mind, especially when she stands alongside other badass manly heroes, perhaps it would have been better if the trailer had done a better job of conveying Lara as a badass warrior, killing baddies, taking names and blowing shit up while doing deft defying leaps and exploring tombs. That's the character and the angle to go for and something I suspect a pretty starved female audience would want to see. A kickass heroine doing kickass things.
Instead the trailer decided to appeal to the innate male desire to protect the helpless female and showcased her vulnerability in a gratutious and dare I say even kind of exploitative manner and despite how much I WANTED TO LIKE THAT GAME for a long time the marketing campaign looked a little bit questionable to say the least.

Point is at some point the marketers looked at this game with a female lead and thought to themselves:
We have a female lead and we want to make it appeal to men, how should we do it?
And the solution (for the early trailers at least) was to showcase her vulnerability and helplessness as much as possible and had her beaten, stabbed, mauled by animals, impaled on a spike, almost drowned, thrown from great heights and almost sexually assaulted.
YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO SEE WHY THAT BOTHERED PEOPLE.

The point is women are allowed to be weak while men aren't. I can promise you the same line of reasoning would never be seen in a game with a male hero being marketed towards boys. Because we don't want our men to be weak or made vulnerable, we want them big and strong and manly GRRRRR!!!
I suspect Kratos would lose all his popularity in an instant if someone decided to make an origin story about him as a teenager that's first trailer was just him being beaten up and then almost sexually assaulted by a cyclops. Somehow I doubt that rape or sexual assault would ever be a 'defining character moment' for any male hero. Masterchief will not reveal he was molested by a Grunt at age six and that that is the reason he is super strong and determined now, nor will Duke Nukem ever break down and reveal his tough guy persona is just based on the fact that he was bullied as a kid and was touched inappropriately.
By contrast the melting of the ice queen and the breaking of the hero to reveal a sad fragile bunny rabbit is so par the course with female characters its jarring.

Anita Sarkeesian (yes I know she's apparently the evilest evil person who ever eviled but when she gets it right she gets it right so shush) pretty much hit the nail on the head with her video about the real reason men should hate Twilight. The primary reason men got angry about twilight, says Sarkeesian, was Edward being 'sensitive' and 'gay' and 'being all emotional'. Instead of the fact that he was an asshole and something of an emotionally manipulative stalker. But that wasn't the complaint, instead it was that he wasn't badass and tough enough which is stupid because if he was the thirteen year old equivalent of 'badass' we could add angry and grumpy and condescending to the list of the aforementioned problems with that arsehole of a character.

Point is games, and stories generally, are going to have to try to cover issues like senstive men and violence towards men in a way that is honest and geniune if it wants to succeed and we desperatley need more badass female heroes who are just badass and not walking sex dolls or just waiting for the obligatory 'break down and cry' moment. Someone else said that he finds female heroes more interesting BECAUSE of their potential to show a wider range of emotions than:
"Wisecrack, wisecrack Imma kill you now."
And
"GRR ANGRY, GRRR ANGRY IMMA KILL YOU NOW!!!"
And I agree to an extent but I still reckon we can try to work harder, put men in more physically painful and even humiliating positions and break the stupid sacred seal of masculinity that's been acting as a blockade for potentially interesting stories for too damn long now.

This whole 'women can be vulnerable, men can't' thing really has to stop as it hurts both genders. It continues to push the idea, even unintentionally, of women as the inherently weaker sex and it reinforces obnoxiously outdated ideas of masculinity and bravery.

 

[Lieju]

One of the reasons Eternal Darkness is one of my favourite games is that the characters, male or female, were just normal people who got thrown into a situation far beyond their ability. Even if the gameplay gave them the ability to use weapons and magic, the plot made sure their stories ended up badly.

Most of them might not have been deeply characterized, but we don't see that many realistic medieval monks or overweight middle-aged doctors as playable characters and since they were relatable, you identified with them and that they'd like to survive.

Non-combat oriented games can also have interesting male characters.
Phoenix Wright is one of my favourite game characters, because he won't solve his problems with violence. (He'll just run away and get them later at court)

There is a scene in the first game where the suspect punches him and he doesn't even think about hitting him back, he is just so stunned the guy would just attack him.

 

[balladbird]

The internet is a funny place, sometimes. I was contemplating creating a similar thread, albeit less caustic toward feminists. Moreover, it was the same example in the same article that made me want to post it. Now I don't have to, which is awesome. XD

The writer looked at Elly and complained that she wasn't more emotionally castrated, and the example they cited made me realize that, even if Elly had been a male, if her only reaction to what had just happened to her were to crack a bond one-liner and get over it, I'd have been capitally annoyed by the unbelievable writing.

Honestly,the fact that the article seemed to complain that female characters didn't behave more like bland, 1-dimensional aciton heroes really got to me.

I support what a lot of moderate feminists have to gripe about regarding female characters in video games, but it truly is only half of a larger problem. If video games ever want to be taken seriously as a storytelling medium, they need to stop being so juvenile about their portrayal of characters in general.

Yeah, there are plenty of movies that treat male characters the same way: where they're maverick cowboys on the edge who never bleed or cry and care only about kicking ass and looking cool, but at least there are diverse genres in movies and books, most of which aren't afraid to explore sides of humanity that the "men don't cry" crowd are uncomfortable with. the fact that this thread has a only managed to draw so few examples is a prime example of how video games fail to be able to make the same claim.

Granted, portrayals in general get better with time. The medium just needs time to evolve. People above have made some awesome examples of more realistically written characters, I especially agree with Lee Everett, Arcade Ganon, and Vincent Brooks. Even the action heroes in video games tend to have little features that make them more believable. Nathan Drake, for instance, while mostly playing the "action hero badass" completely straight, at least exhibits knowledge that what he's doing is painfully dangerous and crazy. Watching him balance-beam across an unstable platform while softly muttering "ohcrapohcrapohJESUSohcrap" is worth a chuckle, as well as a bit of appreciation.

 

[JonnyHG]

I'm currently playing Lost Odyssey. Kaim is a badass and he cries, even though he should be desensitized more than most male video game characters.