Jimquisition: Let's End the FPS Sausage-fest

[Right Hook]

Huh so Jim is a woman now...and a sexy one at that!

 

[Furrama]

This made me happy. Thanks Jim.

 

[Mylinkay Asdara]

Yup. It sucks to have to play dudes when you aren't one. It's not that you're playing a dude, so much, it's that you have to, because they didn't give you any other option. My fiancé knows I have 'dibs' on any female toons when a game has them, because there are usually only a few and they are mine because I have spent years and years and years in a male avatar across so many titles that when the option to play my own gender comes up, I'm doing it. Even though that sometimes forces me to play character types I wouldn't normally favor, if they are the girl, that's me. It's a little ridiculous that we're still in this situation, as players, where we have to scavenge for our own gendered toons.

 

[Proverbial Jon]

I'm a guy who prefers to play as female characters where possible... what does that say about my gender role?

I said everything I wanted to say about the Colonial Marines problem in a previous thread when this came up before, so instead I'll just echo Jim's wizened words as usual.

 

[Kuth]

I'll be blunt, we are not looking at this issue in the right angle. Jim's points are valid but the sad truth is that that it's not about historical accuracy, or even present day accuracy with women in the military, the reason women are excluded is because of one thing: Men are disposable.

Think about this for a few, who has died more in wars between sexes? Men. Who is forced to sign up for selective services (in the U.S)? Men. Who are more enlisted? Men? Seeing the pattern here?

It is a cultural issue why women are not included video games, nothing more. Remember Poison from the game Final Fight? Originally she was a woman, but in the US she was just a guy who looked like a woman. Why the hell would they do this? Because in our society, we don't like women getting their asses handed to them. We don't like seeing women get their head blown off, ripped apart, melt in acid, set on fire, have numerous spider eggs hatch in their bodies to explode all over the skin. We do not like women to get hurt, this is in reflection of just how games are.

Men are always off to rescue the princess. This is such a common trope, yet most don't look deeper into why. Some would assume it's to reinforce stereotypes that women should know their place, but what if there was a different reason? What if the reason we reinforce such a trope and accept it, is because we believe women are unable to handle themselves in combat? That women are more likely to die then men when it comes down to it. What if a woman dying actually meant more of a loss than a man dying?

We actual do this, we have placed the value of women higher than men. Women can breed children, men can not. So logically our forefathers would ensure the protection of the sex that can make kids compared to the sex that just sticks some sperm, and call it a day. That does not mean this idea or tradition is fine, it isn't.

Men have been raised under this ideal that men go to war, fight, defend, and sacrifice their lives for the cause. This has changed in the last 50 years. Men don't have to go to war, they don't have to sacrifice their lives, or give up their resources or well being for the comfort of women, but old traditions die hard.

Jim scratched the surface of a very large iceburg of issues. Men are disposable in games because society has accepted it. Society has accepted it because they were told to accept it.

 

[WindKnight]

https://images.nonexiste.net/popular/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/This-is-why-I-dont-like-knifing-people-in-BF3.jpeg

Look at this guy. Look at his eyes. He's almost like a puppy.


Now imagine if that guy was replaced with a in game version of this: http://i.usatoday.net/news/_photos/2011/04/24/women-soldiers-afghanistan-0I3D7RJ-x-large.jpg

I think the more pertinent point would be, 'why do we need that kind of detail in a game'. Thats going a little overboard, and sure that would stop me using melee weapons on men or women, and just used silenced guns for that kind of thing.

 

[krodux]

Good point Jim, but actually in Call of Duty, they do show women, well actually, a woman in CoD4 as she's hear in the mission, Charlie Don't Surf, then you have to rescue her from a downed helicopter in the mission, Shock and Awe

Yeah that's true, but the female characters in CoD (with the exception of the Russian president's daughter in MW3) hardly stick around for very long. There still aren't any female characters (except for the previously mentioned) who fall outside the realm "bit parts" (That is to say showing up for a few seconds or having one or two lines of dialogue).

 

[Imp_Emissary]

Come on Jim, you shouldn't have thanked God this time, thank Mother Gea, when dressing a feminist womyn, you don't need to thank a phallocentric Male God, thank a female one, for Gea's sake.

You're practice futility friend! God is omnipotent, and beyond comprehension. Only nothing is omnipotent and you can't see nothing. That means he, she, it, and they are all "correct" and "incorrect" pronouns to use on God. God is a woman, a man, a genderless thingy, and a group of creatures all at once and yet not at all.
<_< But I can't picture that in my head, let alone describe it.
So, lets just say God in lady form looks like Oprah.

Also, so we stay with the topic; Not having playable women in shooters is crap, realism is a poor excuse (especially when we have soldiers fighting unmaned four legged walking tanks), and strangely Jim is a pretty lady.

 

[SnakeoilSage]

Team Fortress 2 has the Heavy and the Scout.

Any argument against scaling issues is invalid.

 

[Vampire cat]

Well from what I know from religion God (with an uppercase), usually refers to the male Christian god, occasionally known as YHWH or Yahweh. While god (with a lower case) usually means gods like Zeus, Aprhodite or Artemis.
Still, he really should have referred to Gea, since apparently that's what some radical feminists do, and not referring to a explicitly female deity is misogynist and cissexist.

Why so? He's not roleplaying a radical feminist, just a (very sexy) female Jim! No reason he needs to go all radical on us =3.

...

So hot...

 

[MrCalavera_v1legacy]

Hey, there was a female character in first Modern Warfare. Female NPC to be precise. Who was later to be saved by your male protagonist...

Spoiler

And then she died anyway.

OK, maybe this wasn't a very good example.

Anywho, I was also surprised by the fact of not including female characters in Aliens: Colonial Marines multi.
I mean: no women? In game being a part of ALIEN franchise? ...Really?

Yet I can think of a FPS that needs no female characters and that is Team Fortress 2, a game which still plenty of women play and has tons of yaoi for some reason. It would interesting to release a Team Fortress 2 esque FPS with only women in it and see how it goes.

What about Pyro? Ok, but seriously: TF2 is set in a stereotypical, quasi 60's world, hence the lack of female mercenaries can be kinda justified.
Still, if you want play as a female character, there are some mods and custom servers which can allow you to.

PS. Speaking about TF2 - Captcha: Vicious Cycle. Now i have an idea what to do for the next hour!
PS2. Jim in drag looks surprisingly well.

 

[el_kabong]

Good point Jim, but actually in Call of Duty, they do show women, well actually, a woman in CoD4 as she's hear in the mission, Charlie Don't Surf, then you have to rescue her from a downed helicopter in the mission, Shock and Awe

So the only woman is an earpiece and then a damsel in distress? Kinda just proves his point. And there's still none in the online component.

As a man, I prefer to play as men in online games. That character is my avatar in the world, and playing as a girl feels wierd. So yeah I can imagine some girls would feel the same way.

Although with CoD and BF raking in the money they do with their current gaming model, I can't see them changing any time soon.

I don't know if you could say it was a "damsel in distress" scenario. Although she was a female who was in trouble, the whole COD series is full of saving or coming to the aid of fellow soldiers (most of whom are male). I think of it more like a generic mission type for a COD game where there just happens to be a woman.

OT: As noted by some other posters, context is a big factor. For modern US army-based shooters, it makes sense that there are few women in "the shit" because there are currently very limited combat roles for females. Though, it wouldn't bother me because guns know no gender.

Fantasy/SciFi shooters really depends on the franchise. I wouldn't be comfortable if some game company shoe-horned in a female Space Marine into the 40K universe (though I'd definitely welcome female characters from the Sisters of Battle or other factions). In Aliens, it's not only fitting that they're should be women, but a distinct step away from the franchise to not include them.

I think another thing that may even indirectly affect game makers is the whole sexism argument. It's been clear from recent buzz stories about Hitman, Daniel Tosh, Tropes vs. Women, etc. that issues regarding gender brings out the absolute worst of the internet (both sides) on forum posts and general discussion. Truth be told, all of the above controversies are about artistic ability. Anything done against anybody, for any reason, can be considered offensive if proper care wasn't taken in its presentation.

Developers who wish to avoid violence against women controversies (who don't know anything about how one can tastefully present violence), may choose to avoid the issue entirely by omitting female characters from their games (see also - children in any GTA game). I don't know if this has been something that has affected previous games, but we're already starting to see it with talk from the God of War developers (not that I consider omitting the more heinous of Kratos behavior as a bad thing).

 

[Waddles]

Forgive me if I am wrong, but didn't Halo have some female marines?

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

I agree, completely. And despite being a guy, I can relate to women 100% because I'm an RPG fan. Many RPGs like to have your class choice also be your character choice, so there have been many times where I felt forced into a specific class because my class of choice is a female character, and I generally don't like playing as a female character. So yeah, granted I have to deal with it in the minority case, but I can still use that to think about how much it would suck if EVERY game pigeon-holed me like that.

 

[RockPlazaCentral]

It's really odd that Aliens: Colonial Marines doesn't have female characters for multi-player. Sigourney Weaver is 6 feet tall, so it would have been easy to put an accurate character model of her in the Aliens game while still keeping the same hit box size as the male characters.

 

[Raso719]

I mean for all of the "realism" these games propose to present the lack of women on the battlefield is strange, considering it is the 21st century. But at the same time, the way that politics have been lately, with scapegoats and villains dominating issues (rather than the issues themselves) and all of the back peddling on so many issues we've been making it would not, in the slightest, surprise me to see a future where women are broodmares to provide soldiers to the state to go off and fight our many, pointless wars for our corporate overlords.

I suppose if you have as much "faith" in mankind as I do the very fact that colonial marines suggests that humans are even still alive a few thousand years in the future makes it utter fantasy while the aliens, cryo-sleep and other sci-fi elements are entirely plausible.

I'm not saying any of this makes any of it ok, mind you. I actually hope that having more women as main characters could lead to some new styles of narrative, rather than all of the crappy, military revenge porn we see these days. Ideally something more mature than "She almost gets raped because she's weak and pathetic and nothing like the old, ass kicking take on the character so you want to protect her and help her escape the island."

 

[Draconalis]

Jim makes a very believable... if ugly, woman.

 

[bdcjacko]

Funny how old games like Unreal, Aliens vs. Predator 2 etc. had female characters in multiplayer... Modern games are a step down in many directions. Look at Duke Nukem 3D level design for example.

Games have become about cutting as many corners. the relative cheapness of the FPS is one of the reasons it is so prevalent.

So it's no shock it trickles down to the naughty bits.

Speaking as a woman who likes shooters, I agree. It would be nice to have the option, at least. And the lack of a female option has led me to not buy at least one game. (Brink - because seriously? Over a quadrillion customization options and not one of them is female? Because it would have cut down on the options available? Could you not have not half a quadrillion male options instead? I don't think anyone would have been unsatisfied.)

That's also a more general problem. People always look at someone else being given an option as them having an option taken away.

Why is it a thing that women have to be petite and short?
They have body sizes that differ as much as men do, sure they have less natural muscle than men do, but that doesn't mean they all have the physique of a 16 year old with two watermelons duct taped to them.

To be fair, a 6' woman is up there on the curve.

Then again, in games populated by hulking refigerators of men, I think the argument that there are too many tall women is kind of...What's the word I'm looking for...Ridiculous.

While that was the example I was thinking of, I can't get past the fact that it's throwing up an easy target for the militant feminist, who will no doubt point out that the fact that the one female's sole purpose is to be rescued isn't all that much of a step forward.

Still, a woman in CoD is a woman in CoD.

Is she playable in either single player or multiplayer? Because that's the crux of the issue here. Jim may have started with the lead-in that you might think women don't exist, but the main thrust here is less about NPCs and the like.

Also, if you think that's "militant feminism," I think you're using both of those words wrong.

Your post has got me thinking... This is such a binary discussion. Why aren't there more male characters that use to be female chacters and vise versa?

 

[Korten12]

Forgive me if I am wrong, but didn't Halo have some female marines?

While you couldn't play female Spartan's until Halo 3 (which was odd considering they established female Spartans a bit before they released Halo CE) there was female marines in Halo 2 and so on.

 

[Meatspinner]

Team Fortress 2 has the Heavy and the Scout.

Any argument against scaling issues is invalid.

TF2 has a rock, paper, scissors class approach to it's game balance. Most shooters don't. Everybody is supposedly on the same level. your argument is invalid