Your Daughter Is in Another Castle: Essential Paternal Masculinity in Video Games

In recent years, there has been a notable increase in video games that put players in the role of a father figure who must protect and/or rescue his child. This article focuses on instances of this where the child in question is female and looks at how she is being used as motivation/reward incentive for the father figure. Considering video games’ historic use of damsel-in-distress characters, the shift to adolescent girls who fulfill the role of daughter rather than love interest is significant. This trend elucidates a very specific type of masculinity, which the author designates “essential paternal masculinity.”