Ladies, how about you?

[TeapartyTokyo]

That's a really interesting question, because all the female gamers I have ever met (myself included) care a great deal about story and characters (which is probably why we tend to have either a Zelda or a Final Fantasy topping our lists).

Personally it makes no difference to me, I never really thought about it, although I'll admit I do always pick the girl or hot guy whenever I play a fighting game, for example. I like characters I can associate with, or that I'm interested in knowing more about. I remember thinking it was cool that Chell from Portal was female, but I had fun playing as Gordon Freeman, too And while Elena (Uncharted) and Ellie (Dead Space) are both awesome, it's the player characters I associate myself with when I play. It's all to do with the story!

But I think it's hard to make a fixed female character that will in fact be liked by a female audience ^^;

 

[xdiesp]

It's baffling, people are losing the ability to separate themselves from what they see on screen. It's not you moving on screen, it's a character under your control: its features are meaningless compared to your kind of needs and life.

I blame mmporgs.

 

[CloudAtlas]

It's baffling, people are losing the ability to separate themselves from what they see on screen. It's not you moving on screen, it's a character under your control: its features are meaningless compared to your kind of needs and life.

I blame mmporgs.

A what exactly is wrong, in your eyes, with the desire to identify, to connect with the character you control?

 

[Tarante11a]

It didn't used to put me off but it does now. There are several big games I've not bought recently for this very reason - Assassin's Creed, Far Cry 3 for example. I love Borderlands 2 but got fed up because I couldn't play any class I like as a female character, and I didn't buy any of the expansion packs as a result. Sadly, I felt the same way about Dishonored, I've not finished the game and won't be buying expansions there either.

I like to be fully absorbed in my game, whatever genre it may be, and these days, only having (yet another) male protagonist to play prevents me from doing that. I think in part, it's because there's no balance. If there were the same number of female player characters out there, the issue might not occur to me. I would just feel more immersed in some games than others. But I've hit my patience threshold with male leads now.

 

[feauxx]

I definitely go for the female character option if i have one. Especially if it's an RPG or in other ways rich in story. I mind a male player character less when it's third person (gears of war) or a story being told like in Assassin's Creed. But yeah I played Mass Effect with a male Shepard once and it just didn't do it for me. Maybe if there were more female protagonists or games with gender options it would be less of a big deal but for now, when I have the option I go for it cause they aren't in abundance.

 

[LiberalSquirrel]

That could be societal. When you think of women we always give em bows and stuff which is cool. It makes sense lacking the upper body strength that some men have a woman would be crafty about it I suppose.

I've actually found the "give women bows" thing to be very interesting. Because it takes a lot of strength to wield a proper medieval longbow. The draw weight on those things could be 100, 150 lbs, even more sometimes... as in, that's the force that each arm has to deal with. Medieval archers' skeletons could actually be deformed from the requirements of consistently using a longbow.

I'd say the societal construct around giving women bows is, instead, that keeping her "further away from the violence" is more "ladylike." A man can be up there hacking away at the gristle and blood and gore, but a lady should stay far, far away. And lord forbid if her clothes get blood on them.

Or it could be a fundamental misunderstanding of how longbows work. Who knows.

OT: I honestly don't mind playing games with a male protaganist whatsoever. As for games that give you design choices for male/female, tall/short, bald/Rapunzel, whatever - I'm a writer. I tend to design characters in games like Skyrim, not some representation of me. So my protaganists in "choose-your-own-blank-slate" games tend to be an even split of male and female. Some games have me leaning one way or another, though - Shepard is female to me, just because that's how I clicked with the name, and Hawke seems a more masculine name, so he's a he in my head. (That being said, I do have both a male Shepard and a Lady Hawke.) The protaganist is so rarely a strong character in his/her own right... more often they're just a pair of glasses you wear to see into the world. So I (once again, bad habit of a writer) try to insert a character for my blank slate, act like he/she/it would... which means I'm not turned off in the least if someone refers to me as a "he," for example.

It honestly doesn't matter that much to me. I'll play a guy with no compunctions, and if the game's good, I'll still like it. (Here's to you Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, The Witcher 2, et cetera...)

 

[Rickin10]

Must be depressing to be female gamer. I feel depressed as a male gamer having to play the same chisel-jawed steroid junkie, or my new personal favourite: dark-brown-haired-male-model. When a female character does appear, it's a shock if she doesn't have the look and intellect of a pornstar. I'm not sure if this is just nerd-fantasy on behalf of the developers or the economic reality of chasing the massive white male adolescent dollar, but i feel pretty damn old playing games these days.

Personally I love it when I get an option to role-play a character like in Mass Effect or Skyrim but i have no problem playing as a preset male or female as long as they are vaguely interesting. Unfortunately, interesting characters (like decent story) is in pretty short supply in games.

 

[Aaron Sylvester]

I'd say the societal construct around giving women bows is, instead, that keeping her "further away from the violence" is more "ladylike." A man can be up there hacking away at the gristle and blood and gore, but a lady should stay far, far away. And lord forbid if her clothes get blood on them.

That's just it though, I haven't seen women using "true" longbows, they use variants of shortbows. That's what Lara Croft is using...the girl from Hunger Games seems to be using a slightly bigger one, but it's got a lot more flex. To fire a true artillery-style longbow, yes you need man-level upper body strength to get a decent range out of the shot.

But the most important thing is lethality, and honestly you don't need to pull a bow all the way back to get the arrow nicely stuck into someone. Even a schoolgirl could provide enough draw-weight to kill a person if the arrow is pointy enough.

Of course it should be the men hacking away in the blood and gore, how can you even compare using a sword to firing a bow? It's a whole different story. Even the weight of a standard legionnaire shortsword (~2 kg) would be too heavy for an average woman to swing effectively with one arm, a longsword/broadsword (3-4 kg +) would be out of the question. Even if she could swing it, the speed and cutting/thrusting power wouldn't be anywhere near enough to get through armor or make an enemy swordsman lose his balance/guard. Throw 20-30kg chainmail/armor into the mix and...yeah. That shit needed both strength and agility to pull off.

It's less to do with "getting blood on her clothes" "not ladylike" (I hope you were kidding, right?) and more to do with the fact that it would be a fucking stupid idea to send women charging head-first into battle. It's far more effective to send only the men - because that's what they are very good at, that's what their bodies are designed for, evolution equipped them with the motor skills, strength, agility and reflexes to be effective in combat.
Would you have the men sitting in the castle while the women got destroyed? Because I think whichever civilization tried that got erased from existence so quickly they didn't even make the history books.

Good thing we don't live in those times eh?

 

[Coppernerves]

That could be societal. When you think of women we always give em bows and stuff which is cool. It makes sense lacking the upper body strength that some men have a woman would be crafty about it I suppose.

I've actually found the "give women bows" thing to be very interesting. Because it takes a lot of strength to wield a proper medieval longbow. The draw weight on those things could be 100, 150 lbs, even more sometimes... as in, that's the force that each arm has to deal with. Medieval archers' skeletons could actually be deformed from the requirements of consistently using a longbow.

I'd say the societal construct around giving women bows is, instead, that keeping her "further away from the violence" is more "ladylike." A man can be up there hacking away at the gristle and blood and gore, but a lady should stay far, far away. And lord forbid if her clothes get blood on them.

Or it could be a fundamental misunderstanding of how longbows work. Who knows.

OT: I honestly don't mind playing games with a male protaganist whatsoever. As for games that give you design choices for male/female, tall/short, bald/Rapunzel, whatever - I'm a writer. I tend to design characters in games like Skyrim, not some representation of me. So my protaganists in "choose-your-own-blank-slate" games tend to be an even split of male and female. Some games have me leaning one way or another, though - Shepard is female to me, just because that's how I clicked with the name, and Hawke seems a more masculine name, so he's a he in my head. (That being said, I do have both a male Shepard and a Lady Hawke.) The protaganist is so rarely a strong character in his/her own right... more often they're just a pair of glasses you wear to see into the world. So I (once again, bad habit of a writer) try to insert a character for my blank slate, act like he/she/it would... which means I'm not turned off in the least if someone refers to me as a "he," for example.

It honestly doesn't matter that much to me. I'll play a guy with no compunctions, and if the game's good, I'll still like it. (Here's to you Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, The Witcher 2, et cetera...)

I expect that "give women bows" comes mostly from wanting to keep them safely behind a defensive line of adult male infantry, along with the children (again with the "indirect action").

Another reason could be that a bow is shot while standing sideways, often un-armoured, without getting caked in blood, thus showing a nice, slim but curvy figure, rather than shoulder broadness.

Something I wouldn't say without the cover of internet anonymity is that despite being male, and glad of it (they seem to encounter more social dilemmas, and who wants mood swings and genital bleeding every month?), I enjoy fantasising about being pretty, and defying "stay in the kitchen" attitudes, more than I do about being ripped and chiselled, and living up to the old ideals of bravery.

Makes me wonder what a game would be like if it was set in a culture where most females voluntarily had their limbs amputated, and were put into super strong powered exoskeletons, but males stayed natural.

It could come from a cultural perception that when modern technology makes manual strength less relevant, the females protective instinct, and tendency to form tight cliques, makes them better soldiers.

 

[APersonHere]

I expect that "give women bows" comes mostly from wanting to keep them safely behind a defensive line of adult male infantry, along with the children (again with the "indirect action").

I wonder, though, what actually is the casualty rate among archers? A classical tactic is to send cavalry to hit the rear and flanks--archers become prime targets because they are typically lightly (if at all) armored. Dagger versus a lance... my bet is on the lance.

Even the weight of a standard legionnaire shortsword (~2 kg) would be too heavy for an average woman to swing effectively with one arm, a longsword/broadsword (3-4 kg +) would be out of the question. Even if she could swing it, the speed and cutting/thrusting power wouldn't be anywhere near enough to get through armor or make an enemy swordsman lose his balance/guard.

Historically swords are not anywhere near as heavy as modern media portrays them to be. Take a look at this:
http://www.thearma.org/essays/weights.htm

Swords were not made for hacking through armor, particularly not plate armor. There were specialized weapons for that. Watching Lord of the Rings and most fantasy medieval worlds in movies is sometimes laughable as %99 of the time armor does absolute shit (unless it's mithril, evidently.)

Imagine with the next CoD or Battlefield, now that the females in combat restriction has been lifted in the US Military, you could have either a male or female character

It will be interesting, though, to see what percentage of ENEMY soldiers will be women in the campaigns.

 

[Carrots_macduff]

I don't desire to give a title a chance if I can't make... well, myself I guess

people can have more in common than just their sex. the idea that people can't relate to anyone that isn't the same gender as them seems so superficial to me. men and women have more things in common than things they don't really.

 

[Musette]

Personally, I'm not as affected by the idea of not having a female character choice in most scenarios. In western RPGs though, I like having gender choices for the most part, since they're more of a self-insert character anyways. Even in games like that, role-playing a male character can be fun too. I am a little indifferent about gender though (If I woke up male, I don't think my life would feel very different, and I doubt I would feel any dysphoria), so I guess that would reflect my indifference to gender in a game, but choices are always nice when they are appropriate. The only times I find myself turned off by a game because of the characters is when they irritate me due to bad writing. Unfortunately, some writers have trouble getting past the "I'm female and that is my defining trait" method of characterization, and the sheer number of male protagonists leaves more gems to choose from in that pool at the moment, but I really appreciate well-written female characters.

 

[Aaron Sylvester]

It could come from a cultural perception that when modern technology makes manual strength less relevant, the females protective instinct, and tendency to form tight cliques, makes them better soldiers.

Might want to think about that a little deeper. Women are very emotional creatures, it's a fact. Something to do with socializing with each other better while the men were out hunting or warring over the thousands of years of evolution, I don't really know. But a less "tinfoil hat" explanation is that they experience emotions at a deeper level, react to stress differently and emotions have a deeper impact on their decision-making. Women have proven to have higher emotional intelligence [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence] on average than males, emotional intelligence is an absolutely incredible and crucial aspect of humans being where they are today.
Want even more proof, look at the sheer percentage of women who prefer jobs that allow socializing, helping and meeting other people instead of designing bridges and submarines. Even in Norway where they LITERALLY tried to force-change the gender "imbalance" in industries, it completely failed and the ratios/percentages settled back to what they were within no time. No matter what they tried...90-95% of nurses remain female, 90-95% of construction workers remain male. Brilliant!

To put the argument to rest, PTSD rates among female soldiers are anywhere from 50%-100% higher than their male counterparts [http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/139851.php/] - and PTSD is almost entirely mental, not physical. Make what you want out of that. I believe that even if they were as physically capable as men, their minds are just not as well-equipped to deal with insane amounts of stress experienced in war.
Think of it as throwing a perfume bottle at a dog, while usually his sense of smell is extremely useful, he's just going to go CRAZY with all that perfume going up his nose and become useless because his nose is just too damn sensitive.

Historically swords are not anywhere near as heavy as modern media portrays them to be. Take a look at this:
http://www.thearma.org/essays/weights.htm

Swords were not made for hacking through armor, particularly not plate armor. There were specialized weapons for that. Watching Lord of the Rings and most fantasy medieval worlds in movies is sometimes laughable as %99 of the time armor does absolute shit (unless it's mithril, evidently.)

Hey I read that too! Google is nice
I find it really hard to believe that swords weighed less than 1kg. Perhaps the gladius swords, but the longswords had to weigh a lot more than that. And broadswords are basically the huge things that vikings swung around with BOTH hands, no way those things weighed any less than 5kg. Impractical now that we look back at it, but hey, they used them to fight :S
But even if you take that article to heart, strength, agility and reflexes still heavily come into play. A male training for 5 years is going to be a CRAPTON more dangerous than a woman training for 5 years, doesn't matter whether you give them a sword or a tree branch to fight with.

 

[LiberalSquirrel]

That's just it though, I haven't seen women using "true" longbows, they use variants of shortbows. That's what Lara Croft is using...the girl from Hunger Games seems to be using a slightly bigger one, but it's got a lot more flex. To fire a true artillery-style longbow, yes you need man-level upper body strength to get a decent range out of the shot.

But the most important thing is lethality, and honestly you don't need to pull a bow all the way back to get the arrow nicely stuck into someone. Even a schoolgirl could provide enough draw-weight to kill a person if the arrow is pointy enough.

Of course it should be the men hacking away in the blood and gore, how can you even compare using a sword to firing a bow? It's a whole different story. Even the weight of a standard legionnaire shortsword (~2 kg) would be too heavy for an average woman to swing effectively with one arm, a longsword/broadsword (3-4 kg +) would be out of the question. Even if she could swing it, the speed and cutting/thrusting power wouldn't be anywhere near enough to get through armor or make an enemy swordsman lose his balance/guard. Throw 20-30kg chainmail/armor into the mix and...yeah. That shit needed both strength and agility to pull off.

It's less to do with "getting blood on her clothes" "not ladylike" (I hope you were kidding, right?) and more to do with the fact that it would be a fucking stupid idea to send women charging head-first into battle. It's far more effective to send only the men - because that's what they are very good at, that's what their bodies are designed for, evolution equipped them with the motor skills, strength, agility and reflexes to be effective in combat.
Would you have the men sitting in the castle while the women got destroyed? Because I think whichever civilization tried that got erased from existence so quickly they didn't even make the history books.

Good thing we don't live in those times eh?

Honestly, I go by names - you'll see "longbow" being used as a weapon name quite often in fantasy RPGs. Now, from what I remember, what's-her-face from Hunger Games was using a compound bow of some sort, which lessens the draw weight via a system of pulleys, thus allowing for more rigid parts, which'll send the arrow further with less effort. I may be wrong, though, since I've only seen the movie once, and as you can probably tell from the "what's-her-face," it didn't make much of an impression on me. And, being a bit short on disposable income, I have yet to play the new Tomb Raider games, so I can't make a comment on the bows Lara uses.

But unless you're talking more modern bows, no. "Some schoolgirl" (which I'm taking to mean an untrained, unpracticed person of average strength, which could just as easily be "some schoolboy") would not be able to accurately and effectively fire a medieval bow at all (unless she is uber-schoolgirl, destroyer of worlds. Unusually strong and all of that). I'm talking medieval here: that's what I know the most about, and also what you see most in video games thanks to the Tolkein-esque world you see in fantasy RPGs. That's also where I got the draw weights and other info. Attempting to shoot a bow with any sort of accuracy was an "aim-draw-fire" thing, and if someone struggled on the pull, the arrow would go wildly off-target. Not to mention that you would have to draw a bow the proper way if you wanted it to even make contact. If it's not drawn correctly and efficiently, it will just fall out of the bow... or, if by some miracle it's fired, it won't make the proper distance. It'll just make a sad little downward arc before plopping into the ground. Long story short: if you don't make the full pull, the arrow won't go much of anywhere.

Now, I do agree with you on one point. You do need a certain amount of strength and agility to be able to properly wield a sword for any length of time. Not purely because of weight (as I noticed someone else above me saying, your weights are a tad off. Even stuff like hand-and-a-half swords, the real big 'uns, were rarely more than 5-6 pounds. Two-handed swords like, say, zweihanders, were wielded with two hands not purely because of weight, but also to put more force behind the swing, and to be in control of them - beyond 5 lbs was where you start to see 2-handed swords rather than 1-handed grips). But because of stamina. You're swinging a thing over and over and over. You need stamina for that.

So... honestly, no, I wasn't kidding. (Okay, it was a tad snarky. My point remains.) You have to train to be good at something... whether you're male or female. There's no reason that a woman couldn't train herself to carry the load of mail + sword + shield. She'd just have to train to do it. Just like a man. Any guy who hadn't prepped beforehand wouldn't be fine if you just dumped some armor on his back and a sword into his hand and sent him out. Just because someone is male doesn't mean that they automatically have the magical ability to be able to swing a sword for extended periods of time. They need to practice at it, or else they will tire. Very quickly. Just like any woman would need to. Women are capable of building muscle through training as well. If not, there is something severely wrong with her. An "average" male being better at wielding swords than an "average" male is debatable, but possible. However, even if I accepted it as unadulterated truth, that doesn't mean that all women are incapable of wielding a weapon as well as... or better than... a man. I've met several women who can mop the floor with equally-classed men in martial arts, for instance. Let me just say this: it is impossible to generalize that a man will always beat a woman with the same training. That completely disregards natural skill, talent, fighting styles, and even the individuality of the people involved. Not all men are the same. Nor are all women the same. If you picked a member of each gender, with the exact same training, it is impossible to judge which one will turn out the victor based solely on their gender.

Not to mention that sword vs. decent armor usually comes out on the side of the armor. Because that's what armor (especially stuff like plate) was meant to do. Deflect blows. No matter the "thrusting power" of a sword or the man wielding it. (In fact, bows are much more successful than swords at cutting through armor. Not that you see that often in games, literature, or anything.)

Still, my problem with the "women get bows, men get swords" thing isn't so much the inaccuracy of it all (goodness, if that was my issue, I'd have gone mad by now). If we are already meant to believe that our front-line men can cut through armor like tissue paper, then why can't a woman cut through the tissue-paper armor right next to them? It's obviously not a worry about appearing realistic. So there's something else at play. That's all I'm saying.

Hoo boy, that was long. But I suppose that's what happens for me when "medieval weaponry" and "feminism" somehow collide.

I expect that "give women bows" comes mostly from wanting to keep them safely behind a defensive line of adult male infantry, along with the children (again with the "indirect action").

Another reason could be that a bow is shot while standing sideways, often un-armoured, without getting caked in blood, thus showing a nice, slim but curvy figure, rather than shoulder broadness.

Something I wouldn't say without the cover of internet anonymity is that despite being male, and glad of it (they seem to encounter more social dilemmas, and who wants mood swings and genital bleeding every month?), I enjoy fantasising about being pretty, and defying "stay in the kitchen" attitudes, more than I do about being ripped and chiselled, and living up to the old ideals of bravery.

Makes me wonder what a game would be like if it was set in a culture where most females voluntarily had their limbs amputated, and were put into super strong powered exoskeletons, but males stayed natural.

It could come from a cultural perception that when modern technology makes manual strength less relevant, the females protective instinct, and tendency to form tight cliques, makes them better soldiers.

A good point. Especially with the "archery gives a nice silhouette" observation.

-raises hand- I definitely don't want genital bleeding every month. (Luckily, I've proven rather immune to mood swings. Probably stems from me being an unemotional sort under any circumstance.) I think everyone kinda wonders/fantasizes about how being the opposite gender would be. I have determined that male-me would probably be just as boring as female-me, though. The only difference was male-me would no longer be able to wear a dress without weird stares. (I get stares in dresses anyways, but they're usually a different sort.)

Okay, I'll admit it. That game you just described sounds cool. Not just because "empowered female protagonist" or anything. More because that "super powered exoskeletons" things would be a logical extension of military technology... which would indeed make gender rather irrelevant. I think an even mix of genders would be more logical in that sort of world, but hey, if it can be justified, I'm all for a squad of well-written ladies.

 

[Uhura]

I definitely like to have the option to play a female character. It's not that I can't identify with male characters, after all many of my favorite games/films/tv-shows have male protagonists. It's just that a lot of the type of media I consume (being a sci-fi fan etc.) revolves around men and their stories and it's just refreshing to sometimes see women do something.

 

[APersonHere]

it is impossible to generalize that a man will always beat a woman with the same training. That completely disregards natural skill, talent, fighting styles, and even the individuality of the people involved. Not all men are the same. Nor are all women the same. If you picked a member of each gender, with the exact same training, it is impossible to judge which one will turn out the victor based solely on their gender.

I agree with essentially everything you wrote above, but I'd like to point this out:

Medieval battlefields were not just a bunch of 1 on 1 fights. A solid charge often relied on just sheer weight until one side gave out. We also see this in shield walls.

Pit 500 "average" trained men weighing 160-180 pounds against 500 "average" trained women weighing 140-160 pounds, and my bet would almost certainly be on the men. (And I'm quite willing to bet a third side with 500 warhorses ridden by either gender could mop both other armies up at the same time.)

It's the law of averages. Suppose a fantasy universe were to permit "average" women as standard infantry. If this fantasy universe follows anything like our historical one ( though with gender biases removed), you'd probably see more women being placed in the role of disposable light infantry fodder--or as archers where grappling and brute strength is not expected to be needed. Even a 20 pound handicap becomes an important factor the larger the number of those involved.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

So much casual sexism in this thread.

Women can shoot bows, guys and fight with swords.

At the end of the day I'm not entirely sure why you are arguing this. Unless you actually think a man could survive some of the shit we put protags through in videogames.

Also it's funny to see men get so upset when one suggests a woman might be able to beat them in a fight. Oh Diddums.

I've beat at least 2 big guys hand to hand during my life. One of which I put in the hospital ( he WAS trying to rape me...) deal with it. Jumping upwards into someone's nose does the job surprisingly well most of the time.

I guess not everyone went to my dad's school of dirty fighting though.

 

[APersonHere]

Also it's funny to see men get so upset when one suggests a woman might be able to beat them in a fight. Oh Diddums.

Sorry, but how many posters here have ACTUALLY said that NO woman could beat them in a fight? You're contributing to the casual sexism too.