Are mainstream devs deliberately discouraging women from gaming?

[Quillbell]

I know that I'm in the minority here and I'm probably going to get shouted down pretty badly but please think about what it's like to grow up loving a past-time that no one seems to want you to be involved in.

I know exactly what you mean and frankly I'm sick of it. Female protagonists aren't even an afterthought, they just aren't there. The three examples of realistic female protagonists people always bring up are Samus (who hasn't been relevant since Other M), Laura Croft (who is best known as a sex symbol), and Jade. And other than select-your-gender RPG protagonists who else is there? Heather from Silent hill 3? April from the Longest Journey? Even if males represent the majority of the gamer demographic, this is ridiculous. I tried doing a google search on "upcoming female video game protagonists" and I got nothing.

But it's not just the lack of representation main-character wise, it's the assumption that video games are played by men and men only. You can see it in the scantily-clad female support characters, in the Witcher's sexy postcards, and in the fact that female characters are more often used as rewards than anything else. Even in little stuff like Amalur's recycled dialogue there's the assumption that even if someone is bothering to play with a female avatar it must just be a guy who prefers staring at a woman's ass, and if that's the case then why bother doing the extra work? It's depressing and alienating. The only developers who bother thinking about the female audience is Bioware, though you wouldn't know it by the asinine way they market their games.

Also, the argument that male characters are just as sexualized as female characters is bullshit. I'd explain why, but this comic does it better than I could.

Spoiler: False Equivalence

 

[F4LL3N]

Lately I have noticed that female gamers are being discouraged for all sorts of reasons.

Assassins Creed 3 said that a female protagonist wouldn't fit into the period of the game (yet a Native American would be acceptable and wouldn't rouse suspicion wherever he went?).

The Witcher of course has Geralt whose misogyny is accepted because of the books. Meanwhile if developers made a Conan game would he be portrayed as a racist?

Kingdoms of Amalur treats the female character like she is a man (constant flirts from female characters) to the extent where she is forced to marry a women if she wants to complete a quest line, there is no option to just say 'No' and complete the quest that way.

Risen 2 has dismissed a playable female out of hand even though their protagonist is 'The nameless hero' and plenty of women were involved in piracy.

I don't mean to go into tin foil hat territory here but as someone who has been gaming for a very long time it almost feels like we are going backwards with gender acceptance in games (outside of Bioware.) and the mainstay excuse of devs seems to be that mistreatment of women is part of their universe or time period and so must be accepted out of hand. These are often in games where there are giant bug monsters or other fantastic occurrences.

Sometimes I wonder whether we will ever be accepted as part of gaming or the very excuse of 'men are our main demographic' is going to discourage women from playing games and therefore not allow the demographic to balance out.

I know that I'm in the minority here and I'm probably going to get shouted down pretty badly but please think about what it's like to grow up loving a past-time that no one seems to want you to be involved in.

Blame Western developers and the Western audience. JRPG's get poo flung at them for doing the exact opposite of what your saying.