Poll: To Female Players - Does Gender really matter for Single-Player Games with no customization?

[Cazza]

I dislike RPG's with where you choose your gender. The game never feels rights. Take KOTOR II just after the start when in the jail and the assassin comes to kill you. When male in that scene it doesn't feel right. Atton telling him to pick on someone his on size. The whole man protecting the female thing comes into play. All through these kinds of RPG's it keeps changing gender.

Gender does matter in games. Setting is so important and placing in the wrong gender messes with that. Which changes the story. I don't mind what gender Iam ingame as long as the story fits what one I am.

It's funny so many example of female protagonists combat isn't a main part of the game.

Portal, Mirror's Edge, Tomb Raider.

 

[Trolldor]

Gender is part a of character. I don't want a role there simply for the sake of appeasement. If it adds nothing to the game, why waste your time?

Take Male Shep and Female Shep - Gender adds nothing to the game other than your choice of romance. It's a useless tack on. The world interacts with you in completely the same way.
It shouldn't.

I remember the merc recruiter in ME2 commenting that 'The dancers go over there' to FemShep or something.

Anyway, gender doesn't matter to me...but if given a choice, I always pick female.

If I'm going to be forced to stare at my character's ass for 90% of the gameplay, it may as well be an attractive ass.

See, I don't get this. How is that arse attractive? It's nothing but rendered data.

That aside, the merc recruit is irrelevant as it doesn't change your interaction with the world. The quest proceeds precisely the same.
In a good game, your gender would provide you with limitations.
Take Baldur's Gate 2, for example. There's a character who simply will not talk to you at all if you're male. If you're female, they have a whole slew of dialogue allowing you to ask questions about the history of the place, and gather some information. A male character locks you out of this interaction.
But a male character too has unique interactions with the world through the story - such as when in the Drow City.
There are some much better examples out there but I can't be fucked remembering them at this point.

Why do people feel tension in Amnesia? It's just rendered data.

Why do people become upset by moving scenes in movies? It's just actors reading from lines of a script.

A medium can only give you what you're willing to take out of it, and nothing more. If I want to find a pixel ass to be attractive, then GOD DAMN that ass will be amazing.

Edit: I realize that makes me sound like a weirdo pervert. I don't actually go play games to stare at women's asses, I just mean that I find women more attractive than men, so I may as well find my character attractive if I'm going to be spending the whole game playing as them. That being said, I actually have a BroShep instead of a FemShep because I HATED the FemShep hairstyles, but BroShep had a few nice ones.

Basically, I choose whichever gender I find more attractive within the game. Usually it's female, but sometimes it's male.

Tension can be built through a number of things - sound being a primary attribute. Playing Amnesia muted is just boring.
Staring at rendered ass is purely an aesthetic thing, and I honestly find it hard to understand how a digital ass can be physically appealing.

Gender is part a of character. I don't want a role there simply for the sake of appeasement. If it adds nothing to the game, why waste your time?

Take Male Shep and Female Shep - Gender adds nothing to the game other than your choice of romance. It's a useless tack on. The world interacts with you in completely the same way.
It shouldn't.

Well, there are some lines that are dependent on what gender you are in the ME games, but you are quite right, there should be more divergence between the stories of manShep and femShep.

That said, if you immerse yourself in your character, playing a femShep could add an extra layer to things. Unless things change dramatically in the next two hundred years, a female Shepard would've had to work twice as hard to get to the rank she currently holds in the Alliance Navy, and the fact she is a woman gives her a different psyche compared to a male so she would take decisions differently and react differently to situations than a male would. So you can give yourself added layers to the experience depending on the choice of gender. But Bioware could, and indeed should do more with it.

Edit: And yes, I too would like more well written female protagonists in video games, particularly of the variety where you don't make your own character, and in those where you can I'd like to see the female player character be the canonical one more often.

A 'make-your-own' backstory is fine, but when the game makes fails to take a major character attribute like gender in to account there's no point in having the function outside of appeasement.

I didn't play 'Beyond Good and Evil' and think:
"You know what would make this game better? If I could play as a dude."

 

[Kotep]

It'd kind of be nice to see more female main characters, but I don't think it's a big deal. As a guy myself, I don't have any issues with playing a female character, though I do tend to pick female characters when given a choice because they're fairly underrepresented.

Does it really matter that Nariko is a girl or that Nathan Drake is a guy? Nah, not really.
Would it be nice to have more games with female main characters? Sure, I don't see why not.

 

[loodmoney]

I am a man, so I won't answer the question (except to say that "I am a man and I don't care about gender" is a bad argument; there is no easy symmetry here), but I will point out a problem with your poll:

I take it you want to gauge how much gender in games matters to females. But your sample is going to be biased. Let's imagine that a woman really didn't like being forced to play as a man. The vast majority of games, she might feel, do exactly this. So she might not get into games as much as someone for whom it didn't matter at all. As a result of this, she would be less likely to be on The Escapist, voting on your poll. By asking your question here, you are likely to get a larger number of 'no' votes relative to what you'd find in the general population; i.e. you are asking, in effect, "do female gamers who already play games with male characters think that gender matters?", whereas you want the answer to the question, "do female gamers or potential female gamers think that gender matters?"

Just something to keep in mind before you say, "I took a poll and found that gender only matters a lot to 8% of females." Because of who and where you polled, you have likely missed out on all those to whom it matters enough to keep them off The Escapist's forums.

 

[lettucethesallad]

I'm female and don't care whatsoever. It'd be like saying "I don't feel like watching this movie/hearing this story because there's a man in the lead instead of a woman". You play a game for the experience, and that's not really something governed by gender imo.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

Depends. If the character is premade with their own backstory and personality, it doesn't bother me in the slightest because that character doesn't represent me. Kratos for example doesn't phase me at all and I have no problem playing as him.

If I'm supposed to be playing a game with a semi-blank-slate character and choosing how I want to play them and create their personality, it pisses me off a good bit if I can't pick a female character as I can't relate to playing a male character and it's hard to get myself into the proper mindset, so I just do random stuff because it's there, rather than because I believe my character would act in a certain way.

Although, I'd be lying if I said I didn't wish for more female protagonists. It doesn't effect me playing games though unless I'm supposed to be role-playing that character to some degree.

This is pretty much how I feel. I had alot of trouble getting into Amnesia because of the male main character. It didn't scare me as much as my male friends and when discussing this with them we pretty much came up with 'lack of immersion'

It feels wierd playing as a male character when you are playing a customizable RPG because that character is meant to be you.
Games like Alan Wake or Darksider's don't bother me because it's almost like you are outside the character watching their story, although this may feel different for men playing I guess. It's just the way I see it. I always felt very immersed in Tomb Raider because of Lara for example even though with that game is technically the same as Alan Wake by the standards I mentioned.

Anyway I think my point is that it's immersion that is the problem when it comes to no female avatar.

 

[Friendshipandmagic]

I know I will be called out for bias (since I am a male, and most games the main character is male) but to female players do gender really matter?

I have seen girls skip God of War becuase you couldn't pick a female Kratos, and even for the Gothic series (rpg, but no customization of looks.)

So how much does it matter for Single-Player Games with no customization?

It matters to me in the sense that if I have to play one more freaking white/30-something year old male I may swear off western games altogether. Its driving me crazy.

You all can play your various re-tellings of "old white dude shooting people", I'm gonna be over here playing my games about cutesy anime characters with magic powers.

*pouts*

 

[J-wad]

The implicit message that heroes are always male does get very boring. I don't excessively mind playing as a male if the game is good but it still does raise the question: why couldn't or didn't the developers provide the option of playing female? And so many single player RPGs force the player into that incredibly clichéd POV (which one can't help assuming must be the devs' POV) whereby all female characters are compulsively (and superficially) sexualized (if not through dialogue then often just through the graphics), which not only makes for an unimpressive product overall but also feeds into the idea in the wider community that people involved in the computer game industry (whether devs or players) are mostly sexist (male) nerds who can't interact in a healthy way with other human beings.

I would love to see more Fable 2 type games in which the option of playing a female character (who wasn't visually designed solely in order to be titillating-looking for an audience of teen hetero males) existed, and who maybe hired male prostitues and generally went around objectifying all the male characters she came across (though I suspect most devs wouldn't be up to this, creatively - at least that's been the case for a long time now). (Actually, a sort of "man-hating" female character could be quite funny & interesting to play.)

It's a shame that so many devs fail to take the preferences of a female market demographic into consideration. I think it would help them to be more creative and open-minded in their approach to gender in SP-RPGs.

 

[DementedSheep]

I slightly prefer playing a female but no it doesn?t matter.

 

[tklivory]

I answered 'Very Little', because for most games, it doesn't matter (as long as it has good character/writing/gameplay/etc).

The main exception to this are RPG games where the gender does, in fact, influence the gameplay. In Dragon Age: Origins, for example, if you're a male and want to choose the Dark Ritual ending, all you have to do is sleep with a woman that you've probably already slept with during the course of the game. If you're a woman, however, you might have to ask your own lover to sleep with a woman he hates to survive at the end. This does add dimension to the gameplay, which is why I can't say that gender doesn't matter.

Has it ever influenced my decision whether or not to buy/play a game? No. My favorite Single Player game series (Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia) both feature male protagonists, and their gender didn't in any way affect my enjoyment of the gameplay.

 

[Dimitriov]

As a guy I will just say that on the flip side I do prefer to play as a male character in RPG's or any game that allows you to project yourself onto your interactions with the world. However, in the case of a game like Assassin's Creed, where you are playing out the story of a pre-written character, I couldn't care less what the gender of the main character was.

As long as the character is well written and engaging and appropriately fits into the world they inhabit there is no reason not to enjoy a game with an opposite gender protagonist, and since most games still have male leads it would be nice to see more female protagonists. After all there are probably a lot of unexplored stories and themes out there that could use a well written female rather than one just there as eye-candy, and many more like Portal where the character's gender has no real bearing on gameplay anyway.

After all I'm a guy and I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer more than Angel (although I do love both shows) so I doubt there is any real reason not to create more character variety. After all it's not just women as a demographic who are under-represented.

 

[SillyBear]

It depends on what you mean by "matter". Will it prevent me from playing a game that otherwise looks interesting to me? No, of course not - denying myself an enjoyable experience just because of a single design choice would be foolish. And not every character should be female. Take LA Noire, for example. Making the protagonist a woman would have completely ruined the story because it would be an absurd idea - a female police detective in the 40s? Unheard of! Same holds true for God of War, really - that simply wouldn't be the same game with a female main character.

But in those cases when the character could be female without any harm to the cohesion or immersion of the game, then I do wish that more developers decided to have a female lead. I don't think for a moment that male players would turn away from a good game simply because they had to play as a girl, so why not make it happen more often than it does?

Hit the nail on the head. It's all about the context of the game.

 

[Zeraiya]

I am a girl, so I just offer my humble opinion.

Technically, no it doesn't matter. I really don't mind playing a male character in a game, hell I do that a lot anyway. It's more important to ask what kind of game is the game?

If the game is just another FPS or something of the like, no, it really doesn't matter.

But if it's a game that requires personal interaction and personal choices, like Mass Effect for example, it does matter. You want to feel personally invested and not forced to think like you were a male John Shepard.

I doubt the problem most women have with having to play male characters is that *shock* *gasp* they have to be a male, but rather they feel offended that the developers didn't cater or think about them, the female gamers.

I prefer to have female customisation for my characters simply because I can invest and identify with the character quicker, but I won't throw a fit because of it. I don't mind pretending - or tapping into my male alter ego ;P - in order to play and enjoy a game; however I do think it is important to represent the other half of the gamers.

So, in the end the answer is 'Not Really, But Yes'

 

[thePyro_13]

If you think of games like other media, then it becomes: "If the main character of a book/movie isn't the same gender as me, can I really enjoy it?"

How can I enjoy Sam and Max is I'm not a 7 foot anthropomorphic dog with a styling hat?

How can you really enjoy any media if the main character does something you wouldn't do or believes something you don't believe?

As a male, playing a female protagonist has never subtracted from a games plot, story or immersion(for me).

I understand that it's probably annoying for women that the sheer weight of games have male main protagonists. It's annoy for me too, I'd celebrate for some more variety in protagonists.

Though I tend to play games with proper stories and defined characters, rather than 'build your own story' sandboxes.

 

[Galletea]

It really depends on the game and how it's trying to tell a story. Sometimes it's all fine and dandy not to bother if your story and interaction depends on your central character being a well rounded individual with a predetermined past. Games like Fable, where interaction is different depending on sex benefits from the option, regardless of customisation. But in most scenarios it is more likely to be a man in that situation, for example, army based shooters and the like, so it really doesn't matter to me.

 

[Jack Rascal]

I can't believe someone would actually skip a game because you can't have a female character. That's just silly.

I'm a woman, but I always (if given the option) choose to play as a guy I don't know why... I have tried some female characters, but something was lacking, can't put my finger on it.

 

[Pappeska]

I usually end up with a male character in any case.

 

[orangeban]

Well, I'm male so I don't know if I should answer this, but I think it's wrong that male is default. And I know about how males are the majority of RPG gamers and you should appeal to the majority but I think it really should be about a 50/50 split between males and females in games in terms of protagonist.

 

[Brutal Peanut]

It depends on what you mean by "matter". Will it prevent me from playing a game that otherwise looks interesting to me? No, of course not - denying myself an enjoyable experience just because of a single design choice would be foolish. And not every character should be female. Take LA Noire, for example. Making the protagonist a woman would have completely ruined the story because it would be an absurd idea - a female police detective in the 40s? Unheard of! Same holds true for God of War, really - that simply wouldn't be the same game with a female main character.

But in those cases when the character could be female without any harm to the cohesion or immersion of the game, then I do wish that more developers decided to have a female lead. I don't think for a moment that male players would turn away from a good game simply because they had to play as a girl, so why not make it happen more often than it does?

This is pretty much exactly what I was thinking , but couldn't put in to words properly. So,... *yoink* post!