On last week’s GDC ListenUp special, the three amigos John Davison, Garnett Lee, David Ellis, chatted with God Of War creator David Jaffe about the dominance of empowered supermen/women as protagonists in videogames. Their discussion started around the difference between Western and Eastern tastes in protagonists. The American palette leans towards the militaristic hero archetype, the one man, muscle bound army who, plagued by existential angst or not, can solve every problem with brawn. The Japanese audience prefers youthful androgyny, characters either brimming with naïve confidence or crushed under the weight of responsibility for civilization. The ListenUP crew went on to lament that there is seemingly no place in either culture for the Peter Parker/Spider-man archetype, characters who are empowered, but deeply flawed, whether by insecurity or another humanizing debility.
They’re right of course. I can point to a selection of flawed, humanized characters in games; Oddworld’s Munch and Abe are iconic inhuman outsiders made relatable through fragility and Ico’s horned protagonist is so memorable because of his incompetence and weakness. Gaming’s more literary canon, the adventure genre, is also populated by relatable humanized leads like Farenheit’s Carla Valenti and Lucas Kane or Dreamfall’s Zoe. But these icons make up a significant minority in the world of character-based and narrative-driven videogames. If Peter Parker and his alter-ego are the most profitable fictional characters in contemporary media, why are characters like him so under-represented in videogames? Why are our game protagonists so rigidly defined by complete empowerment? Where are our emotional, and our actual, cripples?
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