A Male on Females on Female Characters

[Twilight_guy]

Here's an idea - just a thought: stop caring about gender.

Since when does one's chromozones matter?

Every time you cry out for a character with or without a penis, it sounds more like 'sex is important to me. I see everyone as a gender. Your sexual organs are important.'

Unfortunately, that doesn't really work. Society has seen fit to acknowledge and address a power inequality in the portrayal of gender in games and the community has seen fit to address it. You usually can't just simply undo movements like this. Once an unequal power relationship is address it and becomes a rallying cry it will not be ignored until it is seen as "solved." On top of that, ignoring the problem won't solve it either. If we don't address this topic then the issue of bad characterization will continue uninhibited and to many that is unacceptable. Social norms like the largely white male protagonist reproduce themselves in society over time and letting them do so will mean that they will continue indefinitely until some other social pressure enforces something else. People are trying to hider that reproduction of the norm and create a new norm. I personally think this is a worthy cause and I know that nothing is going to change until it is actively addressed. Sitting idly by does not make you gender neutral in your thinking, it makes you a passive recipient of a genderist power divide. If you got the short end of the stick on the relationship by being a woman then simply accepting it means accepting a lower position in gaming while others have a sort of male privilege and more representation simply because of their y chromosome. What needs to be done is an equalization of power. My only concern is that we must keep in mind to not go to far and become genderist the other way by trying to make women superior but instead address the equation in a way that seeks to give both sides equality. [/soap box]

 

[4173]

The canon Exile (KotOR II) is female.

So? Doesn't make the stupid canon male Revan any more right. They made the Exile female simply to appease all the fans of female Revan, and failed completely.

And I actually think the Exile's story works better if he's male. Kreia acts more like a mother would towards a son than a daughter.

I agree with you about the Exile, 100% I just thought it was worth pointing out, especially if, as you say the Exile was written specifically because of Revanette fans.

I'm of two minds on Revan a number of things are better with female Revan: Jolee, Malak's resentment towards Revan and torture of Bastilla, Carth, trope subversion with female Revan as the Revanchist etc. On the other hand, the Bastilla arc with a male is better.

 

[370999]

I can't disagree with this article. It's obnoxious when you play game after game and never get to see or play as your own gender - it's even worse when you're given the option to play as a female but are penalized for doing so (eg: can't enter the Arena in Fallout: New Vegas if your character is female).

Disagree here. It would of been silly to let a female compete in the arena seeing as the Legion has a "get back into the Kitchen" attitude towards them. I don't think it is fair to fault the game for being coherent in portraying the various soceities that populate it's world.

Honestly though don't people write what they know? It's not like they are actively being prejudiced but they are drawing grom their own expereinces. While I could imagine what life is like for an Iranian women I doubt my picture would be wholly accurate. I think the answer is to have more females in the creative process of games then it is to force men to design female character* as that would have a problem of making them see it as a choure and thus not do the character justice.

*I know there are some men and women who are incredibly good about getting beyond what they know. Fair play to them and I think that's great but it is silly IMHO to expect everyone to be that good.

 

[Two Angels]

Sod the main character! How about we concentrate on just getting the game mechanics right and making something fun to play no matter who is the lead.

Saying that I like having the generic male tough guy character as then I know where I stand with the game and what to expect.

 

[RevRaptor]

How about "my character"? Does anyone ever say, let me get out my player character sheet? Or, let me see the new player character you just rolled up? Not to mention, that as far as me and most of the western world is concerned, a PC is the computer that sits on your desk that's not a laptop and not a mac.

So A party of Pc's is a party of my characters? That really doesn't roll of the tongue to well.

 

[beefpelican]

I always think it is funny when someone who isn't directly affected by stereotypes is more offended than the people who are. And then more zealously defend the precised victim. So I chuckled at how Shamus is more offended at sexual pandering than the ladies at the Comic Con.

Other wise I think he makes some valid points.

I guess he's offended because the boobs are targeted at guys, not at girls. It implies that all guys want in a female character is sex appeal. Of course, if Shamus does not find that to be true for him, then all he has to do is not buy a game that sells itself that way. Then, abrakadabra, he is no longer the target market and thus is not being insulted by the advertising. So yeah, basically what I'm saying here is that complaining about sexualized marketing is silly if you're gonna buy the game anyway.

 

[Eikoandmog]

I'm one of the strange few that despite being male, enjoys playing as female characters in video games. I can agree that you simply don't see enough of female characters, even in multiplayer modes but there is one case where the addition of females just wouldn't make sense. In the wave of 'realistic' shooters that the AAA industry likes to shove at us, it wouldn't make sense to have women playable since they can't be on the front line as infantry for various reasons.

Actually in the New Zealand, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Israel, Serbia, Sweden and Switzerland (thanks, wikipedia) armed forces, Women CAN take active frontline combat roles.

It's embarrassing there aren't more.

Well, I've learned something today.

 

[beefpelican]

BioWare gets points for letting us choose the appearance and gender of our protagonist in Dragon Age and Mass Effect, but then they lose those points by making the default box-cover characters a couple of generic white dudes.

THANK YOU GEEZE. That exact sentiment is one I've desperately wondered about. Does it actually raise sales? Really? Can't they just have no default Shepard or Hawke?

It's worth noting that there isn't even, ala Mass Effect, a 'default to male' Hawke in DA2. You choose gender and class before anything else and you can't just say "default please". The male Hawke is no more 'canonical' than the female one, judging by the game.

Well they have to put something on the box art. And in the gameplay trailers. And in the cinematic trailers.

Mass Effect's box art is meant to tell you about the game inside. Look at the box for the first game. You can see just from looking at it that mass effect is a grand sweeping space drama, that the main character is military, that the dude with the glowing blue eyes is evil, and that other aliens and a lady in a tight space jumpsuit will be involved. Granted, they could have had female Shepard on the cover, or black Shepard, or black female Shepard, but they had to pick something.

Same thing goes for DA2. DA1 abstracted the cover, giving you a big red dragon with no people. DA1 also had many more racial options than DA2, which forces you to play a human. But in both games' advertising, they had to pick one character for all of the trailers, just to give them some consistent link. I don't know that they could have done better than they did.

What do you think would have been better, from both a diversity and a marketing standpoint?

 

[WaderiAAA]

And although I personally wouldn't mind seeing more games aimed at women, I don't know if it's immediately a sound business strategy to do so. Let's be very generous and say that the male/female gamer ratio is 60:40. It may seem intuitive that the best strategy is to make 60% of games for men and 40% for women (of course there's a middle ground, but I'm simplifying), but the simple fact of the matter is that the optimal (short term) strategy is to aim everything at the majority (search "matching vs maximizing").

60:40 ain't generous, it is the actual numbers (if this wikipedia page is reliable at least)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_gamer

I'm not sure if aiming at the majority is always optimal. If there is a large audience that craves female protagonist, being considered "the shooter with a good female protagonist" might be more profitable than say "just another shooter".

 

[internetzealot1]

It's gotten to the point where we kind of shy away from such multiplayer/cooperative games that don't provide female options. We had been rather excited for Brink, as an example, and their bragging about the endless options for customizing your character. Then we learned those endless options don't involve being able to pick a female for a list of variously lame reasons. We decided: if they don't care to even try to appeal to us we wont give them our cash.

I'm not sure if it was one of those "lame reasons," but female avatars can't be in Brink because of the way body-types correlate to gameplay. Light characters have low health, can only wield submachine guns, and can free-run. Medium characters have more health, can wield all weapons, and can do limited free-running. Heavy characters have the most health, can wield all weapons, and can't free-run If you've seen the three body types, then you know that they're exaggerated, and that it would visually make no sense for a female to be either medium or large. So, to include female characters would result in one of two things: 1) Anyone who wanted to play as a female would be relegated to the Light body-type and have their gameplay options reduced by 66%(which is a bad thing), or 2) The game is filled with hideous, Soviet-experiment-gone-wrong women.

Its really a shame. I'm a big proponent of personalization in games, but sometimes it just doesn't work out like that.

 

[internetzealot1]

Mass Effect's box art is meant to tell you about the game inside. Look at the box for the first game. You can see just from looking at it that mass effect is a grand sweeping space drama, that the main character is military, that the dude with the glowing blue eyes is evil, and that other aliens and a lady in a tight space jumpsuit will be involved. Granted, they could have had female Shepard on the cover, or black Shepard, or black female Shepard, but they had to pick something.

What they should have done was make the orange light behind Shepherd's head obscure his face.

OT: When developers first start designing a game they have to make a choice. Will immersion come first, or will storytelling? If they answer immersion, then they should allow the player to choose gender, race, etc. If I were to pick on a company for not doing this, It would be Valve. In Half-life, Freeman is only ever acknowledged as a man a few, unimportant times. It would hardly effect the game if Freeman was a woman, but since there is a rather strong stor to Half-life, it can slide. The real failure was in Portal. The female protagonist, Chell, was absolutely nobody. Gender did not once factor into the game. The only reason she was ever given a gender was because players needed an avatar to see when they looked into portals. Of course, unless you're a white woman, every time you look into a portal and see yourself, you'll remember that you're not in Aperture labs, but that you're playing a video game and the protagonist is in Aperture labs.

If storytelling comes first, then they are going to have to create a character for the player to control. This means that the character will have to have a gender and race, which means that some demographic is going to be left out. Personnally, I place more importance on immersion, but whatever.

Now the problem I have with these protests against the lack of diversity in games is that they seem to assume that enjoyment of a game is hampered if the main character is not exactly like the player. They seem to assume that a woman can't enjoy playing as a man, and that I can't enjoy playing as a woman. They're wrong, because I sure as hell liked Metroid. The thing is, if people want a protagonist that is also a character (I don't, but once again, whatever), they're going to have to make concessions.

 

[Zom-B]

So A party of Pc's is a party of my characters? That really doesn't roll of the tongue to well.

Uh, no. You're just taking the piss. Language is fluid, especially english. If you want to try and say that what you just said would logically follow what I said, I'd have to ask if english was your first language.

Honestly, if you're not just being pedantic for the sake of trolling me this doesn't even deserve an answer. But just for the sake of it...

Maybe a party of "player characters" would be referred to as "your party"? I mean really, if you were the GM (that's Game Master, or DM if you're the Dungeon Master) would you really even say "A group of Smurfs ambushes your party of Player Characters! What do your Player Characters do?" Doubtful.

You would most likely say something along the lines of "A group of Care Bears ambushes your Party/Group/Posse (or even in a pinch Characters)! What do you do? Roll for initiative!"

Are you picking up what I'm putting down here?

ps- it's "...doesn't roll of the tongue too well.", not "to".

 

[Mysnomer]

Shamus would love to see more gender diversity in games.

So I'm reading the article and I get to the second page. Oh, a scene from Mass Effect. If there's text somewhere that might mean something, I try to read it. So I'm squinting and trying to read what Shepard is saying. Slowly I'm moving my face closer and closer to the screen, but I still can't make it all out. Then I see that the point of the picture is actually that it a shot of someone's butt, and my face is inches from it. To any outside observers, I am now some kind of pervert...well played, Shamus, well played.

Also, I always make a female character when the options are open. I am so sick of guys being the lead that I have taken it into my own hands to create awesome female main characters.

 

[mattag08]

snip

I assume you're making the point that there should be more situations where women interact with each other? Why is that important?

It's important because if you ask:
1) Is there more than one man?
2) Do the men talk to each other?
3) Do they talk about anything other than the female characters?
Almost every game and movie will pass. Females make up roughly 50% of the population yet they probably hold less than 10% of the conversations in popular media.

Did you ever wonder why? And if your answer is "the patriarchy" then you've missed the mark.

 

[BlindChance]

Well they have to put something on the box art. And in the gameplay trailers. And in the cinematic trailers.

...

What do you think would have been better, from both a diversity and a marketing standpoint?

Basically? Look to Portal.

This was the standout example of how to do marketing without a centralised figure. (Oddly enough, it's also cause for some despair, but for different reasons; namely, that in such a profoundly female game with an easily depicted central character, they decided to keep her hidden.) Abstract it. Dragon Age 1 used the blood dragon as its symbol. For Dragon Age 2, I'd have gone with that weird symbol thing of Kirkwall's. Or maybe the silhouette of the Kirkwall skyline? After all, Kirkwall is, in many ways, the star of DA2. Moreso than Hawke.

Trailers are, I grant, a little trickier. But again, look at Portal. There they used a clever device to convey the humour and nature of the gameplay without really using much gameplay footage. I don't believe for a second they couldn't have done something similar with Dragon Age 2. Use Varric, talking. (Hell, it's what he does.) Perhaps something about the mystery of 'The Champion of Kirkwall':

"Who is the champion? Heh. Nobody can agree. I've heard stories about how he's eight feet tall and wields a sword as long as himself; I've heard she's beautiful as a flame and wields magic just as deadly. The champion is the rebel lord of the resistance; or the tyrant's right hand. Born into power and destiny; or a Fereldan refugee caught up in the winds of chance. And y'know, the champion is all of these things, and none of them. But that's not the point. The point is, the champion changed the world. And I know the Champion's story..."

Use the images of the game. Show the setting, show the gameplay. Build intrigue and mystery.

Would that be better from a diversity standpoint? Absolutely. Anything to dilute the endless range of gruff men in the marketing. From a marketing/sales perspective in the short term? Probably not. The fact is, it's a way of signalling to the male fanbase, "Hey, this is for you. You wanna be this guy, right?"

But it's being done at the expense of the mid-to-long term. We can only grow this industry so much without getting women involved. They're half the population, and we're doing a crappy job of growing the market to them. In the end, gaming is caught in a Prisoner's Dilemma. Everyone's defecting ("just keep on using gruff men, it sells") because in the short-term it's always a better strategy than co-operating ("let's try and expand the market") even though it's limiting future growth.

 

[Jumwa]

I'm not sure if it was one of those "lame reasons," but female avatars can't be in Brink because of the way body-types correlate to gameplay. Light characters have low health, can only wield submachine guns, and can free-run. Medium characters have more health, can wield all weapons, and can do limited free-running. Heavy characters have the most health, can wield all weapons, and can't free-run If you've seen the three body types, then you know that they're exaggerated, and that it would visually make no sense for a female to be either medium or large. So, to include female characters would result in one of two things: 1) Anyone who wanted to play as a female would be relegated to the Light body-type and have their gameplay options reduced by 66%(which is a bad thing), or 2) The game is filled with hideous, Soviet-experiment-gone-wrong women.

Its really a shame. I'm a big proponent of personalization in games, but sometimes it just doesn't work out like that.

I would categorize that as a lame excuse personally, as just giving two seconds thought to the issue I came up with the notion of giving heavy type female characters big blocky armour that's, hypothetically, supposed to enhance their strength while making them similar in make to the male models.

I would think a professional team of game designers being paid for their work could come up with even better ideas. If they cared to. Which I dare say they don't.

 

[Jamie Doerschuck]

I wonder how big the percentage of female gamers actually is

The largest gamer group are women between the ages of 18 and 24.
2/3 of "online" gamers are female.
46% of "game purchasers" are female.

Really? That is not at all what I am experiencing in my social circle. Do you have the link to where you found these numbers?

http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_Essential_Facts_2010.PDF

There was also another study, but I can't seem to find it... This is pretty comprehensive though.

 

[Nurb]

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I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the double standard in targeted audience of entertainment products getting an appealing character to look at.


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[GloatingSwine]

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I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the double standard in targeted audience of entertainment products getting an appealing character to look at.


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The double standard is in the fact that us dudes whine about twilight whilst lapping up any hot chick gaming serves to us. (and don't say you don't. Alyx Vance runs off ahead for a reason you know...)


(though this doesn't only apply to men, Sephiroth didn't wear a shirt for reasons not dissimilar to those cited on behalf of Peter Petrelli. Women like fanservice too, deal with it.