How mascots became men: Growing up with Video Game protagonists

John Wilds
Jul 25, 2017 · 8 min read

So I’m sitting here after E3 thinking about what stuff I’m most looking forward to. Of course swinging around as a shiny new Spidey is going to be fun. Lobbing my cap at everything and their mother as Mario is probably going to be brilliant. Hell, even the canned Anthem demo gave me a little tingle in the testis. But bizarrely, what’s really got me excited is the new God of War. And not the interactive monster murder set pieces that made younger me get excited about past God of War games. Nope, for some weird reason it’s the idea of playing a Dad. A shitty, fucked up, I’m not good at this because I am a literally destroyer of armies, Dad. And then it hit me, not only am I growing up, but so are my favourite video game protagonists.

I got my first video games console at the ripe old age of about 6. For me, gaming started with Rayman on the PS1. The beautiful, brilliant and fucking fantastically unfair platformer from soon to be giants, Ubisoft. It was smack bang in the middle of the era of the mascot platformer. When standing out against early 3D environments and having a little bit of attitude passed for characterisation. Not that that bothered me. Mario, Crash, Sonic, Spyro, Croc, these guys and their great mechanics were enough for me to spend countless hours falling into bottomless pits without much consideration for the who or the why. I didn’t associate with the characters or their stories and frankly, I didn’t want to.

Yes there were deep games with deep narratives but unless I wanted to get tied up in a JRPG I wouldn’t understand or get into the import scene, I wasn’t going to get much in the way of meaningful characterisation. Almost every character was there as a colourful proxy for the player. A way to experience the mechanics of a game and nothing else.

Next came the PS2 and the original Xbox. I was an early teen, I thought I knew who I was but really, like most people, I was just a confused mix of my past a future selves.This was mirrored by the mascot platformers of the day. Jack and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank were both colourful mascot platformer style games that found their real following by adding in a little bit of pseudo-maturity, namely guns. In fact, I spent the entire PS2 generation shooting things. From GTA, to Halo, to Splinter Cell, my absolute favourite games were essentially about quiet white dudes shooting things.

There was little to no complex characterisation, with the occasional bit of nuance thrown in from Japan or a clever side mission or two. But really these were gruff men, gruffly murdering men. Again, these characters were really just there for the mechanics. Another faceless dude with which I could happily murder some more faceless dudes. I loved it, and the new more complicated stories woven around these still simple characters really sucked me in. I loved the lore of the Halo rings and all of Vice City but did I associate with the characters? Nope, not really. Stories had grown up, but their protagonists hadn’t.

Only in brief moments, little respites from being one dimensional killing machines did I see the chinks of emotional complexity that I was developing as a young man represented in video game protagonists. The character arcs, questions and themes that represented the slow maturation of the medium and ultimately, me. Two examples of this that stick out for me were playing as CJ in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2.

For CJ, I think it was simply being a black main character trying not to be defined by the stereotypical, “gang banger,” tropes of Grove Street. I’d never been anyone in a game who wasn’t a perfect white guy and something about playing as CJ fighting against the expectations of my (in game) community really stuck with me. Raiden on the other hand was the first time I felt like a puppet. The first time a character had expressed enough feeling of confusion and ultimately betrayal for me just to look at my TV and be like, “well fuck the Major and fuck this entire system, I’m out.” I wasn’t just intrigued, I was outraged. How could I, the main character have been so oblivious to world around me, so ignorant of what the real battle was? I was a teenager pushing against the boundaries of a world I didn’t really understand, nothing was more intriguing to me than characters doing the same.

Next comes the HD generation. The first time I bought every console on the market and although shooting was still the order of the day, this was the first time gaming showed me that everyone was growing up, not just the outliers. I was in my late teens and shit was getting real. I’d learnt the impact of my decisions and that a single personal choice could not only affect me forever but the people around me. I’d learnt about love and heartache. That I’d been selfish in my views of the world and maybe most importantly, that no two people see the world in exactly the same way. There weren’t just two sides to every argument, there were billions. And just because you think something is objectively right, it doesn’t mean it is. Nothing scared me more than that.

This console generation is so rammed with quality that it’s hard to pick just a few examples to really make my point. My new context for viewing the world was represented in so many brilliantly nuanced games and their protagonists. I’ll start with Call of Duty Modern Warfare, because it gets overlooked on the narrative front far too often. The now iconic Nuke scene, where you essentially get blown to smithereens even though you’ve completed your goal, really hit me. I’d died in video games before, had my main character face their untimely demise thousands of times. But doing everything right, being Mr bulletproof, gruff, white man who saved the day only to be completely and utterly destroyed, had never happened to me before. Life is unfair. And just as I was discovering that in reality, games were starting to show that to me to me too. Bioshock is also a fantastic example of this. A game essentially based around asking the player, what would you do for the greater good? Would you kill a child, or more specifically 21 children, to save the world? Jack, the relatively simple (still white), protagonist spends the entire narrative confused. There are no rules in the world he inhabits, no standards or morals, just choice. These were the choices I too faced as a now nearly adult. I’d left the world of morales and structure given to me by my parents and been presented with a new world filled with choice. Real, consequential choice. In the end I never killed (or harvested as the game called it) any of those children, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. A game had never ever asked me a question like that.

Finally, I can’t really talk about grown up video game protagonists, the scary power of choice or the impact of responsibility, without talking about one of my favourite games of all time, The Last of Us. I played it at the ripe old age of about 20. Here’s a very brief, very spoilery synopsis for those of you who haven’t.

You play as Joel, a tough, white smuggler of sorts who has to take a teenager called Ellie across the USA, twenty years after the Zombie apocalypse. After an incredible journey filled with Zombies, double crossing and some seriously creepy dudes, they reach their destination. What Joel doesn’t realise is that the journey is supposed to end with Ellie being being dissected, as it turns out she contains the cure to the Zombie apocalypse. Ellie is ok with this, Joel isn’t and whilst Ellie is under anaesthetic about to be operated on, Joel breaks in, kills everyone and takes her away. After their incredible journey Joel cares about Ellie way too much to let her die. The game then ends with Joel lying to Ellie and telling her everything went ok, they didn’t actually need to dissect her and they drive back off into the wasteland.

After I completed The Last of Us I just sat there in the dark, open mouthed, tears running down my cheeks. Not only was this gruff, white man I was playing not the hero, but what he’d done, what I’d done, was commit an incredibly heinous act because of an emotion I’d never ever seen properly represented by a video game protagonist before, love.

Love is complicated. It’s joyus, horrible, throwaway and all encompassing at the same time. It’s a shade of grey, and whilst the Marios and Call of Duty guys had shown me the kind of simple emotions I could understand as a child, now as a young man Joel was showing me the messy shades of grey that all of us face as adults.

This game hadn’t just fooled me into being the bad guy all along, it had made me care so much about a cocky teenage girl made out of pixels, that when one man chose to save her instead of the entire world, I totally understood why. Hell, there’s a cutscene late in the game where Ellie disappears for about 12 seconds and I literally shouted, “No!” At the screen because she wasn’t safe by my side as always. This game isn’t about building a high score or a kill streak, it’s about building a relationship. A beautiful exploration of two people caring about each other with enough maturity to tell the real truth about love and life, it’s selfish.

Just as I was really starting to understand love this game came out of nowhere to remind me just how complicated it is. Something that Mario, CJ, Raiden and all those other guys had simply never been able to do. Instead of a binary character feeling one pure emotion, I was playing a deeply complex character that was making decisions informed by multiple emotions. A big tangled web of a protagonist that was more akin to me, a real human, than any protagonist I had played as before. The ultimate realisation that what I’d been doing as Joel wasn’t some valorous act of good but a terrible act of selfishness, is still something I think about today.

I’m not really sure why I wrote this. I’m not even entirely sure what the point is. I suppose I just can’t believe how far this incredible medium has come and how lucky I am to have grown up alongside it. Actually scrap that, how lucky I am to be growing up alongside it.

I didn’t even speak about my experiences this generation. That just as I was thinking about settling down Uncharted 4 came out and showed me a story about a protagonist’s struggle with just that. Or the brilliantly nuanced coming of age story experienced by Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn, that I found even more fascinating than the robot, dinosaur mystery surrounding her.

For video games to have gone from colourful little guys jumping around, to murderous generic white dudes in epic stories, onto incredible character explorations in just 20 or so years is totally unprecedented. Nothing in entertainment has ever grown in maturity or complexity quite so quickly. And the fact that next year the game I’m most looking forward to is an exploration in shitty parenthood, shows that I’m not a kid just passing time anymore, I’m a man interacting with art. And that, that’s something to be excited about.

John Wilds

Written by

Shameless video game fan with a penchant for gin, comics and noise. Creatively creating and copywriting for advertising and video games. wordsbywilds.com

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