Surely everyone has wanted to be a hero at some point, right? I mean that’s one of the reasons why we play games – so we can save the world, ‘get’ the girl (or boy), and generally feel good about ourselves. Rarely does anyone want to play the bad guy for long. It feels good to perform good deeds and do right by the world. It’s empowering. Even in some of the grimmest first-person shooters, you still tend to be the hero, despite the fact that often happens to involve killing an awful lot of bad guys along the way.
Perhaps weirdly, games all too often skim past the actual heroes in our real lives. When you think about it, in our everyday lives, it’s the emergency services that are more obviously heroic than most other professions. However, reliable things are often taken hugely for granted, so we end up underappreciating them.
Similarly, they’re underappreciated within games. Take firefighters, for instance. How many games can you name off the top of your head where you play a firefighter? Don’t run to Wikipedia! I could name two when I thought about it – Rosco McQueen and Burning Rangers.
