In Luna Bob’s blog post about the damaging effects that stereotypes and gender expectations have on male characters that play the role of savior for distressed damsels, she draws our attention to the inconsistency between the improving social climate for women and the stagnating sphere of men. She lays the groundwork for the idea that violence is romanticized by the physical depictions of men in games, and that this is damaging to male gamers. Beyond just that, the actions engaged in by male heroes enforce harmful ideals of behavior. Physically violent male characters in games do not make gamers into murderers, but they can inspire internal tension in many gamers between what we tout as the ultimate signs of success for the ideal man and what is legal within society.

            In the real world it is illegal to dismember our enemies when they bad-mouth our mothers, but within the worlds of videogames, violence is the go-to solution for all problems. When you are betrayed by Zeus do you appeal to a council of other Gods? No, you get two big honking swords and go around systematically obliterating half of the mythological pantheon of the Greeks. When the Locusts begin evacuating their underground world in the face of a toxic flood, do we provide a scenario in which the humans offer means for the Locusts to integrate into the sunlit world? No, we wage war to the last men and women standing. Heck, in PacMan we encourage players to get vengeance by giving them large point bonuses for eating the ghosts who’ve been hunting them all game. Now there are some games that do encourage peaceful success, but those are not the ones that I am speaking of, and they are in the minority, especially of games marketed to males, who developers believe are only interested by the body-armor and bullets of most big-name titles. If society shows that this is the most ideal way to manage problems in videogames, it should be unsurprising when males romanticize violent problem solving.

            This seems to clash with our societal ideals of peaceful conflict resolution. Violence is strictly prohibited by law, is it not? It is, but only through necessity. We cannot effectively run a country and operate within it if we expect to be ruthlessly butchered when we accidentally bump into someone’s car on the road. People would never leave their homes in anything less than suits of armor or tanks. This necessity exists in tandem with a prevailing societal fantasy of violence. We love our guns, are enthusiastic about kicking terrorists’ butts and largely support the death penalty. We do want to resolve our conflicts with violence, but we are blocked from it legally. It is not that videogames have begun this obsession with violence; it is that they help to perpetuate it. In an effort to combat this, we applaud the smart citizens and intelligence achievers within our country, telling our children to grow up and get an education so that they can be like them. We divert the idea of physical success, into an idea of mental success so that we can operate within society safely.

            Videogames have attempted to shore up their social standing and appeal by claiming that they value intelligence as well. Unfortunately when designers attempt to utilize this ideal in gameplay, it usually just means that excessive force is exerted in specific locations, thus serving only to complicate the violence rather than replace it with legitimately intelligent solutions. It’s so common that a trope has developed concerning creatures significantly more powerful than the hero: shoot for the glowing eyes. Even characters that are said to be intelligent rarely exercise this in any meaningful way. Kratos, protagonist of the God of War games, was an excellent commander of the Spartan army, according to game lore, a position that would require plenty of strategic skills, including planning maneuvers, interpersonal skills to maintain the morale of troops, and management of supply chains.  All of these skills seem to only serve Kratos in his ability to locate and attack weak areas on monstrously oversized enemies. Here he is utilizing the only tool in his toolbox that is presented in game:

           Image courtesy of Annick

            While game characters show violence as the ultimate solution through their actions, they also encourage violent ideals through their physical appearance. Muscles are attractive to us because they are a physical sign of power. Players enjoy success, and often a hero character is depicted in a manner that promises future success in the form of current power, usually taking the shape of excessive musculature. In this way, muscles on a character are promised power, even when the character is said to be in a weak position. This implies that developers believe male gamers would not think a character as appealing if they were anything less than visual avatars of violence. They, especially the bulging melon-biceps on display in the Gears of War and God of War franchises, are billboards on male bodies that shout to all who see them that their bearers have the ability to inflict destruction on their surroundings. The prevalence of these images in popular games and other media tells men that this is really the only true sort of power, and that men who are not physically over-developed are not powerful. There is a reason that weight lifters are stereotyped as overly aggressive “meat-heads,” and who can blame them for being so, when all they have done is better internalized this prevailing social ideal in the same way that game heroes have done.

            So lets take stock of what ingredients have been added to the pot so far; perhaps the problems with our potpourri will become clear. There’s an impossible expectation of men to be powerful only by being powerfully built, a belief that “smart” means excessively violent in very specific scenarios, a presiding display of violence as the master tool in any problem-solving arsenal, and a society that has made violence illegal. I think I can see the stew starting to bubble. You smell that aroma? That’s the smell of millions of men being torn between what is shown as the right way to solve their problems, the ideal and permanent solution to every dissatisfaction, and the rules, which prohibit them from enacting these skills that they are told to foster. I am not claiming that games make boys into murderers; I am claiming that violent games create tension inside boys between what they are shown and what they are allowed. I highly doubt that this can have positive effects.