The announcement of a new female character in the saga God of War provokes many reactions within the community.
The announcement of God of War Laufey caused a great wave of anger among certain players, furious at the idea of playing a woman and repeating over and over on the networks that the game is not called “Goddess of War” in French.
Some have gone very far in sexism: players have even created “mods”, that is to say digital modifications of the game, to depict the heroine doing the dishes or laundry, rather than fighting monsters. Here are some comments received when the game was announced: “A woman as the main character is shit, it’s with a girl, God of War without Kratos is not God of War… And there you have it, even the games have become feminist. »
It’s quite incredibly violent. Why does simply having to play a woman pose such a problem for these men?
Because beyond misogyny, there is a real identity panic. For a fringe of male, white and heterosexual gamers, for a part of them, video games have always been a safe space where they were systematically represented on the screen. Seeing women and minorities take the lead is experienced as a threat, the fear of losing their privileged place. Except when the female characters are hypersexualized, like the heroine of the game Stellar Blade. There, they have their place!
Yet women have been playing male characters for decades. They don’t arrive out of opportunism in video games either. They have been active there since day one.
In the 1980s, they were the ones who assembled NES console cartridges in Nintendo factories. On the creative side, we owe them major foundations: it was an American engineer, Carol Shaw, who programmed the classic game River Raid in 1982, and another American creator, Roberta Williams, who revolutionized the narrative adventure game with King’s Quest.
This rejection of a main heroine is not new. The history of video games has already encountered this kind of reaction…
In 1986, the cult game Metroid offered to play a bounty hunter in high-tech armor, without mentioning his gender. It was only at the very end of the game that we discovered that under the armor was hiding a woman named Samus Aran. Already, at the time, some men had protested, but it was an extremely clever communication move on the part of the developers to trap prejudice.
Forty years later, things have not changed so much. Women or minorities are only allowed to take the leading role when the franchise has proven itself and the financial risk has disappeared. Ciri becomes central after the success of Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher. Laufey gets his game after Kratos makes billions of dollars. And Ghost of YÅteicarried by a heroine, happens only because Ghost of Tsushima was a planetary hit. Basically, big-budget diversity remains a late-stage luxury, after the audience has been secured.
Finally, playing characters who represent half of humanity should not be considered an achievement or a commercial risk-taking. It’s just a base. The day when the arrival of a woman at the head of a major game is considered an ordinary artistic choice and we stop imagining or representing her with dishes in her hand, the video game industry will finally have reached its maturity. But before that, an entire society must evolve.
