Male Protagonists

[Captain Pancake]

You do realise that Kratos, the figure you have nerdgasmed over in previous articles, comes under macho?

On a different note, good to see that the space game is coming along.

 

[shogunblade]

I know everybody wants to know Kratos and Gordon Freeman, but what about Solid Snake?

The man balances between the two so often, it's hard to tell.

But it was an interesting read, and I enjoyed reading the differences between the two.

On a somewhat similar note: I have yet to achieve the purchase of a 360, Wii or PS3, so I grab Solid Snake because he's the only character I happen to have played all the games for (i borrowed a friends PS3 for MGS4).

I'll get with the times eventually.

 

[Yeq]

I'm sort of against the idea of the first category as a manly man. He's 'manly' in the sense that he's not a boy; that is to say, an adult. However, he's described essentially as both capable and not an emotionless twat. That makes him mature, but nothing than a woman can't or shouldn't be.

I sort of get the idea of "masculine" equalling "doing everything and helping out those in need", but I'd really emphasise the maturity aspect of that rather than its gendered perspective, because put in a stressful situation I'd damn well expect a mature woman to be able to start helping out and shit (if not necessarily, as was pointed out, start destroying everything, since odds are in our society she wouldn't be strong, or more importantly, trained enough to do anything all that effective).

 

[Billion Backs]

I kinda like what Yahtzee described as a "macho man". Emotions are fine an dandy, but completely sociopathic destruction for the sake of destruction is very liberating.

 

[VGStrife]

I know everybody wants to know Kratos and Gordon Freeman, but what about Solid Snake?

The man balances between the two so often, it's hard to tell.

But it was an interesting read, and I enjoyed reading the differences between the two.

On a somewhat similar note: I have yet to achieve the purchase of a 360, Wii or PS3, so I grab Solid Snake because he's the only character I happen to have played all the games for (i borrowed a friends PS3 for MGS4).

I'll get with the times eventually.

Clearly Manly.
(<<MGS fanboy)
Pretty sure he keeps going on about "love blooming on the battlefield" and even regrets killing some people :O
(Plus tranqing people makes it so much more fun!!)

 

[Supernova2000]

If Fun Space Game: The Game turns out to be an X universe knock-off in which all ships are hopelessly dependent on jump gates to get around and can travel at sub-light speeds which, in interplanetary terms, are best summarised as 'standing still' and having capital ships that can only pathetically 'pew pew pew' each other to death then Yahtzee will have missed the point by at least a hundred light years.

 

[For.I.Am.Mad]

Yahtzee seems to be implying that there is something wrong with angrily jacking it. I can't imagine any other way.

 

[cikame]

Sometimes you don't want a susceptible, occasionally wrong, sometimes weak lovey dovey man.
Sometimes you just want a hilariously unreal beefcake to stomp everything, case in point the most recent Universal Soldier film where, lets just say, the 2nd half of the film is one sided and awesome.

I guess my point is there's room for both, i want to scream and destroy everything, and i also want a character who has ups and downs.

 

[Therumancer]

Hmmm, well I think that's overly simplified.

For all Yahtzee's dislike of the stereotype, I think "Macho" protaganists have their place in games, I think they are just overdone and appear far too often.

See, a hyper macho, arrogant, dude who is as good as he says he is, is interesting when compared to other more normal characters including the "manly man" that was mentioned, the emo types, the warrior-scholor types, and others. However when everyone is doing the same schtick in nearly every game it gets old.

It's sort of like my take on Dark Heroes, in general when everyone is a dark, brooding shadowy hero type like Batman, it loses it's distinction. There needs to be the allegedly "regular" type of hero in successful operation with some frequency to have the counterpoint make sense.

That's why when Dark Heroes were fairly new, and lethality came back to comics, it was interesting, and a worthy analysis of the comics genere. However when such characters became the staple, it more or less turned into irredeemable costumed psychopaths.

I see some similarities. For example "300" with King Leonidas was cool, but the 47 hyper macho imitators that tried to catch onto that vibe "because it worked there" generally were not.

Ah well, enough rambling.

 

[theSovietConnection]

They should make a game where there are 2 main characters, one is a Raiden esqe pretty boy and the other is a Marcus Phenix esqe macho man. They can be partners in something.......mercenaries maybe? I'll start on the design documents.

Hmm, maybe in an army, but only the two of them work together? And they need masks.

Anyway, I agree with the example of Niko as the manly man. Easily one of my favourite main characters from the GTA series.

 

[nerdpride]

Yahtzee's game sounds fun, but I hope he reads up on sci-fi physics that's the intended background. Heat is more of a problem than cold (spacecraft have the biggest radiators).

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

Anyone else thinks Yahtzee forgot about the manliest man of all?

Spoiler

 

[Sonofadiddly]

Why is the Macho-Man so hated in the gaming community? Am I the only one who likes playing an 80s Action Hero as my video game persona? I love the Rambo/John McClain macho badass banter, but it seems that it is constantly ripped apart in the games media.

Have all gamers been so emotionally ripped apart by "bros" and "football jock douches" that they can't enjoy the macho-man for fear of being thrown in a trashcan and given a wedgie? All joking aside: really, what is the issue with having a character that has muscles on his muscles and uses a gun as big as he is?

Those characters are boring. Maybe their big guns blowing the heads off of slack-jawed opponents provides some brief amusement, but games with stories that are actually good need characters that aren't big raging throbbing stereotypes. It's one of the basic rules of writing.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

There are too many macho men in my school... Also I think the idea to have a shield sapping effect on staying in cover too long is a good way to keep the pace of the game frantic. I still want to try it out when its done.

 

[Russian_Assassin]

Oh hey! You pronounced Ezio's name!

Spoiler: I think this fits your description of Macho:

 

[ironlordthemad]

Ok why does everyone bag on marcus fenix for being an emotionaly jaded psychopath?
Does anyone remember when marcus was dragged by his best friend Dom out of a prison crawling with locust? Does anyone remember Colonel Hoffman saying how he had left him there to rot after pulling every other prisoner out?

Now tell me, if you were a young man, emotionaly stunted by the dissapearence of your mother when you were a child, raised by an uncaring father, joining the military at a young age, being helpless and forced to bear witness too the death of a childhood friend and father figure, then being put into a war winning battle only to have your father put in danger, your one chance to rescue him fails, you are then put in prison for several years as the world burns around you and you are left too rot, would you not be a little bit emotionaly jaded?

Also, you have to fight for survival in a regular prison, so who knows what happens when the prison is over run by alien monsters who want nothing more than to rip your face off. Regardless of how you physically deal with prison, no one escapes without any mental scars.
Marcus was abandoned and condemned to almost certain death by one of the few father figures he had, only to be saved by the brother that he never had.
I think it would be unrealistic if marcus fenix didn't appear to be an emotionally dead psychopath and besides, its not that he doesn't have emotions, its that he has trouble expressing them.

Marcus Fenix is a great character and is simply missunderstood by those who look at a game and see only shallow characters, just pixels with big guns, however a little probing into the gears mythos reveals that each character is just as realistic and human as any character in a novel, a movie or any other video game that you care to name.

 

[Falseprophet]

Why is the Macho-Man so hated in the gaming community? Am I the only one who likes playing an 80s Action Hero as my video game persona? I love the Rambo/John McClain macho badass banter, but it seems that it is constantly ripped apart in the games media.

I loved--and still love--those 80s action flicks. I think the difference is most of them--the good ones, anyway--were basically violent, live-action cartoons. The action was completely over the top (for the 80s, anyway) and the heroes would just casually toss out groan-inducing one-liners when exterminating foes. They were great fun.

But as many have already noted, when macho-men expect you to take them seriously, you can't. (This is also why Chuck Norris is my least favourite 80s action hero. However badass a martial artist he was in real life, onscreen the man had zero charisma and expected me to take him seriously.) I've only played the original Dead to Rights, and although the game was overly-repetitive, I actually liked Jack Slate in that one, because he was so ridiculously over-the-top I just laughed at everything he did. "One good cop is wrongfully accused of murder and needs to clear his name...by slaughtering hundreds of dudes, most often execution-style in the back of the head." How could you not laugh at that?

Oh, I was also surprised that he named Ezio as a good character. He didn't even mention much about him in the review, but I guess he has to grow on you first. I really thought the character was well-written and believable, which was actually undermined by his ridiculous body-count. It's like the person in the cutscenes is Ezio, but the hooded figure you play is a random psycho. Maybe it was just me.

No, I got that too. While in AC1 I'd murder Templars and city guardsmen without a second-thought, I always felt really guilty in AC2 when I had to kill random archers just to maintain my low-profile. A voice in the back of my head kept saying, "these guys are probably just working schmucks with families to feed."

 

[ArmorArmadillo]

w

You already talked about female characters before, but what is the terminology for female variants of manly and macho?

I'd say the variants are:
Action Girl: Katara, Hit-Girl, Farah in SoT
Supercilious Badass Action Girl: Lara Croft, Every Bond Girl, Farah in TT, Almost Every Strong Female Character in Every Medium Ever

The action girl is a girl who can hold her own in combat, but the authors remembered that after the word 'action' was the word 'girl', and the action girl isn't afraid to be feminine. She may enjoy wearing dresses or flirting with men, or she may not, but either way she knows the difference between evening wear and tactical wear. She is probably beautiful, but has a neutral attitude toward it...it doesn't mean much to her. She is honestly very similar to the manly men in her attitude to most situations.

The supercilious badass action girl acts like showing femininity is for weak-minded pansies, and her battle cry of "p'shaw, men" can be heard at every opportunity. Creators might claim it's an attempt to make her independent, but really they do it because [sarcasm]everyone knows competence is not a feminine quality, and the only way a woman could be strong if she wasn't feminine at all[/sarcasm]. Contradictorily, she probably shows off tons of skin and has boobs like watermelons, but you can expect token pretensions to being a femme fatale and using her sexuality as an asset. Typically, the supercilious badass action girl is mostly talk, and if stuff ever gets real she's the first to be captured and arousingly tied up for the male characters to save.

 

[geizr]

Warning: Another Geizr wall-o-text ahead!

Here, Yahtzee echoes some of my own thoughts concerning the stereotyped portrayals of men(and even women) in video games. The basic point is that, no matter what gamers, game developers, and the gaming press may say to the contrary, video games still have yet to actually grow-up. Games still evince a thinking and perspective in their design which is that of a priapic juvenile male pretending to be an adult and having all the skewed misunderstandings of adulthood that a 14-year-old male would have; games still have yet to go beyond the 14-year-old male testosterone-laden fantasies. What Yahtzee describes as the manly man is much closer to the real adult male; whereas, the macho man is closer to the priapic juvenile's skewed perception of the adult male. An earlier poster put it best saying the manly man accepts and does what must be done(grounded in reality and accepting it for what it is), while the macho man is just trying to show off(compensating for his own deficiencies and unbalanced character).

It is interesting to the think that for all the "realism" that game developers like to try to push into a game(I swear FPS developers and gamers must have the eye-sight of a dog to think the monochromatic color palettes used in such games is realistic), the one area of realism that they tend to totally fail at is human interaction(the body language, the manner and subjects of conversation, and the responses to situations). I can only blame that on the geek culture's lack of empathy in social situations and the overuse of cameoed/canned jokes, potty humor, and geek culture references.

Let's be clear, however, adults have their fantasies too, and it's not all about sex(though it does come into play every so often). However, adult fantasies can tend to take more depth or be more simulation oriented toward particular situations, a vision of the future(personal, familial, or societal), a utopian dream(such as finding the perfect relationship), or a state of permanent perfection of being. Sometimes, the fantasies can center on more base desires for riches and domination; other times, these fantasies can be exploratory of other possibilities of existence. Of course, I have to admit, that the dream of being a kid again is definitely on the list of adult fantasies.

The point is that the adult mind and outlook is far more, and far from, being some indifferent badass that blows shit up all day and has copious amounts of sex. That image is a ridiculous sensationalization portrayed in the media. Unfortunately, the 14-year-old priapic male does not have the wisdom of experience to separate the fantasy from the reality, which may explain some disillusionment people suffer when moving into adulthood(disillusionment, burnout, and even some depression can be caused when our fantasy expectations of reality are not met by reality; reality is under no obligation to adhere to our ideologies or whims).