Apparently Lara Croft is Non-Existent

[DK]

My simple man brain is not capable of comprehending why a female protagonist having a partner and expressing affection for them should bother anyone or make anyone feel uncomfortable. I find the idea of female protagonists spending entire games being concerned entirely with grabbing treasure, fighting bad guys and wearing outfits designed to make teenage boys nurse a semi without ever displaying the ability to or desire to engage in a relationship far more troublesome.

I'd wager that half the companies rejecting the game would have picked it up if the main character had a lesbian partner. The whole thing is just stupid. I'd like to think that as a society we'd be mature enough to not be turned off by this kind of thing, but at the same time I can't really disagree with the producers that there probably would be a minority who would have a moan about it.

Either way I'd play the game and I wouldn't give a trout what she did with her romantic interest.

[Psychotic]

Woman protagonist? Who cares? I think the real issue here is the game's setting. Who the smurf wants to play a game set in France? Good on the publishers for trying to bury this gallic piece of trash.

[Bolivar]

I'm not sure if the stats are painting the accurate picture the author wants. We've already shown a lot of the games with the biggest budgets can feature definitively female leads or games where the gender is up to the player like The Elder Scrolls and Mass Effect, the latter of which spent a good deal of time marketing the game based on the female character. I think they say it's "less than half" that have a female lead or allow the player to choose the gender, and that might be ok with me. We don't need a perfect 50% because that would create a synthetic environment that subverts creativity. I'm sure there are some publishers out there that will refuse to greenlight a game based on a woman protagonist, but I don't see the game industry and its marketing teams as a whole being terrified of female leads or at least subconsciously colluding to keep them out of gaming (they haven't been doing a good job if that's the case).

I think the more interesting point he brought up is how many games with a female character show her expressing affection in a relationship. I do see our gaming culture having a problem with that, even if none of us on this forum do (except BoB :P ). I do wonder if that's a cross-gender issue, though, given how few games I actually see a male lead in a relationship. That might have to do with our culture getting in an uproar over explicit sexuality, but having no problem with explicit violence, and the video game industry perhaps embodies this principle better than any other medium. I've heard George RR Martin call this a uniquely American thing, I'm not sure if it is, I'm curious what our European members think.

[Aulayna]

Mass Effect, [...] which spent a good deal of time marketing the game based on the female character.

To be fair they didn't really start doing that until Mass Effect 3.

[Skyblade]

The statistics are worthless.

Game sales are driven by far more than the protagonist's gender.

For example, first person shooters are incredibly popular and sell well. They also feature mostly male protagonists, which skew the numbers. If you played a girl instead of Master Chief or the Rookie in the Halo games, would they sell any less? No. Heck, you could gender swap the main character and not tell anyone, and no one would know the difference. Did Metroid Prime sell any less because Samus was a girl? Hell, no. The gender doesn't matter, it's far more about the mechanics and the gameplay style, and a male protagonist is used simply out of habit and the fact that companies don't like to experiment.

Do the statistics take that into account? Nope.

And that's only one of dozens of factors that make these statistics worthless.


Games can, and do, sell well with female leads. We've seen tons of examples in recent years alone (which you have all already cited, so I won't bother to go over again). We will see more in the future.

Hopefully somone will get word out to these guys to forget the industry and start crowdfunding it.

[XxSephirothxX]

For example, first person shooters are incredibly popular and sell well. They also feature mostly male protagonists, which skew the numbers. If you played a girl instead of Master Chief or the Rookie in the Halo games, would they sell any less? No. Heck, you could gender swap the main character and not tell anyone, and no one would know the difference. Did Metroid Prime sell any less because Samus was a girl? Hell, no. The gender doesn't matter, it's far more about the mechanics and the gameplay style, and a male protagonist is used simply out of habit and the fact that companies don't like to experiment.

You're ignoring the point, which is: Why do they all have male protagonists? In the vast majority of games, a male protagonist is default. It's expected. It's "normal." I think you're being naive if you think a Halo game with a female Master Chief would have sold as well to a mass audience as the games did with the gravelly voiced male lead.

Similarly, a lot of other examples don't do much to disprove the fact that female leads are pretty marginalized. The Metroid Prime games each only sold a bit more than a million copies. Maybe something like two million lifetime, far lower than the ~10 million Call of Duty sells annually (obviously it's one of the most popular franchises on the planet, but the point is Metroid is very small in comparison). Heavenly Sword was pretty much a flop. Mirror's Edge is well-loved, but only sold about two million. That is pretty decent. Bayonetta wouldn't have a sequel if Nintendo didn't step in to publish the second game as an exclusive for the Wii U.

Sexism can play a role without being overtly malicious. Sometimes it is malicious, as TSoL pointed out about Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women series. But other times it's there, affecting the decisions people make and the way things are presented, and it's easy to overlook because it just seems normal.

[Bolivar]

There are a thousand and one debatable reasons why Halo sold such an astronomical amount of copies. Master Chief's gender was an ancillary one at best. That's not being naive. In this conversation, I'd say he was fairly perceptive.

Judging a game on its ability to sell multiples of millions isn't a fair assessment. Very few games reach that threshold, and dismissing a long line of iconic gaming heroines because later entries sold only a million is pretty arbitrary.

No one's denying there's less absurdly successful games with female leads in them than with men, or that some publishers' reluctance to over-market them is related to it. But the developer overextended himself with the comments at issue, with ample evidence to the contrary.

[The Summoner of Leviathan]

I agree that what propagates sales of a particular game are many things, but I think that the gender of the characters do factor in. What is naive is to think that games such as CoD or Halo would sell as well if you were forced to play a female character or that there would be no controversy. I'd be willing to wager money if Activision decided in the next CoD to make the main character female, that there would be complaints. Heck, it'd be a wager I would be sad to win and happy to lose.

Moreover, it does not change the fact that researchers found out of 669 current-gen games, only 24 had female only protagonist. That's 3.6% of the games! I think that is a bit more than "skewed". I think this itself is an issue that cannot be easily explained away.

long line of iconic gaming heroines

Please elucidate. I, for one, would not call figures like Princess Peach/Toadstool and Zelda "heroines". Peach is a classic damsel in distress. She has like zero agency and is just a plot device for Mario. Zelda fairs not much better. Few gaming "heroines" are given their own games, or even developed fully as a character. Often they are just charicatures of women, sexualized objects, plot devices, marginalized (i.e. secondary/tertiary characters), or their sex is rendered insignificant/invisible. That is not to say that the industry isn't changing and that you cannot find strong female characters that escape or at least complicate these problems, yet the majority of depictions of women in video games is not flattering.

[Aulayna]

She has like zero agency and is just a plot device for Mario. Zelda fairs not much better. Few gaming "heroines" are given their own games, or even developed fully as a character. Often they are just charicatures of women, sexualized objects, plot devices, marginalized (i.e. secondary/tertiary characters), or their sex is rendered insignificant/invisible.

This is exceptionally true of Samus Aran who falls into nearly all of those at the same time. Clad behind that Power Suit you have no idea what her gender is until your reward for being a completionist is her essentially soft-stripping. Then in Other M she pretty much got relegated from being this strong, voiceless, independent bounty hunter into a love interest for Adam. The story behind her is really interested but the games pay it such little attention that it's practically non-existent unless you want to read up on it.

It's very easy to say sales figures aren't important - but publishers are looking for a return on interest so sales figures are sadly quite important.

[Quindiana Jones]

Out of those 669 games, I would also be curious as to how many had male only protagonists.

Also, Toad is a girl?!

[Bolivar]

Speaking of COD, your gender is often just as relegated to non-existence as it is in Metroid. In the Modern Warfare games, your character is sometimes given a name, but he never speaks and you never see his face.

[Jinx]

Out of those 669 games, I would also be curious as to how many had male only protagonists.

Also, Toad is a girl?!

I'm pretty sure Toad is a boy. They made Toadette, his female companion.

[Loony BoB]

Loony BoB--Would you feel weird if the lead was a male, and he jumped into bed with a woman?

No, because when I immerse myself in a role I have no particular issues with the male character sleeping with a female character - however, if I don't like the female character at all then I probably wouldn't enjoy it on any level.

Essentially it all comes down to role immersion. I struggle to immerse myself in the role of a person who displays characteristics which are so far apart from my own. This is why I don't play Renegade on Mass Effect, nor do I encourage my character to sleep with aliens (female included).

I love immersing myself in roles, but sometimes a game will come along that I just can't immerse myself in, and that game can on occasion lose some kind of appeal to me when compared with games in which I can immerse myself in. It's only a natural thing. Still, it's a very small part of a game and I don't think that it has ever impacted whether or not I purchase/play a game.

[Skyblade]

For example, first person shooters are incredibly popular and sell well. They also feature mostly male protagonists, which skew the numbers. If you played a girl instead of Master Chief or the Rookie in the Halo games, would they sell any less? No. Heck, you could gender swap the main character and not tell anyone, and no one would know the difference. Did Metroid Prime sell any less because Samus was a girl? Hell, no. The gender doesn't matter, it's far more about the mechanics and the gameplay style, and a male protagonist is used simply out of habit and the fact that companies don't like to experiment.

You're ignoring the point, which is: Why do they all have male protagonists? In the vast majority of games, a male protagonist is default. It's expected. It's "normal." I think you're being naive if you think a Halo game with a female Master Chief would have sold as well to a mass audience as the games did with the gravelly voiced male lead.

MC's sex has nothing to do with the sales of the games. Heck, he could be a girl, just like Samus, and we'd never know it. He never talks or removes his armor, we only have other people's word for it.

You clued into one very important point here. Games have male protagonists because its normal. The male protagonist is an artifact carried over from a bygone age, kept because people, especially businesses, tend to play safe and conservative.

Similarly, a lot of other examples don't do much to disprove the fact that female leads are pretty marginalized. The Metroid Prime games each only sold a bit more than a million copies. Maybe something like two million lifetime, far lower than the ~10 million Call of Duty sells annually (obviously it's one of the most popular franchises on the planet, but the point is Metroid is very small in comparison). Heavenly Sword was pretty much a flop. Mirror's Edge is well-loved, but only sold about two million. That is pretty decent. Bayonetta wouldn't have a sequel if Nintendo didn't step in to publish the second game as an exclusive for the Wii U.[/i]

Again, you're missing the point. Do you honestly think that Metroid Prime would have sold more with a male protagonist? Do you think that Heavenly Sword flopped because it had a female lead? No. These games stand, or fall, on their own merits, and characterization doesn't enter into it.

Marketing, writing, gameplay... These are what make or break the sales of most games. As long as 90+% of games made feature male protagonists, yeah, they'll sell better and probably have the top sellers on their list. Especially since there are still games which feature female leads as nothing but sex objects. But that doesn't mean that having a female lead is even a minor factor in the sales figures of most games. It isn't.

Wings of Liberty featured James Raynor, a male lead. Heart of the Swarm featured Sarah Kerrigan, a female. Compare the numbers and get back to me on how much that change hurt the sales of the expansion.

[Shiny]

My simple man brain is not capable of comprehending why a female protagonist having a partner and expressing affection for them should bother anyone or make anyone feel uncomfortable.

Because introverted fellows who sit in their mom's basement playing video games all day are unable to deal with their only female interaction and love interest (that being one that's completely fictional and virtual) being attracted to someone other than him.

I think the problem only arises for people who clearly cannot take themselves out of the game. I can play anything and be anything in a game because I can take myself out of it. I'm playing a character the way I think the character would be. Many people always try to be themselves when they're playing. To me, that detracts from my own personal enjoyment as I like unpredictability of knowing how the opposite of myself reacts to situations.