I’ve never had a baby. I once had one of those dolls that you could feed and it periodically pissed itself, but I gather this represents only a fraction of the maternal experience. I’ll tell you what I have done, though: I have played a lot of video games.

And games, you may be startled to discover, are not too great at portraying motherhood – though they seem to have fatherhood all figured out. Did you know that once you have a daughter you suddenly become aware that women are people, too? Who could have seen that coming? This modern phenomenon, known as the “dadification of games”, has largely come about through game designers and writers growing up, becoming parents and having all these feelings about protectiveness and caring that they want to express through their chosen medium. See The Last of Us, BioShock Infinite and The Walking Dead among others. Meanwhile, due to the fact that not a lot of senior game designers are women, and because many of the ones that are women are often forced to choose between career and family – because sexism is bullshit – the motherhood stories just don’t get told.

The Last of Us represents a recent trend of dad games, where male parental figures are depicted as both action heroes and functioning carers. Photograph: Sony

If everything I learned about motherhood was from games, a large part of it would be “you die roughly five minutes after giving birth, surviving just long enough to leave a memento or a letter that will later serve as the motivation for your child to do some big quest”. You are less a nurturing, sentient human being, more a plot device. The statistical probability of this happening is worrying on a pandemic scale: there’s Ellie’s mother in The Last of Us, Evie and Jacob’s mother in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, the drowned mother in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, the protagonist’s mother in Fallout 3, the saintly Lady Comstock in Bioshock Infinite (who, when she returns to life, does so as a nightmarish and deadly siren) … the list continues.

You’d think that mothers were some kind of impossible narrative puzzle, best dispatched at the beginning so no one has to bother writing a rounded female character. If we’re feeling generous, we could suggest this is down to the fact that video games have habitually drawn their archetypal structures from fairy tales (the brave prince rescuing the fair maiden, etc) – and in these ancient stories, the death of a mother is a familiar inciting incident. But that’s not really good enough in the era of sophisticated storytelling – and the malaise is a lot more complicated.

For example, another lesson I have learned from games is that motherhood is sexy, but in a dangerous way. The game version of Dante’s Inferno has a 40-foot naked woman who fires scythe-handed babies from her gaping nipples. In Bioshock, the protagonist’s mother is an “exotic dancer” who sells her baby and is promptly murdered by her lover. Bloodborne has Arianna, Woman of Pleasure, who gives birth to a monstrous child who must be killed. If you kill Arianna instead, you get her shoes, which bear this awful description: “Innocent and cute. In contrast with its owner.” Yeesh. A lot of games display this unbearable, puritanical view that mothers must be sexually pure, and therefore anything that combines sexuality and motherhood must be bad and wrought with peril.

In Dante’s Inferno, one of the boss characters is a giant goddess who gives birth from her nipples; the very incarnation of the ‘monstrous feminine’ concept Photograph: Electronic Arts

There is a sinister obsession with the corruption of motherhood, betraying a Freudian fear of women as a suffocating, castrating presence. There has been, for as long as women have existed, a terror that they are “monstrous” – ie unpredictable, chaotic, untrustworthy; cloying sweethearts one second and vitriolic harridans the next. Even now, this deep-seated trope continues in the guise of PMS jokes and Manic Pixie Dream Girls (what do they even want, and why isn’t it me???) – and, of course, female video game characters who look simpering and sweet until they spinning-bird-kick you in the face. Add the body horror of pregnancy into the mix and whoah, it’s terrifying. Hence, the Alien movies – a multimillion dollar franchise based around the idea that birth is gross.

Perhaps it’s for the best that motherhood is rarely portrayed in games if revulsion and death are so often the result, if the actual physicality of motherhood is so baffling and mysterious and, ugh, how do babies even come out and why must mothers have their own personalities and motives? Why can’t they just be caring and loving, and preferably dead long before the events of the game? Think of the mother figure in every Pokémon adventure – stuck in the house, in a dead-end town, while her husband is missing or working in another city. Her 10-year-old child leaves to hunt little creatures all day, only returning to scrounge money from her. She is not a person. A person cannot effectively be replaced by an ATM.

Fortunately, there are good, interesting examples of motherhood scattered throughout the video-game canon. Child of Light begins with the protagonist’s mum dying, but the story isn’t about her relationship with her father; instead it follows Aurora reconnecting with her beloved mother in a magical, fairytale world, guided and helped by her in her role as the Queen of Light. Joyce Price, Chloe’s mother in Life is Strange, has her own worries and motives, working at a diner to provide for her troubled daughter and trying to maintain a relationship with her overbearing husband. The adventure game Richard & Alice is about a mother’s struggle to bring up her son in a dystopian world. In Night In The Woods, Mae’s mother, Candy, begins as the kind of mum who stays inside and interacts only with the protagonist, but she is slowly revealed to be a more complex character who is fiercely loving towards her daughter despite Mae being incredibly difficult and angsty towards her.

Mae’s mum in Night in the Woods provides a more nuanced depiction of motherhood. Photograph: Finji

Still though, it seems mothers are not allowed to be game protagonists in the way that dads and dad figures are able to be. There is a persistent belief that mothers are defined by that role, while men are able to save the world – or even just leave the house – without becoming a tragic plot motivation. Adventurousness – as with Lara Croft’s mother, Amelia Croft – is punished; she dies either by touching a cursed sword or by being in a plane crash. The player is assumed to be male in too many cases, and thus their only relationship with mothers is having one, or marrying one. Even Bayonetta, perhaps the most prominent example of mother-as-protagonist, is actually just playing mother to a younger version of herself, which doesn’t really count, though I haven’t researched the law on that.

And so, I call to you, game designers, game writers and yes, even you execs – especially you execs – who sit at the top of game studios making all the big important decisions like release dates and downloadable content prices: make games about mothers. Don’t just make games about your mothers; make games across the whole spectrum. Better yet: hire mothers and let them tell their stories. Even if this prospect fills you with unnatural horror, there is a vast spectrum of relatable stories to explore out there and an untapped market to sell them to. After all, a large portion of your potential customers will have had babies, or may go on to have them in the future – and many of these people won’t even be murdered by demons immediately afterwards.

