Moms have it rough, man. I’m talking socially, of course, considering the fact that the United States is only one of two countries in the world that doesn’t provide paid time off for new mothers. (Get it together, United States.) But I’m also talking representationally, and it is this particular injustice toward mothers that I’ll be focusing on today. Because the state of representation of mothers and motherhood—especially in video games—is something with which I have some major problems. So much so that, in the spirit of fair warning, this probably is not the last or only time I’ll be writing about it.

Such sentiments were running through my mind as I watched the “Hardhome” episode of Game of Thrones a couple weekends ago (some light spoilers ahead). In the episode, Jon Snow travels to the North to convince the wildlings to come back to the Wall with him, and during these efforts, an undead army attacks him and the amassed free folk. In the midst of these events, we encounter Karsi, a wildling leader who also happens to be a mother. We watch as she works to evacuate as many of her people as she can (including her two daughters) and as she fights off one undead foe after another. She seems competent, she seems confident, she seems exceedingly tough and able. But then she turns around and—gasp—discovers a group of zombie children, who quickly come after her. And instead of fighting them off, as she did with all the other zombies before them, she gives up. She doesn’t just hesitate; she crosses her arms in front of her face and lets the zombie kids get her.

And this is where I start to have a problem with things. Okay, yes, the idea of zombified children is definitely a huge bummer, but I have a hard time buying the idea that a tough wildling woman like Karsi (one who just promised her own children that she’d be right behind them on the trip to the Wall) would just give up—because of, what, some sort of maternal weakness? Some sort of maternal instinct? I mean, if such a maternal instinct is at play here, wouldn’t it cause her to fight that much harder to get back to her children? But no, the limitations in Karsi’s ability to survive, here, seem to be rendered as being caused by some sort of essentialized maternal biological determinism—and Game of Thrones is not the only narrative that does this in its representation of mother characters. In other words, as Stacia L. Brown says in “How TV Gets Motherhood Wrong” (which, by the way, is one of only a handful of pieces that I found that is critical of the depiction of Karsi’s motherhood), “That moment of weakness—that ‘Aw, they’re just children’ beat that results in a deadly hesitation or that assumption that ‘maternal instinct’ will override survival instinct—is a familiar plot device for tough onscreen mothers.” And what such a plot device results in is the fact that, in our narratives, mothers are often written as only that—as mothers who are solely defined by their motherhood role.

Video games are no exception. And I might argue that they may, in fact, be guilty of defining mothers in even more narrowly inscribed ways than some of our other narrative forms. In one such narrow inscription, mothers (as plot devices) often function within the role of the victim for whom the protagonist must search. We see this in Among the Sleep, in which we are led to believe that the mother, having disappeared in the middle of the night, has befallen some sort of horrible fate, and it is this assumption that catalyzes us to work to find her. We also see this in Alien: Isolation, in which Amanda Ripley embarks on a similar quest to find out what has happened to her missing mother. And, to a lesser extent (in that it’s not the focal point of the overarching storyline), we see this in a questline in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, in which Geralt searches for the missing wife and daughter of the Bloody Baron, a man who wants to find his wife (whom, we come to find out, he has consistently abused) so that she might return to him.

But if not characterized as victims, mothers seem mostly to have only one other option, one that lies on the opposite end of the spectrum, and that is to be characterized as monstrous. We see such a representation of monstrous motherhood in the broodmother of Dragon Age: Origins, whose monstrosity is a direct result of her reproductive function (in much the same way as the Alien mother in Aliens is depicted as a monstrous womb). We also see the figure of the monstrous mother in Among the Sleep, to return to this game yet again (huge spoilers ahead); indeed, although the game initially has us believe the mother is a helpless victim, we come to find out by the end of the game that she is an abusive alcoholic, one who abhorrently beats her child when drunk. Thus, it would seem that motherhood is often constructed on the basis of a binary—mothers are either victims or monsters, they are either good mothers or bad mothers. And in both constructions of either mother-as-victim or mother-as-monster, the mother is the object of the protagonist’s action—be the action one of seeking to reunite with the victimized mother or seeking to push the monstrous mother away—and not the performer of action. She is an object, not a subject. She is not an active protagonist, but a passive plot device.

And speaking of active protagonists, when do we ever really get to play a mother? With the exception of Samus Aran, when do we really see a protagonist who also happens to be a mother? Not often. The same can’t be said, though, when we think about fathers. Joel in The Last of Us is

a father, as is John Marston in Red Dead Redemption. There’s Ethan Mars in Heavy Rain and Lee Everett in The Walking Dead. And even Geralt in The Witcher 3 is a sort of adoptive father figure to Ciri. In all these games, we get to play father characters, characters who are not solely defined by their fatherhood roles. These men are fathers, yes, but they are also mentors, saviors, sexual beings, heroes, and antiheroes. But what about the moms—where are the mother protagonists? Why do we not have the opportunity to experience mothers in the same way that we do fathers?

I’m not the only one asking these questions. I’m not the only one noticing the disparity in the representation of mothers and fathers in the games we play. Ashe Samuels notes that this disparity “goes a lot deeper than go-to tropes or lazy writing—it’s reflective of a myopic cultural attitude toward women and the role we are often pressured to be in. This steady devaluing of motherhood is aided by a never-ending deluge of male protagonists written from male perspectives for presumed male consumption.” And Carly Smith continues, “I’ve looked for moms in games I could admire even since my own mother died. Over and over, I see fathers on the frontlines while women are kept to the back. As I’ve reflected on my mom’s strength, I’ve become more and more frustrated that I do not see it celebrated in games.” And it is really frustrating that we don’t get to see more celebration of motherhood in games. It’s really frustrating that we don’t get to play more characters who are mothers. And it’s really frustrating that we don’t get to see more female characters who are not solely defined by their mothering role and who, instead, get to be mothers and heroes and sexual beings and just complicated people in general. The fact that we don’t see such representations, to return to Ashe Samuels’s phrasing, is assuredly symptomatic of a cultural myopia, one that results in the devaluing of everything that more diverse representations of motherhood has to offer.

Again, yes, I’m not the only one talking about these things. But it also seems like there aren’t as many people talking about these issues as there should be. Because, hopefully, the more people talk about and care about the problems with the representation of motherhood in video games, the sooner we’ll be able to play games that feature more fully rendered mothers. And those are the kinds of games that I, for one, would want to play.