![]() Neil Druckmann, the writer of The Last of Us has spoken about how his own daughter inspired the central relationship in the game. A lot of studio heads are now in their forties, they have kids, and they want to explore this dynamic in their work. Some analysts have pointed out how the father/daughter bonds at the centre of these three games have revealed a maturing industry – once it was all about saving the hot love interest, now it's about being a good dad. The characters can also be defined through their relationships. These guys aren't heroes like Master Chief or Marcus Fenix they're scarred, vulnerable fuck-ups, barely functioning as reasoning adults anymore. Lee has killed his wife's lover and ruined his own life in the process Booker has been destroyed by his involvement in murderous military campaigns, Joel has had to become a sociopath to survive 20 years in a devastated America. Lee, Booker and Joel are damaged men, victims of the violence they have perpetrated on others. But in current titles that is all getting muddied. ![]() In the past, these characters tended to be assured action heroes men fighting for a just cause against irredeemably evil enemies. The developers of Remember Me, a sci-fi adventure featuring a mixed-race female lead character, have claimed that the game was rejected by several publishers because the companies wanted a male lead.īut then, Bioshock Infinite, The Last of Us and Telltale's Walking Dead all represent an interesting evolution of that standard, much-desired masculine protagonist. Surveys suggest that women make up around 10% of the workforce in most studios, and a report by research company EEDAR in 2012 found that out of the 669 action and role-playing games studied, only 24 had exclusively female protagonists. It's no secret that game development is dominated by men, and that the demographic courted by the marketers of Triple A titles is young males. But they are reflecting it through a very particular prism. Our sense of certainty has been decimated over the last five years – the world is once again a weird, unpredictable and violent place. Our current obsession with zombies and failed utopias is arguably driven by the gristly meat of 24-hour news coverage: fears of pan-global diseases like avian flu, the over-population of the Earth, the financial collapse of 2008 and mass uprisings like the Arab Spring. The rush of '50s sci-fi flicks about mutated insects and invading aliens came out of post-war fears about the atom bomb and communist revolution and the slasher films of the seventies processed the global economic downturn, the collapse of the patriarchal nuclear family and the rise of feminism's second wave. We've seen these spikes before and they usually reflect and explore wider sociopolitical fears. And how, although narrative themes have progressed, the games industry is still heavily reliant on the old themes of power, authority and physical force.įirst of all, there's no coincidence in the sudden onslaught of dystopian fiction, which has affected movies and literature as well as games. The fact that these two titles have emerged almost contemporaneously, alongside other highly masculinised post-apocalyptic fantasies such as The Walking Dead and State of Decay says some interesting things about where games are right now.
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