Julia Böhm

Have you noticed that in games it is usually up to the father figures to save or avenge (their) children? When women appear as mothers in games, they have a difficult position, because the heroic role as protagonist is rarely granted to them. In some games, they are already long dead at the beginning of the game's storyline and thus no longer present. In other cases, they are relegated to an unimportant supporting role that is neither significant for the narrative nor for the game's progress. If they have a greater importance in the game plot, it seems, they fill the less glorious roles as damsel in distress or, at the other extreme, as the evil mother.
In this contribution I want to show two examples of mothers in games, taking a closer look at Sophia Lamb from Bioshock 2 (2010) and Kara from Detroit Become Human (2018). While Sophia Lamb, in her desire to build utopia, used her own daughter Eleanor for psychological experiments, stands for an evil matriarch, the humanoid android Kara appears as a protector and as caring for Alice, although difficult topics such as domestic violence are also addressed in her role. In doing so, connections to medially and historically shaped images of mothers will be made and an analysis of the respective mother figure, on a visual and narrative level, will take place.