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[SolidSnakex]

Does anyone remember when GTA: San Andreas was announced and the collective reaction on GAF (as well as elsewhere on the internet) leant heavily towards "I don't like the main character. It's not racist, I just can't 'relate'. I can't 'see myself in his shoes'"?

I think the reaction to CJ was fairly positive here. Yes there were definitely some that mentioned what you said. But they were few and far between. And one of them was banned (the "I don't watch porn with black people" guy). Now other places on the net (GameFaqs) were hell holes when he was announced as the main character.

Tomb Raider is proof that people will buy games with female lead characters. You just have to put them in a game that's appealing to people. I love Mirror's Edge, but it obviously niche its approach (a first person game where you're encouraged to avoid enemies).

 

[seady]

I think the reaction to CJ was fairly positive here. Yes there were definitely some that mentioned what you said. But they were few and far between. And one of them was banned (the "I don't watch porn with black people" guy). Now other places on the net (GameFaqs) were hell holes when he was announced as the main character.

Tomb Raider is proof that people will buy games with female lead characters. You just have to put them in a game that's appealing to people. I love Mirror's Edge, but it obviously niche its approach (a first person game where you're encouraged to avoid enemies).

I think GAF is the worst place to do 'focus testing'. What we think here is not what people elsewhere think. It probably seem 'obvious' to say "focus testing kills creativity!" or "female character are perfectly fine as done right!", but I think we have to give some credits to these business process too. Just Dance sold a ton and GAF users will never understand why it sells so great because we only look at the quality of games to determine if it is a good game or not, but the whole universe out there look at other things too.

 

[Regulus Tera]

Tomb Raider is proof that people will buy games with female lead characters with sexual traits appealing to the adolescent market.

Fixed that for you.

 

[Ryu]

When it comes to female leads in games, I am always reminded of Mass Effect. the main character is pretty much whatever you want it to be since the facial construction details are pretty vast, but if you look at the promotional materials, you'd think it's just another bald space marine meat head. Female Shepard is nowhere to be found - despite in my opinion being the better of the two options.

 

[Fox Mulder]

When it comes to female leads in games, I am always reminded of Mass Effect. the main character is pretty much whatever you want it to be since the facial construction details are pretty vast, but if you look at the promotional materials, you'd think it's just another bald space marine meat head. Female Shepard is nowhere to be found - despite in my opinion being the better of the two options.

I agree that female shepard is better, even the voice work. They put a lot of work into both characters, but I understand why they only hype the male version.

 

[Zachack]

I hope those rules are more acceptable. I'm not going to count 'em all, but my guess is there's at least a 5:1 tilt towards male leads.

They'll be acceptable once I've won the argument! From the list, I think my main observation would be that while Male-lead games include highly anthropomorphized characters like Spyro or Kirby (who'd I'd almost consider un-gendered), the Female-lead games are almost entirely "realistic" characters. They also tend to have personalities written onto them, unlike a game like Battlefront (I wasn't even aware there was a story) or R6 (also, it's been a looooooong time since I've played this but I thought women could be operatives). I don't know if the latter is actually a positive or a negative, though; I do remember some minor commentary following the original Half-Life about how the original, non-Gordon box-art was better for women players since the game had almost no gender references when mentioning Freeman.

I guess my position would remain, though, that while top-selling male-lead games do obviously outnumber female-lead games, I'd hesitate to agree that the imbalance is particularly skewed when discussed from the standpoint of meaningful representation in game characters.

As an addendum, I was debating attacking the use of Mario as a "male-lead" since his role is almost entirely genderless in most games, but decided against it because Peach is such an incredibly negative stereotype that it pretty much defines Mario as masculine.

 

[A Link to the Past]

I like how much of the discussion is about the writer, not its contents.

 

[BobsRevenge]

A woman.

Covering games.

Worse than that: she's a feminist, and would like to see games have a lot less testerony "hells ya, brah" bullshit, and explore more different themes and characterisation.

You can probably see why a certain segment of GAF feels threatened by her.

Nice.

 

[Pimpbaa]

Fixed that for you.

Come on, every guy likes big bouncing boobies (not just the adolescent market). Even you!

 

[Amibguous Cad]

It shouldn't surprise anyone that sexism, subconscious or no, can have an effect on what pops up in entertainment media.

That this provokes reflexive defensiveness in most of the populace (this is scarcely a gamers only problem) only proves the extent to which privilege shapes our thoughts.

 

[Aselith]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11_ywaTT-MY

I like how she's such a douchbag that she corrects someone word while he's talking and is so stupid that she actually uses a word that is just as fucking wrong.

But that's beside the point.

I think her thought is faulty. Shaming a company is never a good way to acomplish much on a permanent basis. The industry needs more female perspectives in the industry at high levels before what she wants will happen. There can be good female characters as is shown in Valve games and a number of other companies but a main character will nearly always share a common experience with the writer socially/ethnically/etc. This only really changes when it is a made up being like a robot dude or an alien or what have you.

That is just good writing to be honest. You write what you know and most writers are white dudes. That needs to change before this shift with really diverse protaganists occurs. The industry needs to encourage females and minorities to become videogame writers if they want this. Not programmers, not community managers, not producers, not whatever else. The writers need to be female before we can have really good female protaganists.


By the way, using the example of Samus and Lara Croft is just fucking retarded. Samus is essentially a robot dude that morphs into a female at the end of the game and Lara Croft is just a stereotype natural proportions or not. Using those two examples as companies doing it right just makes you realize how starved the industry is for female heroines.