The Creepy Cull of Female Protagonists – Jimquisition

I personally got very negative responses from people when I said that it was creepy and messed up that Cortana, from the game Halo, was killed off for them to finally do some kind of character development for Master Chief who does little more in the series but rush into rooms full of invading aliens with guns blazing. That’s before we even touch on the other creepy elements in the ways she is portrayed in the other parts of the game. Women in games tend to act as property or prizes of the male protagonists far to often, Halo is just one of them. Mass Effect is only game I can think of where you have full freedom in selecting a female protagonist throughout the story arc that I can think of, but the game is marketed almost exclusively as a game with a male protagonist.

It’s more than just the fact that female protagonists are “curtailed”, but the fact that you can’t even discuss it. If you go on a forum and critique a games sexist elements, you are likely to experience an environment that is so hostile to women you may actually be afraid to go back. Example, Anita Sarkeesian has been issued death, rape, and other vulgar attacks simply for even suggesting that we take a closer look at tropes of women in gaming. She even spoke at a TED conference about it. I looked at the audience, and a lot of people seemed uncomfortably silent by her presentation. People not only vocally endorse the way the gaming industry is now, but they attack naysayers. Sometimes criminally. As the video reveals, publishers even belief that “no one will play a female protagonist”.

Nearly half of all gamers are women now, and you know what, that is a pretty large market base. But less than 4% of games have exclusively female protagonists, which means the other 96% have exclusively male protagonists or 45% which have “selectable female” protagonists, like the Mass Effect Trilogy, Borderlands, and multiplayer parts of several first -person-shooters. The message becomes pretty clear. Gaming is for men, made specifically for them as an audience, and the industry and a vocal fan-base have no intention of changing that, and will defend that privilege via blatant misogyny. The game “Remember Me” which I really want to play, I didn’t find out about through normal methods, like advertising… I only found out about it because I went looking for games with female protagonists.

Games with female protagonists only get 40% of the same marketing budget, as if the developers are intentionally trying to make them unpopular, or perpetuate the message that they are. It’s well known that it’s not just the content you put in the game, but the way in which you market a game that makes it successful. I don’t know about other people, but I am sick and tired of playing or seeing so many games with redundantly shallow male protagonists, and games with a complete absence of women, or female characters in general (playable or otherwise), or if they do, “sexually objectified” playable characters. I like playing games with strong female protagonists, that aren’t perfect models made for male adoration.

Also, I’d be willing to bet that of the 45% of games with female selectable characters, most of them are likely MMO games. I wonder how those numbers would change if you excluded MMO games because of the fact that they as a genre are almost required as an industry standard to feature gender selection. Additionally, are they really unbiased? An examination of female character design in MMO gaming will reveal, out the gate, that character design is highly sexualized from the get go. In fact, it’s an oddity to find an MMO that doesn’t feature sexualized female clothing models, to include first and third person shooters. But if I avoided sexist games, I’d have nothing to play. Seriously, I wouldn’t.

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