Editorial: Omitting Women From Games Because "It's Too Hard" is Unacceptable

[Tono Makt]

Most protagonists are men for games like Assassin's Creed, so it isn't surprising that men make up the vast majority of the audience.

FTFY.

Besides, I'm not even sure that it is that predetermined even with a gender-based audience.

Men are watching most anime, and there is still a majority of characters are female, and not just the objectified ones.

"Each person can only identify with their own gender" is a baseless stereotype at best, and an arbitrary cultural artifact at worst, but it's certainly far from an inherent fact of life.

As they say on Fark, CSB time:

Mrs. Makt and I have a video game console because Mrs. Makt saw that she could play a female Shepard in Mass Effect 1 and decided to buy an X-Box 360. Until that point, I didn't care enough about console games to go out and buy one; most console games bore me. FPS/Action games like Battlefield, Call of Duty and Halo, fighting games like Mortal Combat, any Sports games and Racing games hold no interest for me and that's still a strong portion, if not an outright majority, of console games. She bought it and Mass Effect, played the hell out of it and during her second or third play through I finally decided to give it a shot. I enjoyed it, and have bought a number of games since then, most of which have one thing in common - playable female characters. The only series I have that doesn't have a playable female protagonist is the Bioshock series, and the only reason I have Bioshock is because I got Bioshock 1 and 2 with most of the extras for $20 and the first Lost Planet game, which I think I got as a gift from someone because in writing this post I went to take a peek at my games drawer and found it in there still in the plastic.

So quite literally, we would not have bought an X-Box 360 if it wasn't for playable female characters. We wouldn't be continuing to buy DLC or more games it if wasn't for playable female characters. We're a bit on the extreme end with it, as neither of us play console games where you can't play a female playable character, but we're actual real life people who are on that extreme, not hypothetical people.

 

[Wereduck]

-snip-

As I said, men make up the vast majority of the audience for games like Assassin's Creed, so it isn't surprising that most protagonists are men. The return on investment for creating additional female playable characters would be much lower. Admittedly, it's a shame that art has to be constrained by profit motives, but that's just the way things are.

Touché, that must be why KoTOR, Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls, Saints Row & those other stupid franchises with selectable-gender PCs all barely manage to squeak out a profit. By comparison AssCreed & GTA are money-printing machines because eliminating the option for a female PC lets them be produced on a shoestring budget. Yeah, sounds legit.

 

[Redd the Sock]

While at face value the statement is stupid, "it'll cost too much" is usually short hand for "it won't bring in what it'll take to produce" which is the larger issue.

I keep going back to Remember Me. The whole process: endless complaints about lack of female leads, game comes out with female lead and makes big point about that and how they have to fight to get it out, game doesn't' sell, people wanting female leads make excuses. No I don't want to hear them again, I just want to point out that this sends a message that can be read: that all the gender politics online is just the internet being the internet, and listening to the complaints won't generate new sales, and not listening won't cost us sales. No, they won't do it because it's the right thing to do. they'll do it when it'll either cost them money to not, or make them money to do so.

Look, I get it. Interchangeable male for female characters was done on NES games, and even an Atari 2600 one (ghost manor) so I get the excuse is lame. But as a fiance guy, I can' fault a company for focusing on the features they think will make or break their sales, and in 2 years of gender topics, I've yet to see much in the way of making a game with a female lead a surprise hit (Tomb Raider is an established franchise), nor a noted boycott of a game that produced a surprise failure. We did what Ubisoft expects we'll do again, ignore the game that does what we say we want (remember me) while buy the game we're mad didn't (GTA V)because reasons.

I mean, hell, if 60$ was too much for you t spend on a game that was less than perfect, why else should you expect a company to be any less tight with their own purse?

Most likely it was less of a case of people note spending full retail on a game that was less than perfect and more people not spending full retail on a game that they didn't know existed. The advertising on Remember Me was appealing, I'm not even sure if it existed. Publishers don't think games with female leads won't sell...so they don't give them funding...so they don't sell. In the end, publishers fuck up absolutely everything in gaming and I look forward to the day we can be rid of them.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/games-with-female-heroes-dont-sell-because-publishers-dont-support-them

Also Transistor.

A few points:

1) I'll admit the games best marketing was the controversy around it, but given what I said about sales, that makes it less acceptable that word of mouth didn't get spread. Everyone treated it as a great shaming moment for the industry, instead of buying it and getting others to buy it as well.

2) It also doesn't disprove my point that the gender of the characters is less important than something: in this case the marketing. I buy a lot of games that get no marketing, reviews, or any major press (Mugen Souls Z, Blazblue, Demon Gaze, The Witch and the Hundred Knight, just to name a few over the last few months) that I know about by simply looking at an upcoming release list online. No real hard effort, just a desire to be knowledgeable. Sometimes I even do the unthinkable and buy a game I didn't know about because it looked interesting at the store. Companies actually bank on the notion that most gamers just follow the hype instead of looking to smaller publishers or indys to get what the AAA isn't providing, and saying "it wasn't marketed properly" is just an admission that we'll all just buy what they they'll us to

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

I can appreciate what you're going for, but the thing is that correlation does not equal causation. Remember Me didn't sell poorly because it had a female lead. It sold poorly because it wasn't very good. Games are expensive and while I would love to see more female leads, I'm not gonna throw money at every game with a female lead to send a message, I've got college to pay for. When we have games that spread around via world of mouth, it's because they're well liked and fun to play, like FTL and Dark Souls.

Maybe I'm projecting a bit, but I have not heard of any of those games (They any good?). Mainly because, sure it's no problem for you to look up everything that's coming out, but not everyone is as dedicated as you are and not everyone is willing to take leaps of faith, especially if money is tight.

 

[Wereduck]

People are still bitching about this? This seriously seems like people misunderstood something, latched onto it, and then when explained what the real deal was, they stubbornly refused to let go because they're more concerned with their issue then whether there's an actual problem in this instance.

The game has one protagonist. Multi-player has everyone being the same character. There is only one character to play as. One! It's a set protagonist. Are games not allowed to have a male set protagonist? They are? Then stop trying to run the game's reputation into the ground as an excuse to parrot an issue you care about. It makes your issue and the people who care about it look like a whiny cancer that will spread to anything it can find ANY excuse to latch onto.

If there were four, unrelated main characters like people thought there were at the beginning, the lack of diversity would definitely be odd and I could see why people would take issue. This though? This is people whining because one big budget game on a tight release schedule isn't exactly the game they want it to be.

In all honesty I can't fault your reasoning about ACU here, I'd say you're dead on. Strange then that it isn't the justification they offered for the absence of playable women. For me, that's the real affront here; they're so comfortable with this BS about "including x = political statement / prohibitive expense" that they used it as an excuse when there was a perfectly legitimate real reason. They should at least think when addressing criticism instead of just regurgitating the first unfalsifiable excuse that comes to mind.
At least that's what bothers me about this.

 

[Redd the Sock]

Snip

I can appreciate what you're going for, but the thing is that correlation does not equal causation. Remember Me didn't sell poorly because it had a female lead. It sold poorly because it wasn't very good. Games are expensive and while I would love to see more female leads, I'm not gonna throw money at every game with a female lead to send a message, I've got college to pay for. When we have games that spread around via world of mouth, it's because they're well liked and fun to play, like FTL and Dark Souls.

Maybe I'm projecting a bit, but I have not heard of any of those games (They any good?). Mainly because, sure it's no problem for you to look up everything that's coming out, but not everyone is as dedicated as you are and not everyone is willing to take leaps of faith, especially if money is tight.

Remember Me aggregated 7 to 7.5 out of 10 on metacritic. That's only poor to a crowd that thinks anything less than 8/10 is god awful, but that's another issue (though if that applies to you, then no, the games I mentioned probably aren't going to be for you).

As for the rest, there is quite a bit about that attitude that pisses me off, but I'll stick to one point:
If you're going to complain about there being a lack of something in a medium, you should be at least decently aware of the content of said medium, both to maintain an accurate measure of how deep the problem actually is, but to be as supportive of it as you reasonably can, especially for something that got the political treatment. It follows what I said above: if you can't part with $60 and some time for something in the name of your cause, why should a company part with at the very least a few hundred thousand dollars in development costs for your cause? I mean, if you didn't buy it because it was truly niche (I've got some gamestop never heard of) or buying it would require you to give up food for a while, that's fine. But if you just couldn't be bothered to look at the rest of the new release shelf or demand perfect scores from all your games, then you forfeit the right to complain when a company takes away the message that your cause really isn't all that important to you.

And as I said, right now, I can't blame a company for thinking that the cause really is just the stuff of internet angry, not real demand, and it's going to take more than a wagging finger to change that. They won't change until they fear some upstart indy publisher taking their place in the AAA lineup.

 

[DOOM GUY]

Ahhh, more BS over stuff like this in games. There's like, one set character in this game, and the coop characters are just reskins (sure, they're cutting corners, but still, probably gonna be a fun mode, just like coop in DR2, which you just play as another Chuck), I mean, they could of added a female coop character, but they didn't, oh well. They should of just refused to talk about it, or just said something along the lines of "this what we had in mind for the game, so it's what we're going to include"

 

[Something Amyss]

I just find it amusing that as a product people are whining about it and as a work of art they're doing the same.

You'll have to elaborate on that.

It's even more amusing to think of modern consumers as on the level of patrons to artists.

I suppose, though it hardly reverses the point.

I guess what ti comes down to me is people trying to tell product makers what to do instead of buying the products they want, not buying those they don't like and not looking for things to be outraged at.

Critical response, response from the masses, has long been a viable deal. It's not as though it's a novel idea.

Further, your concept only truly works if there's already diversity in a marketplace. Otherwise, there would be no problem with internet service in the US, for example.

 

[ThePurpleStuff]

I'm not against games having just male characters, or female characters optional. If they didn't word it the way they did there would be no arguments going on at all. This is why you should be extra careful with what you say... Since it will be blown out of proportion. The fact this issue is still being discussed shows there hasn't been any positive changes made. The triple A gaming industry hates to change. Their dislike of change is going to kill themselves off. I left gaming behind because of this amount of hatred, bile and ignorance toward me, the customer. The sole person helping to keep the industry alive. Without me, without us supporting them, we would not even be here. The escapist would not exist. It's just sad and depressing, over something that was apart of my childhood. But then by the end of the day I remember I don't need games, when the world out there also has things to offer. So I feel better.

This issue has no effect on me... but I can see why it would for some people. People will find their niche to make their opinions and morals heard, even for something I now consider so insignificant as video games. I'm neither agreeing or disagreeing with anyone. Say what you want, I am not the one either who is saying to just stop complaining. If you have faith in this industry that I no longer possess then keep making your voices heard. Its no different than any other medium and its share of concerned consumers.

 

[Rebel_Raven]

Still, omitting women from FC4 (For lack of finding a female voice actor)

What, what? Women aren't going to be in Far Cry 4 because they couldn't find a female VA?

If thats true, its a worse excuse than this. Its Ubisoft Montreal. They're in fucing Canada, in Montreal, which is highly populated and quite a few other game developers. Eidos Montreal didn't seem to have problems finding VAs who were women when making Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Didn't have a problem for previous AC games either. Its not uncommon to fly a VA over to do their lines, or have a studio rented out further away - some even do it at home. Thats like saying "I shit my pants because I don't know how to flush the toilet".

http://www.vg247.com/2014/06/12/far-cry-4-director-we-did-our-best-to-put-playable-women-in-really-depressing-to-have-failed/

Among a dozen other google results for "Farcry 4 female" which, possibly ironically, is pretty much the same thing that happened in farcry 2.

Deus Ex? Pfft. Invisible War had gender select using a gender neutral name in "Alex," IIRC.

Honestly, Ubisoft hasn't had the greatest track record with playable women, now that I think about it. I was just hoping that with Liberation, and Child of Light, they might've started changing. I gues I was wrong, but it was nice while it lasted, I guess.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

while i agree the excuse might be bullshit

including every race, gender and ice cream flavor in a game just to avoid affending anybody is also bad in my opinion

 

[Sanunes]

These big publishers really need to get the staff they have talking to people media training so they don't make comments like this, for I am really not sure what they intended to say, but the statement seems to be a "remove left foot from mouth and insert right foot" style of comment. What I don't understand about this Ubisoft statement is they have had a female protagonist in AC4 with the Freedom Cry DLC and on the Vita/PC with Assassin's Creed: Liberty, so at some point they felt it was worth the money and worth more money to make more content based on Adewale.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

My God this article is beyond dumb.

1: 'I'm not a game designer, so even though Ubi's excuses reek of bullshit, I can't say with 100% certainly that animating women is too hard. I can say that it's time to get over it and make it work, whatever it takes'

In other words "I know literally nothing about game design or what animating characters actually requires, but I don't care, I'm mad and I'm going to throw a temper tantrum until you do what I want. Oh and I don't care since it's not my money or job on the line".

2: 'So what? That's your problem, publishers; it's time to do your jobs. Include women characters in your budget. Allocate resources to bring these characters to life. Just make it happen.'

Translation: "It's not my money or job on the line, so you better spend additional money, resources, and push back your schedule to accommodate what I want, and I don't care what your so-called "marketing" people have to say about it not being worth the additional time and resources. What do they know? They only do this for a living, I write articles on the internet!"

Here's the end all, be all solution for "lack of __________ characters" in games.
If you like what a game has to offer, buy it.
If you don't like what a game has to offer, don't buy it.

It's not rocket science, if there's a profitable market for a game, companies will find a way to cash in on it.

 

[Zontar]

EDIT: And question. If you dislike her journalism so and you clearly know enough about it to know what's wrong, why don't you start writing your own articles? I'm just using your own logic here.

I know I'm not part of this argument, and that I really don't care enough on the matter at hand to feel I should voice my opinion on it, but this edit you made I take offense to.

Not for your tone with ccdohl, but for calling this journalism.

As a student of journalism, it infuriates me that websites like this and others such as IGN are given the title. I'm not saying this as a means of degrading the work the people who do so are accomplishing, but it isn't journalism, and games journalism does not exist. It's punditry, and though that doesn't degrade the value of the work, it is something that annoys (and, given the right context, can infuriate if the mistake is made after a controversy which journalist never would have gotten into) us, mainly because it does in some ways degrade the value of our own work by having people continually mix up the two very different forms of mass media (though both existing in all the same medium doesn't help, but such is life).

It's a complicated issue, but if I was to edit her article to be one that a journalist (well, one who isn't yellow anyway) would have published, everything would need to be changed, even the title. Ironic as it may sound, it's unacceptable to use "unacceptable" in a title unless it is a quotation.

 

[Erttheking]

snip

Ok...so basically you're taking offense to me describing her with the word "Journalist"? Offense? Well...that's kind of what she is. You can go on until the cows go home about how she isn't a good one, but she's a journalist.

Also, isn't an editorial supposed to be an opinion piece?

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

I really don't get why every single time these arguments crop up, there's a dedicated group of people dedicated to telling the complainer to shut up. Not arguing against them, not disagreeing with them, just telling them to shut up.

1. In the article, the author quotes several game devs calling Ubisoft out on their bullshit. Such as a dev from Naughty Dog, the creators of last of us, who said they could animate a female character in 2 days. That kind of debases your argument

Oh, so are you only allowed to criticize people if you're in the industry you're criticizing? And you can't really say the author is throwing a temper tantrum without analyzing any of her arguments or saying why they didn't work.

2. How is a customer asking for a company to give her what she wants unreasonable? I thought that was their job And I thought it was agreed that marketing departments were run by morons, or have we forgotten the tidal wave of "Appeal to a wider audience" (Translation, appeal to COD fans) games that came out not to long ago, along with the death of horror games. Also, I find it kind of ironic that you're mocking her for not knowing anything, when I hardly suspect that you're in the know of the inner workings of the gaming industry, so how would you know if she's right or wrong?

The gaming world isn't in black and white. A game is not completely good with everything you want or bad with everything you hate. You can buy a game with plenty of things you like in it but one thing that drove you up the wall. Like Metro Last Light. I love that game, I love it to death. It is sadly sexist as all hell though, with the way it treats it's female characters being abysmal in a way I will never stop complaining about, but I still love the game and am considering buying the remastered version when it comes out.

Then why did publishers decide out of nowhere that horror wasn't viable when it was? Let me answer my own question. Because publishers are stupid. It'll be hard for a company to figure out what gamers want if gamers aren't allowed to complain about it.

 

[CrazyCapnMorgan]

Bayonetta and Tomb Raider prove it is nearly impossible to make games with women in them.

Was gonna say, might wanna tell Square that. I mean, Terra and Celes from Final Fantasy 6 would almost certainly prove that, too. Same goes for Yuna and crew from FFX-2.

As would Alex Vance.

And Samus Aran.

And Ripley from Aliens.

And don't even get me started on Touhou. If a certain poster was still here, they'd have PLASTERED every single female's name from the Touhou series.

OH, and Popful Mail.

....and I remember Legend of Mana having a few female protagonists, as well.

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

Sorry about the wait.

There's still the fact that people didn't even know what the game was. I mean, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure All Star Battle got a 7 on Metacritic, just below Remember Me, but I doubt many people bought it because they had no idea what it was or what it was about. Games are coming out a mile a minute nowadays and a developer needs to work to make theirs stand out, or else it's going to get swallowed up. As a matter of fact, I just realized that while I did know remember me was a thing, I didn't even know what kind of game it was until I heard the combat system described in the Zero Punctation on it, so that's a pretty good indicator of how badly it was advertised. Sure it might get good reviews, but in a day in age where EVERYTHING gets good reviews they kinda lose meaning. It doesn't help that while a 7 is supposed to be a good score, the current rating system doesn't treat it as such. (Worst game ever, 6/10) See the whole Kane and Lynch debacle for that.

Because companies can afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and I can't afford to spend sixty. Well I can afford to spend sixty. Here's the thing though, I can't afford to spend sixty dollars on every single game that comes out on the thin hope that it is good, because I need to have three thousand dollars in my bank account at the start of every semester and my job doesn't pay that well (And I'm trying to save up for a new computer so I can play PC games besides the ones designed for macs). I can still afford to buy video games, but I have to be picky. And you know why I didn't buy remember me? It looked boring. Extremely, god awful boring. It didn't help that for all the ok scores, just about everyone I heard give their personal opinion on it told me that it was kinda meh and forgettable (How ironic). It's the same reason I haven't picked up any of the Final Fantasy XIII games, because I've heard awful things about them (That and I refuse to play any game where I play dress up with the "strong" female main character in the middle of battle) and they look boring. I'm not going to just throw money at anything with a female lead, because I'd be a hypocrite if I did, I can't criticize companies for saying that heterosexual straight white men sell copies if I go out and buy anything with a female lead. It's like being an anti-conformist, you're still conforming, just to a less mainstream norm. A game needs to stand up on its own and look interesting enough for me to want to play it. Like Long Live the Queen. A game about a princess becoming the Queen of her nation and avoiding assassination, an indie game I just bought on the GOG.com summer sale because it looked interesting. I take leaps of faith every once in awhile. I just don't do it with every last game that I see because I don't have those kinds of funds. Expeditions Conquistadors for example. An under the radar indie game where you control an expedition to the new world, and can even have female soldiers. I rather enjoyed that and I like the game a lot. The survive ten turns missions are fucking impossible though, but that's neither here nor there. I also got Giana Sisters Twisted Dreams, but I'm kind of a dead end there because the mac port is taking absolutely forever. Also Lttle Dew. (Between you and me, my backlog is out of control and I really shouldn't be adding to it.)

Also cause is a strong word. I think I'm allowed to be concerned about problems without them being the center of my life.

I'd like to see that. Until then, that, whining at publishers is all I really got. It's not a completely lost cause. We've gotten Walking Dead, Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite. Leading Ladies that I loved and were well received. Granted a few people criticized them, but the day we get a thing that no one criticizes is the day the human race reaches enlightenment.