Playing in the hero's shadow: patriarchal and neoliberal complicity in video game hero narratives

Smith, Caighlan (2025) Playing in the hero's shadow: patriarchal and neoliberal complicity in video game hero narratives. Doctoral (PhD) thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

In contemporary society, many of our daily lives are strained by patriarchal oppression and neoliberal precarity. When we are disempowered like this in real life, we often turn in our leisure to entertainment that feels empowering instead. Video games regularly offer consumers such revitalizing play. However, different types of player-avatars offer different types of empowerment. The hero archetype specifically is a popular avatar type, often used in game design to inspire players. Yet the type of power play the hero offers can reinforce rather than disrupt patriarchal and neoliberal capitalist power dynamics. My research questions how the hero archetype in video games bolsters us through, rather than against, marginalizing social hierarchies. Patriarchal and neoliberal capitalist ideology proliferate through the hero archetype’s reliance on social dualisms, which infer that one person or group (represented by the hero) is inherently superior to another person or group (represented by non-heroic entities) and so justifies the hero’s domination of these lesser “Others.” Such binary social structures perpetuate damaging concepts such as male superiority (over people who are not biologically male), white superiority (over people of colour), and elite superiority (over lower classes/the poor). While extensive scholarship has been conducted on the presence of neoliberal and patriarchal ideology in video games, my research highlights how the hero narrative itself functions in video games to support oppressive ideologies. I argue that equality cannot exist in the hero narrative; everyone else can be equal, but the hero can only be venerated as “hero” if it stands above the rest, alone. I make this argument through an examination of hero avatar subcategories that regularly appear across video games (e.g., the epic fantasy hero in God of War and The Elder Scrolls; the war hero in Call of Duty and Battlefield; the female action-adventure hero in Tomb Raider and The Last of Us). In targeting the hero archetype and its narrative operations in video games, I establish a model for heroic gameplay critique, which will aid future analysis of power dynamics in games as well as assist game developers and players in confronting issues of in-game marginalization.

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