There is a scene in the PlayStation epic God of War III (2010) in which the player has no choice but to crush an innocent woman to death. Kratos, the dogged outcast of Olympus, has slaughtered his way into the bedchambers of the sea-god Poseidon. There he finds a quivering concubine, breasts heaving, and releases her from her bondage—only to drag her toward a massive wheel and chain her writhing to the spokes. Her frail body holds the wheel steady long enough to prop open the metal gates that block the way to the next stage. Progressing in the game means sending Kratos through the gates while their weight brings them lurching downward and forces the wheel to grind the victim, now off-screen, into a mangled corpse.

When my father and I played through that scene together, we did something we had never done in 15 years of gaming: we shut the damn thing off. This was very unlike us. Even before the debacle that was Gamergate, we were unimpressed by the self-appointed hall monitors who indicted video games as gruesomely amoral smut. Sure, there was some nasty stuff out there, but Dad steered us away from anything drastically age-inappropriate. By 2010, I was 20. I knew that violence and sex were parts of life; I figured they should be in fiction, too.

But this twisted parody of a rescue scene was a bridge too far for us both. It was everything the critics said gaming was: gratuitous, sadistic, callous. It travestied the stories of heroism that had always made the best games seem touchingly heartfelt, ever since the days of Donkey Kong and Super Mario. The bait-and-switch of liberating a damsel in distress, only to discard her as a broken prop, felt like a desecration of something almost embarrassingly tender—some sweet and honest teenage fantasy of saving the girl. You expected that kind of gleeful inversion from games like Grand Theft Auto, a series we had always avoided. But up until that gruesome moment, God of War was exactly the sort of game we would have pointed to as evidence that stories could get gritty and raw without getting depraved. Maybe that’s why we felt not just grossed out but let down: tormented though he was by his fury-haunted past, Kratos had always been a warrior, not a monster.

Now, it seemed, the developers had a choice to make. Who would their blood-spattered hero become? As of this June, God of War was the most profitable merchandise brand hosted on Sony’s massively successful PlayStation platform. When the third major installment came out, there had already been two spinoffs for cell phones and portable devices (PSPs). There have been two more minor entries and two major ones since then, bringing the total to nine games (plus a text-based adventure on Facebook Messenger). The series is driven by its main character’s ruthless hunger for revenge. When a character sticks around that long, the natural impulse is to up the ante. Maybe that’s why God of War III’s director Stig Asmussen felt that Kratos, like Macbeth, was now “in blood / Stepped in so far, that should [he] wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” In other words, what could the game’s creators offer but more carnage and mayhem?

But this raised a genuinely interesting problem: it turned out Kratos could only be pushed so far before he stopped being the character we knew and loved. He was a morally compromised and severely flawed man, fighting his way through an unjust world: all that was understood. But if he was going to descend with wild abandon into full demented savagery, then “why,” as reviewer Phil Hornshaw asked, “would I ever want to play a game as this guy?” The franchise was badly in need of somewhere else to go.

A New Myth

The first God of War appeared on PlayStation 2 in 2005. Its creator, David Jaffe of Santa Monica Studio, had an irresistible elevator pitch: “What if Ridley Scott directed Clash of the Titans?” In 2001, developers at Capcom had blended Japanese legend and military history into a riveting series of sword-fighting games called Onimusha. Jaffe wanted to do the same for ancient Athens and Sparta, “basically taking that kind of very adult sensibility and applying it to Greek mythology.” He and his lead animator Cory Barlog created Kratos, a grim amalgam of figures like Diomedes and Heracles. Like Heracles, he had been tricked by a vengeful deity into murdering his own wife and child. Like Diomedes, he had set his flinty heart upon making the gods bleed.

Kratos was the “ghost of Sparta,” so named because the ashes of his dead family had fused to his skin and turned it specter-white. His signature blades swung on chains seared into the flesh of his forearms by the war-god Ares, whom he once served. In the first game, guided by Athena, he turned against his former master and vented his bottomless sorrow on the god of war until ichor coursed from his veins to drench the waiting earth. Part ancient tragic hero, part modern film noir anti-hero, Kratos hacked his way through Tartarus and met with every iconic character from the Minotaur to the Moirai, mostly in order to kill them.

If the writers played fast and loose with the ancient plots, their stories were certainly no more lurid or raunchy than those that once descended from Mount Helicon. This was the era when games reached peak nerd-boy energy—the era of LAN (local area network) parties and two-liter bottles of Sprite. Notoriously, the God of War games that took place in Greece each contained a playable sex scene. But the act was never shown on camera and the mood was more of snickering teenage innuendo than hardcore arousal. In short, the whole thing—from the spectacular environments to the gloriously slick battle mechanics—was an unabashed romp. All the fellas, creators and players alike, were having a great time.

But boys have to grow up. That might have been what my dad and I realized when the brutality in God of War III pulled us up short. Graphics were getting more realistic. Plots were getting more sophisticated. And I was getting older. What once felt fun and inconsequential was starting to take on an alarming gravity. For a long time, video games had been developing from simple entertainment into genuine art. The God of War franchise had straddled that transition. Its protagonist had grown up from a cartoon brute into a layered and complex human creation. His actions had taken on the elevated significance of human actions. And now, like any finely-drawn character, he would have to develop over time. The question was: how?

The Child is Father to the Man

At this point, it is not too much to say that Cory Barlog saved the soul of the franchise. Having designed the look of the character and directed the second game in the series, he had stepped away to pursue his own projects and let Asmussen take over. But from the beginning, his read on Kratos had always been slightly different than that of his colleagues. At a panel interview of directors from the franchise, several creators agreed that God of War’s appeal is in vicarious rampaging: “Who wouldn’t be compelled to play a game about a character who has these same challenges and faults and flaws as everybody else has, but when he wants to do something about it, it’s, you know, ripping the heads off a hydra or something like that?” But Barlog could see that Kratos offered more than an outlet for the player’s thwarted aggression.

“It’s interesting about Kratos,” he said, “he kind of inadvertently changes the world around him for the better. … Sure, he may have a huge body count, and a bunch of blood following him, but he’s bringing down a fairly corrupt system of gods.” This was the germ of a terrifically astute observation. Barlog understands that video games are only at the beginning of their development as a medium. Early on, he saw that implicit in Kratos’ story was a tension that came straight from the heart of the source material. Taken literally as a metaphysics, polytheism makes a mockery of absolute justice. Barlog was asking the question that got Socrates killed and prompted the Stoics, no less than the scholars of Ashurbanipal’s court in Nineveh, to doubt whether there really are many different gods: after all, how can gods be gods if they are at war?

At the opening of his Death of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche speculated that the genius of high Athenian culture was a “pessimism of strength,” a “predilection for what is hard, awful, evil, problematical in existence.” Attic tragedy, at its most sublime, stares into the abyss of a universe governed by forces no less confused and self-contradictory than mankind itself. But the natural reaction to such a universe, if there really is nothing beyond it, can only be horror. If the gods deceive and brutalize each other just like us, why shouldn’t they also die?

Remarkably, these were the questions that Barlog brought with him when he returned to reboot God of War for the PlayStation 4, transposing the story into a new universe of Norse mythology. The two most recent entries, God of War (2018) and God of War: Ragnarök (2022) set Kratos searching for some order and stability that can survive the endless bickering of petty deities. Newly voiced and embodied through motion-capture technology by Christopher Judge, the ghost of Sparta matures into a broodingly reluctant insurrectionist not just against gods but against godhead itself. He finds a new wife to love and to lose. He picks up a new arsenal with new controls. But most importantly, he fathers a son.

Kratos’ heir Atreus, chafing under his father’s gruff tutelage, begins to hanker after answers to the ultimate questions. In Ragnarök, he is invited by the chief god Odin to peer through an existential rift into the world beyond all worlds. “I don’t know where I go, when I go,” says Odin, wondering what power above his own waits to greet him when he dies. And though the king of Asgard grasps furiously to bring even the fabric of reality under his control, Atreus—rechristened in neo-Norse prophecy as a benevolent Loki—simply wants to honor whatever truth there is beyond his pagan remit. He learns at last to channel his young manhood into a code of virtue and loyalty that rules even over gods. Through him, Kratos too begins to tame his old anger and salve his old wounds. The series closes with just a hint that some strength greater than brawn brings order to the world and to the souls of men alike.

When Ragnarök came out, I finally gave God of War another chance. The game isn’t perfect: its production was delayed by COVID, and the creators clearly decided to wrap up in one story what should have been two. But Barlog has accomplished something quietly astonishing: he has curbed the excesses of the series without emasculating or dishonoring his main character. The trajectory of the franchise—from goofy slasher, to gory bloodbath, to bittersweet parable of god and man—demonstrates admirably how video games, like those who play them, have grown.

If there is indeed such a thing as unhinged bloodlust in some of these titles, there is also such a thing as virtuous discipline and manly aspiration. I knew the difference as a kid for one reason: My dad showed it to me. There is no substitute for that, no ideological system or code of artistic censorship that can bring a boy rightly into manhood without the guidance of an honorable father. That is the truth that Barlog drew out of Kratos’ story. In an era and a nation afflicted by shameful levels of fatherlessness, no truth could be more urgent.

For all the discussion and anxiety over the cultural crisis of manhood, remarkably few people have seriously asked whether some video games can contribute positively to the formation of the millions of boys who play them. Here is one answer: real-life boys, just like fictional characters, need mentors to help them sift out what is best in their nature. Kratos’ creators learned the hard truths of self-mastery in real time as his fans did. That is why Kratos learned them too, and why at last he became something more than a beast: he became a father and a man.