Illinois Tech digital humanities and media studies professor Carly Kocurek says that while masculine tropes aren’t inherently bad, “they can limit the types of stories that get told and the kinds of ideas that make it to market, which can really dampen creativity and innovation.”
“A lot of pop culture stories and media rely on a shared pool of influences,” says Kocurek. She points to movies like Star Wars that follow the hero’s journey, or fantasy characters like dwarves and elves that have been popularized by J.R.R. Tolkien and other writers. “We get certain ideas about what a hero is, what a man is, and we see them again and again.”
Consider iconic game characters like Halo’s Master Chief, Metal Gear’s Solid Snake, or even Nintendo’s mustachioed plumber, Mario. “Even Spider-Man is kind of represented as a jock in video games,” says Foddy.
Foddy, who developed Baby Steps alongside Ape Out developers Gabe Cuzzilo and Maxi Boch, says that most often, players adopt this role of a savior character—someone capable and self-sufficient who reflects a heroic ideal. Gender doesn’t always matter; Aloy, the heroine from the Horizon series, exhibits just as many masculine ideals as Nathan Drake of Uncharted. When it came to Baby Steps, the team wanted to go in the opposite direction: a character who’s trying to live up to those expectations but just isn’t capable of it.
Still, Foddy says the game is sympathetic to its lead. He’s up to the task and by the game’s end will have scaled an entire mountain; he just doesn’t begin his journey very well equipped.
“He’s a nerd, as is everybody who made the game,” Foddy says. “We’re also gamers, so you know, we’re not out to get gamers.”
Part of Baby Steps involves Nate, who comes from a wealthy family with plenty of opportunity, grappling with his own troublesome behavior. “He’s part of the privileged, white-male default group,” Foddy says. “That’s making his situation more burdensome for him because it underscores that his failures to accomplish success are of his own making.” But the team was not interested in parroting stereotypical bootstrap advice. “We really wanted to resist the kind of boomer morality play of ‘what you really need to do is get a job and start meeting your responsibilities,’ and ‘you’re just lazy and you’re too oriented to pleasure.’”
In playing this character, Foddy hopes people might reflect more on their own motivations and behavior, the why of what they’re doing. During his time as a developer, Foddy has noticed that there is a certain subset of gamers who refuse to take help. They’re the stereotype of a guy who won’t ask for directions or, for example, skips every in-game tutorial.
Others, he says, are of the “git gud” mindset—a slang way to say that you suck at video games and should try harder. Discussions around difficulty and skill have haunted video games spaces for more than a decade, whether it was about playing in online spaces or challenging series like Dark Souls; arguments about player skill versus how hard a game should be are already taking place in the Silksong community, roughly a week after its launch. “Many games really lean into competition as the primary experience,” Kocurek says, “and there is a kind of feedback loop because you get games that embed certain ideals and values that attract certain players who like those.”
Foddy’s games often challenge what he calls “masculine pride” by repeatedly subjecting players to failure. Baby Steps is just a little more open about it in its narrative. Will the lesson land? Hard to say. The playtester determined to conquer the mudslide never did manage to brute-force it. “He started to feel like he was boring us after, you know, half an hour of it,” Foddy says.
Foddy can relate; he too has found himself climbing difficult areas with no reward in other games. “Did I do that for masculine pride,” he says. “Or did I do it because I was actually taking pleasure in the moment-to-moment play? I don’t think we even know why we’re doing it half the time.”
