Henry is characterized as a traditional, hypermasculine player character, but the game actively refuses to let the player perform that masculinity, enabling instead the performance of a subtle, complex, and well-developed male character. I survey the scholarship on videogame masculinities, then analyze how masculinity is portrayed in several scenes and mechanics of the game. This article explores how Firewatch problematizes toxic masculinity.
The character exists in an interesting relationship with his masculinity-he performs the motions but is thwarted by a game that disrupts hypermasculine performance at every turn. But Henry's hypermasculine presentation is continuously undermined by the game's mechanics, story and genre.
Here we have a hero living a modern version of cowboy life: a rugged loner in the Wyoming woods, an unacknowledged alcoholic trying to escape a tragic past, essentially a videogame John Wayne. Or, to frame it the way this article will, it feels emasculating within the context of traditional videogame constructions of masculinity. The denouement, in which the player learns that Henry was wrong (and doesn't even get the consolation prize of winning Delilah, the game's princess stand-in), can feel disappointing. So, Henry imagines mysteries everywhere, discusses them in detail over the radio with Delilah, and invents a huge government conspiracy out of what is eventually revealed to be an intimate story about relationships and guilt. The problem is, that's a rather boring remit. Henry's job consists primarily of waiting for a fire to happen, preventing one if he can, and reporting anything suspicious to his superior, Delilah.
There's a reason it's called Firewatch and not Firefight. As Campo Santo's ombudsman stated, " Firewatchis a story about real people who take the easy way out and end up making a mess" (Fyfe, 2016). When you reach her tower at last, she's already gone.įirewatch is almost too good at evoking the disappointments of everyday life. Delilah, your flirtatious boss, has spent the summer directing you over the radio from a nearby lookout station. You've now hiked out to your boss's tower, where a helicopter waits to take you both safely away from the fire. By the time you reach this point, you've been playing as Henry for 3–4 hours. The mysterious circumstances that have obsessed him (and you) with suspicions of murder and secret government cover-ups have been revealed for what they truly were: a tragic accident and a wild story spun by Henry's overactive imagination. The Wyoming wilderness that Henry was tasked with protecting is on fire. The final scene of Campo Santo's Firewatch (2016) leaves a lot of players frustrated. Keywords: Walking Simulator, Masculinities, Firewatch, Toxic, Hypermasculine, Dialogue By playing with genre and subverting player expectations, Firewatch enables players to practice and perform masculinities beyond the hyper. This feminized labour is reflected in the gameplay as well, highlighting the divide between "hardcore" games (typically characterized as masculine) and the "hard" work associated with femininity. The kind of labour the character performs, compared with the adventuring accomplished by most videogame protagonists, underscores the complexity of his identity though Henry works hard, his hard work is mostly confined to the realm of emotional labour and therapeutic self-care. As the denouement reveals, the danger that loomed was centered in real world challenges like environmental protection and familial guilt, better solved through conversation and patience than violent heroics. Henry's macho presentation is belied not only by the genre of the game he inhabits, but by multiple feminizing factors in the text, including the prologue, the dialogue mechanic, and the way the game constructs the character's (and the player's) paranoid sense of mystery. If traditional games enable players to live out a fantasy life of performing hypermasculine acts, then walking simulators reestablish an anxious homogeneity of passive non-performance. This destabilization is ludologically intentional and highlights a sensitivity towards the performance of non-hegemonic masculinities. Henry is characterized as a hypermasculine protagonist, but the game actively refuses to let the player perform that masculinity, enabling instead the performance of a subtle, complex, and well-developed male character.
#GAMES LIKE FIREWATCH SIMULATOR#
This article explores how the walking simulator Firewatch (Campo Santo, 2016) successfully problematizes toxic, traditional videogame hypermasculinity, inviting instead the performance of a care-oriented masculinity. Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch by Melissa Kagen Abstract