Games are slowly dumping deep-seated themes of masculinity to touch upon softer emotions — often with key female characters. Since the halcyon days of Italian plumbers rescuing princesses from evil gorillas, narratives in video games have been pretty straightforward. Players control a hero (almost always a man) and are tasked with jumping on unambiguously bad guys until the princess is rescued or the world is saved. But when Sony’s Santa Monica Studio announced a sequel to the popular PlayStation franchise God of War last year, fans were presented with a game radically different from the previous half-dozen games in the series. Until then, the mythological action-adventure games had been defined by their penchant for extreme violence and gratuitous sex, where the hero, Kratos — an immortal demigod — never had to worry about pesky things like collateral damage or excessive force. However, 2018’s PlayStation 4 entry presented a tale of the same character consumed by not just revenge but also regret: His wife dies, and he has to grapple with the challenges of being a single dad with a violent legacy. That shift in Kratos is part of a larger real-world change in an industry that at $152 billion is more than three times the size of Hollywood ($43 billion). Gamers are growing up, and games are trying to keep pace by finally beginning to abandon long-held tropes. | 
