While I honestly believe that women should be better represented in games and I will readily admit that there's a lot of sexism in games, I also firmly believe that nothing will improve until feminist groups stop putting this pressure on the industry.
What do I mean?
I'm reminded of a comment I once heard concerning Star Trek Voyager. A captain who stranded herself and her crew a lifetime from home and, to keep her ship running, had to enlist a similarly trapped group of rebels with no love for the Federation into her staff. She should have been constantly under fire from them and, for the first while anyway, facing constant fear of mutiny, but she wasn't. After some lip service, that issue and plotline was quietly swept under the rug. Honestly ask yourself: why, and why not? Any other captain in the franchise would have been. Kate Mulgrew's a fine actor. She could have done a great job of it.
So why?
It could be that the writers didn't respect the character, but I don't buy that. There were too many love letter sendups to her through the show's run. More likely, they were afraid of the backlash should they ever call her ability into question. To question her ability to be Captain, which anyone should face in those circumstances, became impossible because to do so would be seen as questioning the abilities of all women, not just hers. It could have been very powerful and empowering to see. As the same guy said of Sisko: he was written as 'The Captain' but not 'The Black Captain.' His race wasn't ignored, but it was largely irrelevent to his job, role and the respect given him. Had they done the same for her, subjected her to every criticism and hardship that would be placed on anyone in that situation, it could have been amazing. But it couldn't ever happen because they were too afraid to let the story play out.
In the end, the effort put in to avoid coming across as sexist made it more sexist.
And so it is in gaming.
The outrage over Metroid: Other M should show that we, as a community, do respect our icons if nothing else and there's nothing actually stopping a woman from becoming one. That said, as above, Samus simply was who she was. It wasn't shoved down our throats and the original game (granted, largely impossible to do otherwise at the time) simply let itself play out. What amounted to two seconds worth of a smug grin at the end of that game did more to hammer the point home than pages of dialogue informing us that, yes, this woman is a bounty hunter and let me tell you how amazing she is.
Jade from Beyond Good and Evil, while more feminine and talkative, was much the same. She was, and the game just went with it. Chell and GLaDos are much the same, as is Kerrigan.
I love these characters and yet, if I were a publisher, I wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole.
Again, why?
Just today I was shocked to learn that Amnesty International was up in arms over a torture scene in GTA. Granted, what I've read is in there is quite excessive. Even so, they were calling for parents to be aware and not let children play the game, not for censorship. Thinking back, I can remember at least two of the Metal Gear games having scenes where the protagonist was tortured, even losing an eye in one of them. More recently, in Far Cry 3, your character has to torture his own brother at one point and, later, save a friend from a sociopath. While never explicitly stated, the game made it clear that he'd been raped by the guy, but once the event was finished, it was quietly shuffled aside and never mentioned again. I don't remember anyone speaking up on any of these. Violence in general, maybe, but that's a different argument.
Now, in Far Cry, pretend that it was the main character's sister (assuming he had one) in either of those scenarios. Things change very quickly. Not so long ago there was an outcry over Tomb Raider because of a scene where a young Croft had to kill someone to protect herself, not get vengeance or save someone else getting raped, but to protect herself.
Now, I hate sexual assault of any kind in a narrative. I despise it. I see it like juggling hammers: You can't do anything else until you're finished, it's horribly difficult, notoriously unbalanced and one slip up will end with you crippling yourself. Still, you can't have a character in some of those situations without at least a lampshading done, or you'll have an elephant in the room the whole time. If you want your story to be serious, then you need to be serious, and that leads to some dark places. The situation cannot be sugarcoated without losing the integrity of what you're trying to create.
It's why I greatly respect games like Silent Hill 3 and The Last of Us, and those behind them, for having the guts to do what they set out to do.
In similar vein, accurate or not, the atmosphere is that these groups will tear apart and protest any female character who does not conform to their views on how women should be portrayed. You need a slob? Use a guy. It's okay to make a guy gross. Women may be set up as object and pet hoarders, but those are people with serious mental disorders that must be treated with respect and understanding, and even then it's a sexist stereotype.
Need a kidnapping victim? Use a male sibling or a son. Then, it's a tragedy. If it's his wife or daughter, it's the subject/object dicotomy. And so on.
Now, this doesn't mean there aren't ugly sex-based stereotypes on both sides that need to be addressed, but you get my point.
Now, ask the question: You're looking to invest money in a project and put your name to it. If nothing integral to the story will change, then why not insist that the protagonist be male? There's still something to be said about the tired studio desire to have a leading man to cater to what they see as their main demographic, but more than that, it just dodges so many bullets. Yes, there'll be a short to-do about not having a female playable character, but that'll blow over quickly and just get added to the pile. The real damage comes from trying and failing to live up to what's being asked, so why would they, as a business, risk going through that minefield?
The few gems we have come from people with more guts than I can claim and brass balls to back it up. For most of the rest? It's just not good business sense to even try, or alternately, they make games designed to be juvenile or to titilate (neither of which I see as inherently bad things so long as everyone involved is aware that that's what they're doing) made for an audience who just doesn't much care about the rest of what's going on.
So, no. I don't think the industry or culture needs this form of feminism. I think many, if not most, consumers want the same things that they want, at least in the context of variety and options. Encouragement without duress to have more female options and companies/writers more willing to have well-written female characters, yes, but that's not going to happen in the current atmosphere and climate, and that won't change until a lot of people back off
