Sutter Cane said:
Mahoshonen said:
Sutter Cane said:
Jimothy Sterling said:
ZiggyE said:
Why should a game be criticised or scrutinised simply because it doesn't have a female protagonist?
Why shouldn't it?
because there's nothing inherently wrong with telling a story about a guy. The problem with there not being enough good female playable characters in games is an issue because it's a trend, not because having a male protagonist is bad. I mean if I end up staying with someone who cooks spaghetti for dinner every night for 2 weeks, i'd almost certainly get sick of it, but that doesn't mean that choosing to make spaghetti for your evening meal is a bad choice. Criticizing a game for simply choosing to have a male protagonist is basically like criticizing a different friend's cooking skills simply because he chose to make spaghetti in the previous scenario.
The problem is more like every restaurant in the neighborhood cooks nothing but spaghetti, and while it's very good spaghetti, you're going to get tired of it. But the moment you ask the cook to make something other than spaghetti, all of his fans blast you for trying to dictate what he makes, and say that if you don't like it, then go to another restaurant (ignoring the fact that they only cook spaghetti too, natch).
you're right, that is actually a better way to put it. I still stand by however that it'd be far to single out any one restaurant for choosing to serve spaghetti though, since spaghetti is by no means a bad thing. each individual instance is ok, it's the trend that's the problem. Going "X game doesn't have a female protagonist so i'm boycotting it" just makes you sound like you're trying to say that all games need to have playable female characters, which is pretty clearly not what anyone is actually arguing for.
This fails in that the analogy would have to account for a world in which there is only spaghetti and ziti and the restaurants in question only make one or the other. In such a world, only getting one or the other would be normal and so getting the same one every night from a restaurant or person would be significantly more common. It's not like we have a million different genders like we do food types.
You then have to explain why the restaurant should make ziti when the overwhelming majority of clients prefer spaghetti. While it's a lofty and noble goal to support female leads, the demand isn't that present as far as we can tell. As I said in an earlier post, the 47% female to 53% male ratio in the recent ESA study is terribly off base when considering certain markets like the AAA game market. This study includes iOS gamers and over half the respondants did not plan to buy a single game in the year of the study (2012). So the definition of "gamer" was made significantly broader than the group high budget game companies are selling to. Even then, in the previous big study that was 40% to 60% female/male before iOS was included, 80% of those females had a Wii as their primary gaming console. This meant that the AAA market only saw 9% of that 40% owning a ps3 and 11% owning a 360. Because the ratio is smaller, that means that more than 80% of their actual target market was male. Not only that, but the ratio can skew further if the types of games one gender prefers differs from the other. We already see a significant difference in console preference so why not game type? We don't know and people don't appear to be doing that research (please, someone give me the resources to do this, it'd be extremely interesting to learn what the actual demographics are for AAA tarket markets).
So if 80% of your market is male, why does it make sense to try to reach some kind of equilibrium between protagonist genders? Why does it makes sense to try and have 50% of games having a female lead when your market isn't that way? That is every bit as sexist as any other sexist action that lifts one group up for no other reason than because of their gender. Should it be at least 20% female? Perhaps, that brings me to my next point.
This is a business. Every company that is making a game to sell is going to look at the market and see 80% males in the target range. It is not their job to make the protagonist a female to right some arbitrary statistic. You don't change waist high stockings to have more room for men just because there really are some men who wear them. Your basic stocking is going to take into account your target market and if you want to also cater to the few males who use them then you have to figure something else instead that doesn't make it less comfortable for the women. This is why we have a ton of games now that have completely customiseable protagonists. Each one of those games should be touted as having a female protagonist. Mass Effect, Skyrim, Saints Row, and so many others. Taking all of these into account as well as games that have multiple gender options like Resident Evil did may end up having a higher percentage of the AAA market than we may think where the player can be female.
When there is such a high disparity between target demographics, you don't cater to the needs of the fewer at the cost of the many. You either only cater to the majority or you do something else to make them happy. As such, a female character should only be the main protagonist if it is part of the story. The artistic vision, if you will. But if the gender of the main character isn't stable but they can only have one (for financial or time reasons), then business-wise and customer-wise it makes sense to make it male due to current market conditions. The game in question would require different character modeling and more voice acting resources in addition to rescripting who knows how much. The demand isn't high enough to warrant those resources so just leave it as it should be. I would expect no less if women made up a disproportionately larger market segment of something else I enjoy. If you can't play a game because the main character doesn't have two lady lumps under their shirt then you shouldn't buy the game and should get used to disappointment in life if you're going to be that rigid about it. I don't have a problem playing Lara, I don't have a problem with Chell or any of the other female characters I've played over the years. I do prefer an avatar that resembles me, but I don't particularly care even what species it is. Hell, a humanoid dog character would be out of place in the last of us but I'd have eventually gotten past it.
If a little boy draws a picture of a boy weilding a sword, you don't ask him why like he should have made it a female. It's what he wanted to draw and he wasn't wrong for doing so. The same has been traditionally true of art in every other form of media. This question, while valid, is implying that an artist is doing something wrong by choosing one gender instead of another. That makes the question pointedly sexist itself while accusing the creator of sexism.