Week 6: “Is this to say that all games function as contracts sustaining the repressed homoeroticism that ‘undergirds patriarchy and male homosocial relations,’ even in non-digital, more traditional games?”

Burrill’s “Watch Your Ass: The Structure of Masculinity in Video Games” (2004) genuinely baffled me. Is there homoeroticism undergirding the patriarchy? His assertion regarding game structure emphasizing certain behaviors in the player and how these behaviors are performative and are a reflection of heteronormativity is quite apparent in Kingdom Hearts. Sora, Donald Duck, and Goofy are all hypermasculine characters, and while they may not physically possess hypermasculine features, their mannerisms mirror the mannerisms of the more “traditional” masculine heroes (i.e. James Bond, Joel from The Last of Us). They are all quite aggressive, dismissive of the female characters/NPCs, and eager to prove their worth as men (which they do through challenging other NPCs/monsters to fights or rescuing the “damsels in distress”). It’s interesting to think that we, as a society, have continuously perpetuated this hypermasculine image of men as the “ideal”, even though we frown upon (and yes, all we truly do is “frown” upon them when we should be doing more) hypermasculine, overly-violent men in society. Burrill claims that “games are an ideological machine that manufactures an ideal subject position — the transcendent male,” but I have a hard time believing that the men that are portrayed as protagonists in video games are the “transcendent males” that society desires. The way that video games portray women and the way the male protagonists in these video games interact with female characters (especially in Grand Theft Auto) is quite concerning. Video games do have the potential to “poison the minds of children” if we continue to let individuals believe that the male protagonists depicted in video games are society’s ideal men.