“I don't want to play a game that makes me cry!”

by Jillybean, Saturday, April 06, 2013, 06:35 (4050 days ago) @ kapowaz

Interesting idea - do male gamers shy away from emotional investment? I feel like there's a joke in there somewhere.

I personally love that kind of emotional investment. But not all the time. Take the new Assassin's Creed game. Now I adored Ezio and if I was going to leave my video game husband Kaidan for anyone, it would probably be Ezio. But it's surprising how little endurance Ezio has. His story is wrapped up in one game and his character becomes pretty stagnant after that. The games start piling on different kinds of mechanics, letting you ride ponies in Roma, throw bombs in Istanbul, none of it makes Ezio any more interesting. He's still a charming, somewhat vacant young man who has found his vengeance and now putters around trying to . . . what, exactly?

In AC3, we get two new characters. Haytham (incidentally, definitely a roll in the hay) and Connor (incidentally, definitely not). Now I liked the Haytham portions of the game but they didn't grab me. I loved playing as Connor. I loved how insecure he is, how he needs protecting. He's a warrior, but he's still a character who misses his mother. With Connor I felt maternal. When he's in the prison, I wanted to help him, when he loses everything, I feel incredibly sorry for him and guilty that I couldn't protect him from that.

I mentioned this on Kotaku at one point and one commenter said no male gamer wants to protect anything - well wasn't the exact reasoning for Lara Croft's attempted rape scene? That it would inspire the player to protect Lara? I have my own issues with that, but you can't deny the creators were trying to inspire an emotional investment.

I think there is a problem with all media types being too invested in the white middle class male. They're a powerful buying force for many reasons. Why do companies take such risks with things like online DRM, which has backfired horribly with Sim City and EA has been giving away free games to compensate, but they won't take a risk with expanding some emotional horizons?