Girls On The Escapist: Your views on female protagonists (or the lack thereof) in games.
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This again?
Well the ratio of female to male protagonist is nowhere near equal but there are actually a fair few of them, any game with multiple characters usually has at least one female and the number is increasing. Being female sure I would prefer there to be more but it?s not as that much as of an issue. There is a lack of non straight white male protagonists. It?s not only an issue for women.
Well the ratio of female to male protagonist is nowhere near equal but there are actually a fair few of them, any game with multiple characters usually has at least one female and the number is increasing. Being female sure I would prefer there to be more but it?s not as that much as of an issue. There is a lack of non straight white male protagonists. It?s not only an issue for women.
I think there are plenty of decent female charachters in games
playable ones that ARNT optional? those are very rare
thats why jade from beyonf=d good and evil is the best, good charachter...and she is neither male or optional (sorry alyx vance.....also they look VERY similar..has anyone pointed this out before?)
playable ones that ARNT optional? those are very rare
thats why jade from beyonf=d good and evil is the best, good charachter...and she is neither male or optional (sorry alyx vance.....also they look VERY similar..has anyone pointed this out before?)
I posed a similar question to a game developer in a recent "ask me stuff" column on Kotaku AU a couple of weeks ago. I'm not female, but I think my query and his response shed a lot of light on the underuse of protagonists that aren't some form of straight white male.
Do I think this comprehensively answers the question on why we don't see many female protagonists in games? Or gay protagonists? Or black/asian/latin protagonists? Not really. But it does provide some insight that I felt was worth sharing here.
I havent really noticed at all. I don't often spend so much time on the protagonist compared to the gameplay.
Now that i do notice it, doesn't really matter.
Not much diff really.
Seeing more more female protagonists in games sounds pretty interesting tho.
Now that i do notice it, doesn't really matter.
Not much diff really.
Seeing more more female protagonists in games sounds pretty interesting tho.
Pretty much this. If the writers just thought to themselves "what kind of character would make the most sense for our story?", then plenty of female characters would arise simply from that fact.Erana said:
We seem to be a long way off that yet though, unfortunately.
I'll add my agreement to the posts above. I don't really care one way or the other whether the protagonist of a game is male, female or a giant amorphic blob-thing, as long as they fit the scenario they're placed in and well written.
As an example, I've been playing the Final Fantasy series for donkeys years now, and it never even really occurred to me, let alone got my back up, that most of the leads were men. I was so engrossed in their characters, stories, environments and puzzles, that it just didn't matter.
I'd rather have an excellently written and conceived male lead, than a token, flat, boobs-on-a-stick female, put in just as either eye candy or a sop to female gamers. I want good characters. That's all.
Mass Effect does it well. For me, FemShep is just as believeable as her male counterpart. She's tough and gets things done. Part of that's down to her VA, but the fact is, she feels right, not forced in there.
As an example, I've been playing the Final Fantasy series for donkeys years now, and it never even really occurred to me, let alone got my back up, that most of the leads were men. I was so engrossed in their characters, stories, environments and puzzles, that it just didn't matter.
I'd rather have an excellently written and conceived male lead, than a token, flat, boobs-on-a-stick female, put in just as either eye candy or a sop to female gamers. I want good characters. That's all.
Mass Effect does it well. For me, FemShep is just as believeable as her male counterpart. She's tough and gets things done. Part of that's down to her VA, but the fact is, she feels right, not forced in there.
"Female" and "women" being equal doesn't have to be the case. Take Okami for example, you play as the patron goddess of the Yamato clan, the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu...but she's embodied in a wolf.
Too many people think of sex appeal and whatnot as though it's tied to something being female, that is not the case, you can definitely have a female protagonist which takes the spot of a character who has no outward womanly traits while at the same time being concurrent with the concept of female nature.
Too many people think of sex appeal and whatnot as though it's tied to something being female, that is not the case, you can definitely have a female protagonist which takes the spot of a character who has no outward womanly traits while at the same time being concurrent with the concept of female nature.
GTA Chinatown wars had one I think. Also Shenmue. (though you could say it had kung fu of sorts...)Suijen said:
Call me sexist, but it's more difficult for me to immerse myself in a game if the character is female. I can still enjoy the game, and I can still like the character, but the gender barrier is a difficult one to jump.
That said, Beyond Good and Evil is one of my favorite games of ever.
That said, Beyond Good and Evil is one of my favorite games of ever.
Ryu Hazuki was Japanese, you racist! Apologise immediately! *rolleyes gif to indicate irony so nobody gets offended by this post*Dreiko said:
I'm no huge proponent of the "straight white male" protagonist template, but there are times when I wonder whether a character that breaks the mould would work. Like it or not, straight white male is the "standard" in most Western settings - and that's a setting that an awful lot of games fall under (any game set in the US or Europe, most military games, football, etc).
Any digression from this standard character template needs to be driven by a valid reason. Let's say the game is a near-future FPS set in Canada - and the protagonist is a Filipino with impaired hearing. The majority of people will immediately ask "Why?" - why is he this specific race, why does he have this particular physical trait? A tiny minority of people will hear this scenario and say "hey, why not".
The big question - "why" - is one that needs to be asked. It's not there to enforce some kind of white-supremacist male agenda in gaming, but as a filter to ensure that protagonist choices aren't tokenistic or arbitrary. Yes, videogame protagonists are drawn from a very lean stable of straightwhitemale Everyman characters with a supporting cast of hackneyed stereotypes. Yes, it's a frustrating and depressing reflection of developer's unwillingness to explore more challenging and complex storylines. But it's also a reflection of What Bloody Well Sells. People want to vicariously experience action and adventure, and they want to be able to self-insert into the narrative with the minimum of fuss. And that's why you see these bland, iconic Everyman McBlankslate protagonists cropping up in games, films and comics time and again.
Maybe one day we'll see a game with an Inuit superhero lead, and his race WON'T be his one defining feature, his superpowers WON'T all be ice and blizzard-based and his secret underground lair WON'T be a high-tech igloo. But I doubt it. Until we live in a completely homogenised society where there is nothing remarkable about race, gender or sexual orienation, then the characters we identify with will be mostly StraightWhiteMales.
*shrug*
There's less of them. The common wisdom among some publishers is that they cause the game to sell less copies. There's been a few good female protagonists here and there, but most are just garbage and utterly boring. I'd like to see more female characters and protagonists, but I want to see interesting characters and better character designs.