#genderingames

Sources and Significance – Blog 7

This post looks at how Assassin’s Creed Origins represents gender and power, and how those choices shape identity and agency inside its historical world.

Representation and Power in Games

Games don’t just “show” characters; they organise power through design. Who gets to act, who gets framed as important, and who gets play time all matter. Character models, narrative roles, and mechanics quietly teach players what authority looks like and who is allowed to have it. Assassin’s Creed Origins works as a useful case because it tries to balance historical authenticity with modern ideas about representation, which creates visible tensions.

Bayek, Masculinity, and Authority

Bayek is written as a protector first. As a Medjay, his identity is built around strength, duty, and guarding others, which leans into familiar masculine codes of authority. But the game doesn’t keep him purely stoic. His grief and vulnerability come through repeatedly, and that emotional weight becomes part of how the player reads his actions. Rather than masculinity being presented as dominance alone, it becomes tied to responsibility and loss, which gives his character more texture than the usual “unbreakable hero” model.

Aya and Female Agency

Aya is not treated as a decorative side character. She drives political action, makes strategic decisions, and moves through the world with competence and purpose. Importantly, she often acts independently of Bayek, which stops her from being reduced to support or motivation. At the same time, the game’s structure still limits her. Compared to Bayek, she has less sustained playable presence, and that imbalance matters because agency in games isn’t only narrative it’s also mechanical. Even when Aya is powerful in story terms, the player spends less time being her.

Gender, History, and Representation

The historical setting complicates everything. A game can aim for authenticity, but the past is already shaped by patriarchal systems, so “accuracy” can end up reproducing gendered restrictions. Origins seems aware of this tension. Many women operate inside social limits, but the narrative includes moments where those limits are resisted, negotiated, or strategically used. This links to Hall’s argument that representation doesn’t simply mirror reality; it actively produces meaning through selection and framing (Hall, 1989).

Power, Visibility, and the Gaze

Compared to earlier mainstream titles, Origins feels more restrained in how it frames bodies. Female characters are less often presented as spectacle and more often as actors within the plot. That shift pushes against the familiar “male gaze” dynamic Mulvey describes, where women are positioned mainly to be looked at (Mulvey, 1975). Aya, in particular, is framed through capability and consequence rather than display, which changes how power is visualised.

Conclusion

Assassin’s Creed Origins shows that mainstream games can represent gender and power in more layered ways, even while working inside historical and genre constraints. Bayek offers a masculinity shaped by vulnerability as well as strength, and Aya introduces political agency that isn’t simply secondary. The uneven playability between them, though, reminds me that representation in games happens through mechanics and screen time as much as through character writing.

References