The kid-in-the-fridge: sacrificial children and vengeful masculinity in contemporary videogames

Abstract

A recent content analysis of child characters in contemporary videogames found that over a third of the digital kids recorded in the dataset were murder victims - their lives cut short by drownings, shootings, stabbings, hangings, intentional traffic collisions, cannibalism, murderous religious rituals, and giant spider attacks (Reay 2020). This article builds on critical analysis of the sacrificial child in other media (e.g., Tan 2013; Sanchéz-Eppler 2005; Houen 2002; Mizruchi 1998; Nussbaum 1997) to explore the rhetorical and ludic function of this trope in videogames. Using the Assassin’s Creed series as a case study, I examine how the dead child serves to justify – and even glorify - the hero’s ruthless, aggressive domination of others through physical violence. I compare the child sacrifice to the ‘woman-in-the-refrigerator’ trope (Simone 1999) to explore the ways in which the ‘fridged kid’ perpetuates misogyny and sexism, irrespective of its gender. In these games, maturity - defined in terms of mastery and agency - is equated with masculinity, while the cultural conditions of childhood - vulnerability, innocence, and dependence - continue to be coded as feminine. Through close readings of Phoibe’s death scene in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and Shadya’s death scene in Assassin’s Creed: Origins, this article suggests that the digital child is sacrificed in order to purge the adult hero of his hesitancy, his self-doubt, and his cowardice. The dead child impels action without compunction by creating a schematic moral superstructure that overrides all other ethical concerns: it liberates the adult hero from both apathy and empathy. This article concludes that the dead child in games is a powerful tool for resolving ludonarrative dissonance, for promoting player-avatar identification, and for eliciting strong affective responses; however, in replacing nuance and ambiguity with certainty and purpose, the dead child legitimises an extreme form of vengeful, militarised, hypermasculine violence in the guise of reasonable, responsible, protective paternalism.

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ORCID for Emma Reay: orcid.org/0000-0003-2193-6564

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