Mama Dearest, Papa Nearest

I have noticed a pattern lately.

I’m just gonna list a few of the most well known games in no significant order, see if you can guess what they all have in common.

-Max Payne -Silent Hill

-Red Dead Redemption -Heavy Rain

-God of War (4)

-The Last of Us

-GTA V

-The Walking Dead (season 1)

-Red Dead Redemption

-Dishonored -Asura’s Wrath

-The Witcher 3

-Bioshock Infinite

-Assassin’s Creed Origins

-Fallout 4

-Octodad

That last one might be the biggest clue to piece it all together.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, in all of these games you will play as a father or father figure. Some of them deal with the whole parenting thing better than others, but they all have it in the plot.

I think you could split these dads into categories:

-Max Payne, Bayek from AC:O, and Asura are all dads in seek of vengeance for their dead children even though after those first cutscenes it seems like they sort of forgot they even had a child; -Heavy Rain, Silent Hill, or Fallout will let you play as a dad in search of their children, with the latter being so unimportant for the plot that most people prefer doing all of the side quests than actually be looking for their child;

-Red Dead Redemption and God of War let you play as a stoic father whose education method is pure tough love. You don’t like it? Tough luck. You need to grow up, boy. I don’t care that you’re only 12. (They’re more rounded than that, I know, but that’s how categories work);

Dishonored and Bioshock Infinite will let you control a man who will only find out later in the game that the girl he was trying to protect was his daughter all along;

-And lastly but not leastly, in The Last of Us, The Witcher 3, and The Walking Dead you will play as a father figure instead of a direct father, and yet those storylines are laid out better than others with actual dads, they’re more heartfelt and emotional, and quite frankly, more real;

Kratos is actually a big softy at heart, we all know it.

Now I was going to make another list about mothers in video games but I seriously struggled to find them. I tried looking them up, but the most I could find were NPCs like Toriel and the mothers in the Mother series, who can be great moms for sure but it’s never the same amount of weight given to them.

All those games listed earlier are ones in which you’re able to control the fathers, most of the very few games featuring mothers (no matter how loving, caring, or kind they are, how great of a personality and story they’re given) don’t let you play as them. There’s this unexplainable divide between the two that baffles me. There’s so many stories to be told yet so few are doing it. The only two instances I can think of, off the top of my head, in which you’re able to play as a mother are in Fallout 4 again, and in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s DLC The Legacy of the First Blade.

There are some great examples of motherhood in gaming, don’t get me wrong. Joyce in Life is Strange is a great mother who is trying her best to raise a problematic child and trying to move on from the death of her beloved husband. Mae’s mother, Candy, is a well written and nuanced character that loves her daughter unconditionally but, depending on how you play Mae, can be met with indifference and coldness. Even in God of War, one of the best examples of a game series ‘dadified’, there’s a great mother in Freya whose story is mainly about motherhood but that doesn’t stop her from being an extremely powerful sorceress and goddess.

But none of these characters are playable.

I’ll admit I haven’t played Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, but I know that Kassandra showed how much a woman can both be a badass warrior and a loving mother. There should be more of that, and I hope we’re going towards that direction. But we’re not quite there yet.

Everything I've seen about this DLC looks lovely.

I am a sucker for all parenting stories when they’re done well, if there’s a parent figure in a piece of media I empathize more with them than with their children for some reason, so I’m glad there’s a few games showcasing how those stories are worth being told, they can be interesting, powerful and impactful. However, even now as we are going towards a more progressive era, you can still easily see how they’re handled.

Games are still made (maybe not consciously, hopefully not at least) primarily for teen boys, so even though we’re slowly opening up to the idea of men not having to be stoic but instead being capable of showing emotions and even love for their children, we’re still usually forced to control said men in games like The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite. Other times, some compromises have been made to tell those stories, the fathers we get in games as of late are of the third category I detailed earlier, the angry and stoic kind. That’ll let players be a father but still be able to shoot or fight their way through any situation without it looking unseemly.

The industry is always going forward, we always have more and more women in it actually making these games, and even more are playing them. The cliché and stereotype that says that gaming is only for men is slowly but surely disappearing and yet our games are still clearly made primarily for them, simply because it’s a formula that they know will sell and they’re not willing to risk it by telling stories of minorities like LGBTQ+ or races or religions. In the few occasions they do, there’s always that toxic minority in the community that is unfortunately louder than the majority and I imagine that may scare publishers but the numbers don’t lie.

Keeping Assassin’s Creed as an example, the sales certainly haven’t been low after Black Flag but they haven’t been the best selling games either. Most of them flew under the radar for people who were not already fans of the series. From Rogue to Syndicate the number of concurrent players were between a peak of 2.3k and 3.6k which is not bad, but then they tried to switch it up with Origins and had a peak of 41k concurrent players, quite a jump forward. Odyssey has had a 62k peak concurrent players and if nothing else, that alone will tell you that telling a story or at the very least giving the choice of a story from a different perspective will not hurt the chances of your product selling. If anything it will increase them just because it’s probably something new and fresh, something exciting that people are looking forward to just for a change of pace. I won’t argue that Kassandra is the sole reason the game sold so well, the change in style probably has more to do with that, I’m simply trying to say that Kassandra didn’t hinder those sales and I hope that’ll serve as an example going forward.

So, in conclusion, all I’m asking here are more thought-out parenting stories. I don’t mind seeing fathers in games as long as they’re done properly and not just as an excuse to kick off the game events, as it often happens, I just would like to see maybe even the same stories told from a different perspective. There’s already a handful of good mothers in video games, I just would like to experience their stories directly. Give me my NITW spin-off on Mae’s mom already, give me a DLC or at least just a section in which I can play as Freya in God of War, just give me something. But considering that the examples of great mothers I have made earlier are all from recent games, it’s pretty clear that the industry is moving forward in this regard and that more diverse storytellers are getting the chance to tell their unique stories, so I’m hopeful that I’m going to get more of what I’m asking for soon enough.

Be sure to talk with your parents and let them know you love them <3