U of A master's student examines the 'daddening' of video games

A master's student from the University of Alberta looked into why many newer video games have a father as the protagonist of the storyline.

Gone are the days of the lone protagonist in video games, fighting his way toward glory or to save the love of his life.

Now, several video games centre around a rugged father figure whose sole mission in life is to protect his offspring. 

This new storyline is evident in video games like Red Dead Redemption, The Walking Dead and The Last of Us. The live-action series of The Last of Us is currently being filmed in Edmonton and Calgary.

Kaitlyn Ensley, a digital humanities student at the U of A, had this new storyline as a subject of interest for her master's thesis.

Ensley said she believes what video-game journalist Stephen Totilo called the "daddening" of video games stems from developers' own personal experiences. 

"A lot of game developers are of an age where they're now also dads," Ensley told CBC's Edmonton AM.

"And I think that that was influencing a lot of them … and I think that it's just kind of a compelling narrative for audiences as well." 

Ensley said many developers have confessed in interviews how being a dad played a role in their inspiration for characters.

In several interviews, the creator of The Last of Us, Neil Druckmann, has mentioned how becoming a father influenced the stories he told in his video games.

Ensley said the role of the father is really baked into the story of the game.

"It's not just kind of an incidental thing where they are the protagonist and they also kind of happen to be a dad on the side," she said.

"It's really important to their character development. It's really important to the story and it's actually baked into the gameplay itself."

The fathers in all these video games share common features; straight, white, brawny men — a consequence, Ensley said, of game developer leads being straight, white men.