Yes, females are allowed to be protagonists and have realtionships in games. Speaking of females in relationships, one of the reasons it seems to be looked down upon isn't just because of homophobic males. I do believe part of the problem is with these dumbass e-feminists who seem to be just as opposed to females in relationships, specifically with men. According to these pathetically sad and insecure females, women aren't allowed to show interest in men because it apparently makes them weak and submissive to men. God forbid a woman falls in love with a man, and she wants to persue a relationship with him. Apparently to these internet feminists, women need to be lonely, or only fall in love with other women.
Another problem with female protagonists is how when some people create them, they have to be in god mode. They can go around beating up and killing men, because apparently that makes a strong woman. Oh, but don't you think about having a man who's capable of kicker her ass. Woman have to always win, or else the internet feminists will call you a misogynist.
The reason why people dread these kind of threads is because people don't discuss this in a civil manner. We have internet feminists and white knights antagonizing men, treating them like they are the spawn of satan and that all of us men are somehow footsoldiers of the patriarchy. No, the vast, VAST majority of men aren't actually trying to oppress women. We men don't all get together in secret meetings trying to come up with plans to hold women down. We're too busy trying to live our own lives and making it through our day. Men aren't the bad guys here, contrary to popular belief.
Yes, there is a proplem with discrimination in general in our world. One of the biggest reasons why is because many people who preach about equality are incapable of practicing what they preach. They want equality, yet expect everyone else except themselves to change.
Nice job with the victim blaming there. Again, can I rub Gears of War 3 in your face, and ask where the feminist complaints were about how you can shoot the female characters, bayonet charge them, chainsaw them, do everything to them that you can to the male characters. I played gears with female characters and I did all the above to male and female mp characters, and had them done to me by male and female mp characters. In fact, I'd like to see some actual complaints you have seen by feminists as opposed to you shoving words in their mouths and then damning them for saying what you only claim they said.
I have seen far more frivolous feminist bashing and straw feminising than I have seen feminists making frivolous and misplaced complaints blowing things out of proportion.
Wow, I find it really weird that game developers are scared of giving female lead characters agency in romantic plotlines, or having a female player character kiss a male character, just because it's probably a male player playing the game.
I'm 100% heterosexual, and when I was playing Mass Effect as Femshep I was all like... come on, Kaidan, give me some of that sweet lovin'. And come to think of it, that's the only game I can even think of that allowed me, as a female character, to actively pursue a romantic relation relationship with a male character. Anyone know of any other games that offer that possibility?
I almost always choose to play as female characters when it's an option. I mean, isn't the whole point of playing a character to experience things from a different perspective?
Considering I came here to say just about this exact same thing, I'll just quote you on it and echo the sentiment. I think what Mass Effect did was actually hugely beneficial, since it sort of killed two birds with one stone. First it allowed complete player choice in the matter of gender, and also how much you wanted to invest in it. It also, ultimately, showed that no matter if it was Manshep or Femshep, the story is pretty much the same, with only the romantic subplots differing.
I think more choice is ideal, and more games with the option to play either gender would address many of the issues presented here.
I read a little bit of the discussion on this matter. Like anything online, there seems to be two dominating camps.
Camp One: I am a man and I want to play games as a man. Nothing wrong with this point at all. To be honest, many people can agree with that. It makes total sense, you like to play as what you are used to. I admit, when playing Skyrim and the like, most of the characters I will make are men. First off I always do a run through of any RPG playing as myself, I make a character that looks like me (Which is hard with most character creators, Skyrims was particularly weak in this. I am one of the gamer archetypes, stupidly thin. Its almost impossible to make a weedy looking character in an RPG, which is annoying if you want to be a mage that doesnt look like it could headbutt its way through a brick wall. But I digress).
Camp Two: I am a man and I like to play games, regardless of what the protagonist looks like as long as it is a good game. I would like to see more gender diversity and the gender of the protagonist doesn't bother me. I agree with this point of view wholeheartedly.
You see, Camp One is making a colossal error. The sex of a character doesn't really matter, as long as it works within the story. You are more comfortable playing as a man? Well, thats good for you. But there are a lot of people out there who want the choice to play as something other then a man. And if a female character is done well, its still fun to play as one. Been through both Dragon Ages as a woman, been through Skyrim as a woman, you get the idea.
Games are about having fun, first and foremost. After that, games are about telling stories (Which IMO should always come second to the whole having fun aspect.). Both of those things can be had, regardless of the sex of the protagonist.
You might not want to ever play as a woman in gaming and that is fine. Nothing wrong with that, honestly. All people like me want is more games and more choice! Everyone can get behind that. I am not saying that the Witcher is bad cause you cannot be a woman, or that the game would be better if it was a woman. I am saying that more games with female protagonists is a good thing though.
As for the whole "But nobody minds that there are books for girls and books for boys" argument? The problem with using that argument is it tries to indicate that gaming is for boys. And its not. Gaming is for everyone. And even with that argument taken as true, the problem there would be there are not enough "Games for girls". And as for the whole books argument?
The "Confessions of Georgia Nicolson" series is one of the funniest I have ever read and I can admit that as a dude. The best forms of entertainment are UNIVERSALLY HELD TO BE ENTERTAINING and can be entertaining for EVERYONE.
I would much rather play an FPS that was designed to be fun for EVERYONE in the FPS loving demographic then one designed just for the Dudebros.
Just like I read male focused books and have nothing against women reading books with female protagonists I have a preference to playing male characters.
I would not complain that there isn't a stronger male character in any female orientated book, I would simply not buy it. Thankfully we still have a choice to buy or not to buy games and can let our money speak for itself and leave everyone else to complain about it.
And when the publishing industry decides it won't put out books with female main characters, you'll actually have a point to make. Until then, please don't change the subject.
But the publishing industry is safe in the knowledge that it's products are relatively cheap to produce, and there is a more even balance between the genders when it comes to who is consuming their media. I believe Partezan is bringing an interesting point to this conversation by making that comment about books. Games are incredibly expensive to produce now, at least the AAA titles are. While the 46% statistic has been thrown around, that doesn't take into account that half of that 46% are just playing social games and iOS games. Only 25% of console players are women, and console players are the ones buying up all of the mainstream AAA titles. I know female PC gamer is a little more generous at 39%, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of that percentage are still playing smaller titles, instead of expensive to make blockbuster games. This leads to publishers aiming at the larger demographic of male console/pc gamers so they can at least gain back the initial amount of money that they put forward to invest in developing the game. Shaming male gamers for playing how they want to play or playing the games they want to play will get the movement towards more female protagonists nowhere. In some cases like myself it will just make male gamers defensive and less likely to do what it takes to help your cause in the future (ex. purposefully purchasing a good game with a female lead, hoping to get publishers interested). What really needs to happen, is women need to make up a larger portion of the player base, so the publishers will feel safe releasing more diverse titles.
1. There's more women than you seem to think that play typically "dudebro" titles. We just don't use voicechat because of the shit we get heaped on us when other players here our voice.
2.Having the existence of a female character does not make a game magically free of being sexist. People had valid claims against Bayonetta because she fell into the trope of the oversexed vixen. Not to mention her creator is pretty well known as being a bit of a creep. But there is just as much an argument to be made that her over-the-top behavior made her right at home next to a character like classic!Dante. Neither side of the Bayonetta debate were wrong; it all came down to where the individual drew the line.
As for Skullgirls, people did argue about it being sexist. The game features an all female starting roster, yes. But Much like the DoA franchise, we're told they're strong females because they can fight. Well, it's a fighting game, of course they can fight. So that's a flimsy bit of argument to make. And most of the criticism for the game came from the constant panty shots. In a fighting game (a genre not heralded for its deep plot) visuals are the best ways a player van get a sense of the fighters' personality. In a game like Street Fighter, or Tekken, or Virtua Fighter, or Mortal Kombat you see the male fighters in an assortment of attires. Johhny Cage goes shirtless because he's vain like that. Lee Chaolan dresses like he's ready for a GQ shoot, because he's a bit of a fashion whore. Ryu doesn't care, and just rocks his gi. Yoshimitsu wears armor. And yet women are left in skirts and heels, skin tight bodysuits, short skirts, low zipped jackets (sans a shirt). All made to appeal to a straight dudes libido. Variety for a female character is little more than how risque they can be clothed. So it's easy to side-eye a claim that a game is pro-female when it still enforces the mentality that women can only be scantily clad when fighting.
Oooooor it could just be the fact that the demand for games with such protagonists isn't as high as everyone would like to believe (confirmation bias) and the market just can't support those kinds of characters right now?
Why is that not an option?
Even Devil May Cry outsold Bayonetta by over 30%, and DMC was an exclusive while Bayonetta was multi platform.
That would be using Occam's Razor, which paints a picture that we don't like. It's much easier to believe that we are a more advanced culture, yet we see arguments keep popping up about how we're "programmed", as if we're still just slaves to our base natures. We see folks decrying explanations of why people act the way they do, because the result doesn't align with their paradigm.
I mean how hypocritical are the two following statements when put together:
Treblaine said:
...snip...Just because people have a tendency to act irrationally doesn't mean such irrationality should be indulged...snip...
...snip...I don't give a damn if gaming is 100% +/-0.0000% males that's no reason to exclude depiction of women from video games, even from lead roles...snip...
Video games are entertainment. Businesses are interested in making money, so if they make more money with male leads, it is irrational to expect them to include female leads if the folks buying the games don't find them entertaining.
Publishers aren't interested in being the "starving artist" so they can remain true to some ideological vision. They make what they believe will make money. Trying to force publishers to make things because of ideologies is no different than the oppression that faiths are accused of when it comes to sexuality and/or sensuality. Censorship is censorship, and we either will accept it for any reason, or reject it for all reasons.
This same reason the faiths have lost their voice and influence on culture is the same reason that these folks are losing their voice and finding it harder to be taken seriously - they're focusing on the wrong problem but are being extremely vocal and polarizing about it regardless. Ideologies aren't sufficient by themselves to justify action where few issues are as simple as a single *ism.
Publishers are at best a lagging indicator of the market as a whole. They don't care about what might do well tomorrow, they want to do what worked well yesterday to minimize risks today. We accuse them of this regularly when they recycle the same crap and throw a new number on it, or homogenize the experience to market to a wider audience. Why then is it reasonable to expect people who are stuck looking at yesterday to make tomorrow better?
The permanent solution is to change what people want, because we aren't the ones enslaved to profits. We're the ones in control of what we spend our money on. It's easy to blame someone else for a problem, and much harder to own the fact that we're the issue. Businesses just want to make money and don't care about ideologies. Add to that with how much information we have on people's spending habits, we should be less and less skeptical of the statistics they trot out explaining how our mouths and our wallets aren't sending the same message.
There was a time when horse whips were a much bigger industry, but it wasn't the horse whip makers that ushered in the new era of automobiles. If anything, industry has shown that given the choice, it would rather not innovate and just keep making the same product and sell it for the same price forever, or even better to sell it for more each time around. Business just want to make money, and a lot of folks are intentionally failing Hanlon's Razor because they're embarrassed that their fellow humans can be so easily exploited.
i feel this is the reason why we haven't seen a new beyond good and evil title in years. the industry has to stop this bullshit way of thinking about its audience and understand that most of us are fully functional adults that understand gender equality and politics in games. i for one do not care who im playing as. female or male, as long as the story and game play are interesting and don't overly throw gender stereotypes in my face. there are plenty of male protagonist out there for young men to get there manly rocks off, i should know, i own most of them.
Oooooor it could just be the fact that the demand for games with such protagonists isn't as high as everyone would like to believe (confirmation bias) and the market just can't support those kinds of characters right now?
Why is that not an option?
Even Devil May Cry outsold Bayonetta by over 30%, and DMC was an exclusive while Bayonetta was multi platform.
Considering how well Portal 2 and Tomb Raider sold, it isn't as if consumers are adverse to games with female characters in and of themselves. Putting aside the fact that Bayonetta was a new IP without a pre-established fanbase (unlike the DMC franchise), poor female character game sales is partly down to the chicken and the egg problem Jim already described in the video:
Less Dev Support -> Less Marketing -> Less Public Interest -> Less Sales -> Less Dev Support...ad infinitum.
It's also to do with the fact that a lot of the big titles with female protagonists happened to really suck. That isn't helpful either.
Even if it wasn't to do with that, and it was down to male gamers just not wanting to play as female characters...then that's worse. Those folk really could do to broaden their horizons. Imagine how many classic works of literature you'd miss out on if you applied that mentality to books and their characters.
Tomb Raider has currently sold significantly less than MoH: Warfighter (A series which, may I remind you, is considered to have done so horrifically badly that it straight up killed the IP as well as receiving super awful scores from user and critic reviews alike) and Portal 2 doesn't count. How can it? Chell isn't a character. She's barely a plot device. You could stick a pair of tits to a tree branch and nobody could even tell the difference. Chell's not an example of a female character for the same reason that Gordon Freeman isn't an example of a male character.
Also, the point that people keep missing when I make these comparisons...DMC didn't have a fanbase when it was just DMC. How could it? It was a brand new IP, too. The difference is that it sold, and Bayonetta didn't (despite Bayonetta being the superior game, if only because it's about seven years newer than DMC is). And this is just my opinion talking, but I think Platinum makes much better action games than Capcom does as a whole.
When given the choice between playing as male or female, I'll pick male most of the time (unless the female has abilities that I REALLY like, see both borderlands games)
If the game is ABOUT the woman as the protagonist, then I have absolutely no problem, I'm down with that. Never had an issue with it.
Why is that still an issue these days? Seriously?
--
Also, about that scene from Bioshock infinite at about the 6 minute mark... Did they really just....did they try to......Does that actually happen in the game?! If so and I get to that point (whenever I get the game), I am probably going to jump off the slippery slope and open up a can of mass murder on anyone in the area, indiscriminately. For some reason that kind of thing tends to trigger my berserk button. Anyone who pushes it, beware, and run if you want to live.
Except for ONE notable exception in a recent game. I had my gun out, pointed, switched to grenade launcher mode with my finger hovering on the R1 button......And then I asked myself the armor piercing question. "Can I blame them?". That was a pretty profound moment for me.
Mass Effect was Massively (Pun intended) advertised, a high profile game where you can play either gender, and still. Only 18% of players played as a female...
How does playing as femshep really change the game except superficially? What's the difference? You can sex up Garrus? I don't care! I never cared about the romance in Mass Effect, sex honestly has never sold me video games, so giving me a different romance option is "tits on a bull" useless.
Remember Me looks intriguing, I think I might buy that.
Zydrate said:
saintdane05 said:
Oh, no. Not more gender. I thought we were done with this months ago!
The reason having more sexism threads won't help is because the issue has been exhausted on the escapist, we've had several thousand posts in the past two weeks on multiple threads.
Anybody who had something to say has said it, anybody who was going to change their minds already has and those who are staunchly on either side won't move and are only getting more frustrated with the other side. Shouldn't we have time to reflect on what's been said before we raise the issue again?
The point is that it's difficult for males to empathize with a romance from the female perspective, and thus presenting one disturbs player agency and can ruin whatever emotional effect you wanted it to have on the story.
Just as a disclaimer: I admit that you can say everything I'm about to say when a female gamer plays as a male, but they're in the minority for AAA purchases. Hence the reason for caring about the perspective of male gamers when making AAA games.
In any game the player generally needs to feel a connection between themselves and whomever they are playing as in order to feel any emotional impact from any of the things that happen to the protagonist. This is generally accomplished by making the protagonist relatable to the individual. A female protagonist itself doesn't significantly impact that process for male gamers, because the difference between a female Hero and a male Hero is the sound of their voices and some visual differences.
That said, it is considerably harder for a male to relate to a female with, as Jim says, "an actual life, and a relationship with a man" because males don't know what it means to live as a female. A hero is just an ideal that both genders can aspire to, but a regular Joe (or in this case, Jane) is considerably harder to empathize with if you aren't of the respective gender.
In regards to the male love interest angle and how that impacts the story, you have to look at what you're trying to accomplish with the romance and whether it will have the same effect on male gamers.
For example, the stereotype of the damsel in distress being rescued by the male hero is a form of emotional manipulation on the male gamer that uses their protective, Big Brother instincts or the romantic appeal to motivate the desire to play the game and reach the conclusion of the story.
If you wanted to flip gender stereotypes and have the female go and rescue the male out of romance or love, then because your primary audience often can't empathize with that relationship the effect is lost. You could better accomplish that effect by making the individual a parental/role model figure or establish the individual as a friend, because in that case people don't have a problem rescuing friends or role models of either gender. It's when romance is involved that the immersion is threatened.
My recent experience with Tomb Raider confirmed this: I felt far more motivated to save the father figure (Conrad Roth) and friend (Sam Nishimura) than the romance figure (Alex Weiss). Similarly, the emotional impact as those different relationships were resolved was much different; I was brought out of the moment completely when
Alex sacrificed himself to save Lara after confessing his love like any good male hero protagonist does in every movie, because I had spent the past few hours playing as the female character rather than the male and wasn't used to seeing the gender stereotypes from the other side and didn't share Lara's feelings for Alex Weiss
, but maintained my immersion when
Conrad Roth died early on as is par for the course from parental/role model figures, because I personally looked to him as a father figure myself
. Even while playing Mass Effect as solely a female protagonist I could not immerse myself in any of the heterosexual romance options.
Ultimately you have to ask what the purpose of the romance is. If at any point you rely on the fact that the audience will need to feel any sort of love toward the male love interest, then you won't get that from the heterosexual males that dominate AAA purchases and your story fails outright. I can't read Twilight for the same reason. Your story either needs to frame the male character as a companion or friend for the males playing it, or as a traitor or villain that they can hate for hitting on/betraying the female protagonist.
Or you have to target your game to a much different audience than the average gamer.
You know, this is why I don't like sexism threads. Should women have more main roles in gaming? Sure. Is the industry unfair sometimes? Sadly. Does it need to be addressed? Without a doubt. But the thing is, we can never talk about it in a civil, polite manner. It always boils down to bitter sarcasm, insults, strawmen, and just plain anger. If we can stop this, then I think we can confront the issue much better.
DjinFor, your post basically implies that me, and all women, shouldn't play videogames because we can't immedesimate since they have a strictly male point of view.
Not sure what "immedestimate" means. Did your post get cut off?
And no, I'm not arguing that you shouldn't play games. I'm arguing that the emotional impact of the games will generally be reduced under certain circumstances and that this inability to empathize is a massive elephant in the room that all publishers have to keep in mind when looking at their bottom line.
I didn't note this, but this inability to empathize with people dramatically different from you is an inherent part of being human and generally has to be trained out of you if you ever want to get rid of it. Calling it sexist, like Jim does, is missing the point.
You can play games all you want as a girl, you just can't expect AAA publishers to pander to what they feel is a minority. You can't expect them to produce a big budget game targeted to a female audience with the hopes that not only all of the AAA female gamers buy it, but that also enough casual gamers and male AAA gamers do as well; you'll continue to see games with female leads relegated to smaller budgets as befitting the smaller market for them.
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