DarkHuntress said:
Maybe females don' make up a majority of players but they are out there. Every no sale of a game relects on the bottom line and I am a no sale on most current games.
Why don't they realize that most women don't want to play as male characters? I mean just switch it around, how many male players would enjoy games if most of the ones available had women as the main character?
Why is it a problem for them to develop games where gender option is allowed?
I, for one, don't purchase games that only allow a male character. I can't even role play a character like this. It's just not fun.
Usually these characters have a romantic interest. Of course the romantic interest is female.
C'mon, maybe some female players can go for this but not this player.
Maybe someone here can help me understand why gender option on MOST games, is not allowed.
DarkHuntress said:
Maybe females don' make up a majority of players but they are out there. Every no sale of a game relects on the bottom line and I am a no sale on most current games.
Why don't they realize that most women don't want to play as male characters? I mean just switch it around, how many male players would enjoy games if most of the ones available had women as the main character?
Why is it a problem for them to develop games where gender option is allowed?
I, for one, don't purchase games that only allow a male character. I can't even role play a character like this. It's just not fun.
Usually these characters have a romantic interest. Of course the romantic interest is female.
C'mon, maybe some female players can go for this but not this player.
Maybe someone here can help me understand why gender option on MOST games, is not allowed.
I think some of your respondees are missing your point as they are hammering out games with female leads or the option to play as a girl, since you never claimed they didn't exist. I do however think they are far more common than you are giving credit to. Despite what some of the respondees think, I believe based on some of the statistics quoted here and there that female gamers are fairly common, and make up like 40% of the game playing public, as opposed to being a tiny minority. However at the same time this does show that the current marketing has widespread approval among both genders.
As far as why there isn't a gender option for all games, the answer to that is fairly simple: designing games is similar to writing a book. The more 'storytelling' involved in the game (and it's increasingly demanded) the less flexible you can be with the protaganist, especially of part of the point of the game is to get into the character's head. To use something like "Alan Wake" for an example, a quick gender switch wouldn't have worked with that. Making it "Alice Wake" trying to rescue her lost husband would have involved substantial alteration to key parts of the game to allow for what would have been a distinctly differant perspective. Similar arguements can also be made for other psychological horror games like "Silent Hill" which in many cases include metaphors for children's fears of growing up and developing sexuality and so on, which are also present in girls, but would have involved entirely differant monster imagery and plot development. That said they *DID* have a female protaganist in "Silent Hill 3".
The above point can also be argued in reverse where for example "Tomb Raider" or "Dreamfall" or numerous other games with female protaganists would have required a massive amount of re-write to allow for a male character.
It's also noteworthy that for all claims of "womens liberation" certain aspects of society remain extremely sexist. Organized crime is one of those areas. While there are some isolated examples of female gangsters and such IRL, not to mention various crime movies, a game trying to keep to some pretensions of realism is going to feature a male character largely because organized crime is one of those areas. The Mafia, Triad, Yakuza, etc... all male dominated worlds. The few women in power in such organizations got there through some arrangement of politics or succession, the story of some low-end hood rising from a botched drug exchange tobecome the defacto leader of all crime in a city is going to cause some "suspension of disbelief" issues above and beyond the fantasy aspects involved for those who have read about such organizations via the busts and crackdowns we've seen through the years and are familiar with things like "The Sopranos" which drew upon this knowlege.... even so though, even here you DO see a few totally over the top games like "Saint's Row 2" which do indeed allow you to play as a girl, however at the same time that game is going more for "unbridled insanity" rather than even a remote pretension of realism... I mean your doing things like using military assault choppers to protect drug dealers making deliveries (I kid you not).
At any rate, if you look at generes like "Hidden Object" games and "adventure" games you'll notice a lot of games involving women which are heavily story driven. I suspect in part because these are the generes women are mostly drawn to for gaming (and no, I don't think this is because this is all that is produced for them). In cases where people argue that women are being forgotten because with some (mentioned in this thread) exceptions men are better represented in gaming, all you need to do is point towards the other section of a store's game shelf with the $20 "casual" titles and such to see it's not strictly speaking true.
As far as better representation of women in storytelling for serious video games? I don't think women are exactly under-represented, but I figure the only thing that is going to change things is to see more women go into game development and writing. There are women in the industry, but I can't think I've even heard of some rich lady deciding she was going to become a game producer and start financing developers to make the kinds of games she would like to see on the market.
Much like when certain minorities claim they are under represented in comic books and such, you'll also notice that there are few people of those minorities who decide to even try to become comic writers or artists to break into the industry. Right now for example most of the people who do comics are white or asian, manga and western comics have also been increasingly inspiritng each other. As a result the majority of characters in the "sequential art" storytelling medium are white or asian.
