Jimquisition: The Creepy Cull of Female Protagonists

[chozo_hybrid]

I like well done female leads in games, because it gives a guy like me a unique perspective/look into the game.

What was the game with the women with the holographic thing on the back of her neck, it's bugging me.

 

[Dr. Doomsduck]

Outside of RPGs, there arn't many games I can think of that have female protagonists, but I've never heard people complain about that. Would Portal be substantially better if you were playing Chris instead of Chell? The first time you saw your character through a portal, I remember thinking "Oh, the character's a woman." I can't think of anything else I thought and I doubt there was anyone who threw the game away in disgust.
If anything, it seems to me Publishers are just continuing to aim at the largest demographic as they always do, which is male so they seem to think the main character has to be male in order to connect with them.

The problem with Portal is that Chell is not so much a character as she is an empty shell. We hardly (if ever) learn anything about her, we only see her accidently through a portal and not even the other characters refer to her as 'she' or in any feminine sense.

Put this up against the iconic Gordon Freeman, who not only has a first and a last name, a complete backstory (according to wikipedia anyway) and is the subject of most of the posters and box-art. The image is skewed, In portal, there is far more attention to the game, whereas with Half-life this is divided between the game and Gordon.

This subject was brought up in the 'should Lara be gay' thread. My problem there was that my sexuality ie 'straight female' is ignored just as much as gay men and women but it seems people just want to skate over the top of that and ignore straight women because apparently we aren't a minority and the only good female protagonist in video games just has to be gay.

I hope that lady in Remember Me has a big sloppy snog with some Tom Hiddleston lookalike right up in in the camera.

I would play any game JUST for a Tom Hiddleston lookalike

Anyway, I think that the representation of lesbians is an important issue to be tackled specifically because of that 'girl on girl is hot' trope that occurs in so many sleezy games. Making a character 'lesbian' for the sole purpose of being titillating to the menfolk is just as bad as the objectification of the dead-or-alive ladies and does very little to represent actual lesbians in games. Moreover, Giving one character a deep, meaningful homosexual relationship (male or female) is even rarer than a heterosexual relationship from a woman's POV. All of them deserve more attention, but I think that in this case, us straight females have the advantage and personally, I wouldn't mind Lara Croft being gay, as long as it isn't played for the fapping of fourteen-year-olds.

 

[Undeadpool]

Oh, no. Not more gender. I thought we were done with this months ago!

I'd love for it to be. Too bad the only way to have that happen is WITH DISCUSSION. Seriously, anyone who says that there is no sexism problem in gaming is straight-up LYING TO THEMSELVES and crap like this just proves it.

 

[Bad Jim]

Jim! You can't just claim that female protagonists never initiate any intimacy or have any agency and completely ignore Kerrigan in Heart of the Swarm.

It's one of the biggest franchises around, and it's was only released about two weeks ago. How can you not be aware of such a glaring counterexample to your thesis? Did you record that a month ago or something?

 

[Dr. Doomsduck]

I like well done female leads in games, because it gives a guy like me a unique perspective/look into the game.

What was the game with the women with the holographic thing on the back of her neck, it's bugging me.

It's called Remember Me, something Capcom is working on right now and the subject of those penny arcade interviews Jim sampled. The thing around her neck is, if I recall correctly, some sort of lock to make sure her evil overlords keep her in check.

 

[Dr. Mongo]

After I saw the video I had to think of "No one lives forever", a brilliant game starring secret agent Kate Archer.

The game was heavily stealth based, humourus and story driven. There was a second part that was even better, and then they released a standalone addon: Contract J.A.C.K.

No stealth, just action and the protagonist was ... well, you guessed it, a guy.
This was the death of a promising game series.

 

[mjc0961]

Agreed completely on how weird it is that people don't want to see a female character they're controlling kiss a male character because that's "gay", but want to buy all the games with a big hunky dude on the cover. That and the whole "no female protagonists or females on boxart" is pretty creepy. Not as creepy as that ending, mind you (does anyone have any mind bleach? ), but still creepy.

Anyway, just want to throw this out there: did publishers ever stop and think for a second that the reason games with female leads don't sell has little to do with a female lead and a lot to do with the game sucking ass? I'm just thinking off the top of my head here for games with female leads, and I'm coming up with stuff like Wet, Amy, X-Blades, Heavenly Sword, and most of the Tomb Raider games (not the newest one, but the other ones like Underworld and whatever the awful PS1 ones were called). Stuff I didn't like not because eww a chick keep her away from me so I don't catch the cooties, but stuff I didn't like because the games sucked ass to varying degrees. Then I can think of Portal, which was of course fucking excellent and everyone loves it, and Trace Memory, another great game but one that probably didn't sell very well. But not because of a female lead, but because it was an obscure point-and-click style adventure game for the DS at a time when the DS was still fairly new and didn't have a massive install base yet.

So basically my point is this: maybe try having some games made that both have a female lead and don't suck more than Jim is going to be at PAX Prime this year (thank god for daddy Jim). Might sell a little better. You know, like Portal.

I wish to god we had more non-sexy, single (?), female protagonists in the vein of... Samus

You mean the Samus with tig ol' bitties and a nice shapely ass who goes around wearing a skin-tight blue outfit? The one who you get to see in a bikini or other skimpy clothing if you play the games well enough?

Spoiler: This Samus?

Yeah, the only way you could have picked a worse example of non-sexy female protagonists is if you'd picked Lara Croft.

 

[Legion]

snip

Fine, we'll have to agree to disagree. For me, what it comes down to is this: Bioware treated their female and male characters (who are fundamentally identical in every way apart from what's happening between their legs) differently. And I'm sure we have a word for treating people differently based purely on their sex...

We have a word for discriminating based upon sex.

Treating people differently based upon their gender is not sexism. Treating somebody better or worse because of it is.

 

[Jennacide]

Who needs Anita Sarkesian when the Jimquisition is here to actually elicit discussion about sexism problems in the industry. Long live Jim!

Nobody needs Anita, as she's an awful example of feminism. She cherry picks examples, makes horrible exaggerations and leaps in logic, and rarely, if ever addresses both sides of the argument. I got as far as her second episode of Women vs Tropes before I was disgusted with her reprehensible display of what she thought feminism is. You see, here is the rub that drives me nuts about other feminists, being as I am one: The point is we are equal. Not an inferior to males, nor a superior. Don't relegate us to second class, but also don't assume we shouldn't ever be the targets in story anymore either.

 

[I.Muir]

It's the publishers
I could not care less whether the protagonist was female
Well I do but not in that way

 

[Treblaine]

Femshep wasn't included in the marketing until ME3 and even then they had a beauty contest (ugh) to redesign the default female character into someone more, uh, "aesthetically pleasing".

No they didn't...

They had a competition to choose the default look for female Shepard. The only differences were hair/eye/skin colour. It's not like they asked people whether or not she should have larger breasts, smoother skin or anything.

That's hardly a beauty contest.

The post you reply to is an example of the problem with the industry.

The guardians resort to such derailing hyperbole, they know damn well it's not a beauty contest but seem to think it's some bandwagon to label everything sexist and awful regardless of the truth. But this is about the truth, it must be about the way things actually are and why.

Between them and the quietly numbers who consistently choose burly masculine action heroes instead, what chance do women in computer games have?

When they aren't being ignored by sexist, their supposed advocates are denigrating every aspect of their appearance even when most reasonable. The clear message being sent by both sides is "don't have women in games".

Because you can't really single out a single game for not having women in it, because any one game might reasonably not have any women and what can you say other that "there's no women in it". But women's depiction can be picked apart so mercilessly and disingenuously, you think that developers are going to sit there and just take it?

 

[Nettacki]

Why does female characters not get face time on covers, or play second fiddle, or not be the playable characters? Because they don't sell at all, game is a business first, entertainer second. If you want them, you have to buy them, bitching about it won't do a damn thing, as action speaks louder than words, and as far as businesses are concern, most prefer the status qou.

I don't think you can really say that until we get a AAA level game with a female protagonist that gets as much marketing money put behind it as a Call of Duty or a Gears of War. Something like Tomb Raider, except more.

 

[Costia]

Good episode. Finally something that isn't a nerd rage/hate-rant.
There is one point i would have added: most publishers/developers etc are 80-90% men, so it's really not surprising they would prefer a male hero. Though this is a more complicated topic.
I also wonder about focus groups and such. It looks like there are quite a lot of female gamers, were they even in that group? are we missing any new "girly" game genres? Maybe it's fine that most of the FPS heroes will be boys, if it's their target audience, as long as there are games with female protagonists that were aimed for the female audience from the start.
I think there was a talk at DICE about the audiences the current game market is completely missing, like the older people.

 

[blackrave]

Okay, fuck it!
I always play as a male in character creation RPGs because I like projecting myself into a character.
Next time though, I'm gunna try playing as a woman. MY SENSE OF SELF CAN TAKE IT!

Jim, call me! <3

I tried it few times, went nowhere sadly
When main character can be customized, I simply can't play as female
On the other hand, when there is fixed female character (Beyond Good And Evil, The Longest Journey, Dreamfall, Portal, Mirror's Edge, Tomb Raider, etc.) I have no issues with that
So when given choice I pick my own gender
But when there is no choice I have no problems with that

 

[Jennacide]

I wish to god we had more non-sexy, single (?), female protagonists in the vein of... Samus

You mean the Samus with tig ol' bitties and a nice shapely ass who goes around wearing a skin-tight blue outfit? The one who you get to see in a bikini or other skimpy clothing if you play the games well enough?

Yeah, the only way you could have picked a worse example of non-sexy female protagonists is if you'd picked Lara Croft.

Pretty sure you knew exactly what they meant. Original Samus, before Zero Suit fucked everything up. And yes, there are several examples that can be made, Jade from Beyond Good & Evil, April from The Longest Journey, Chell from Portal, Shanoa from Order of Ecclesia (though box art is meant to be a little sexy). Not going to argue there should be more examples, but there are some. Samus used to be in this list, but newer devs on the series have done screwed that up for us, must like what became of Lara until just recently.

 

[Sheo_Dagana]

Extremely interesting video. It's kind of sad that I've not really realized this was a thing... but as I go to my local GameStop and take a look at the wall, I see that there are next to NO games that have a female on the cover, despite many of those games having women who play large roles in them. I like that Mass Effect 3 had a reversible cover with Fem Shep on the other side, but Fem Shep still takes a backseat to male Shepard. I mean, take a look at the fact that I have to specify 'Fem' when speaking about Shepard - most people assume my Commander is male unless I say otherwise.

I like playing as females in video games, despite being a male, and I see nothing wrong with a female protagonist initiating some sort of romantic activity; after all, my female Jedi Knight in SWTOR was more than happy to show Doc the way back to the engine room. I'm not straight, but I like to think my sexual preferences have nothing to do with it. Or, with the exception of SWTOR, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, or Skyrim (and sometimes even then I'm RPing it), I don't project myself onto the main character like most people do. I don't generally like to think, "what would I do in this situation?" I'm typically thinking, "what would this character do in this situation?" That's why silent protagonists bug the crap out of me.

I know I had read somewhere that Hideo Kojima was interested in making a game that fleshed out the back story of popular Metal Gear mentor, the Boss, but maybe he ran into the same problems. It's interesting to think about and gives you a whole new perspective on how video games come to be. Well, for my part, at least...

 

[theyellowmeteor]

Well, I'm a straight man, and I'd very much like to play a game with a female character, as long as she acts like a woman would, I mean Skyrim, Kingdoms of Amalur, Fable, or Mass Effect, for example, don't count, because you do the same thing regardless of gender, and I think those things to do were designed with a male lead in thought.

I think it'd be cool to see the world through a woman's eyes, even if its just a crude representation, as long as it will improve, I'm all for that. And I find nothing wrong in playing as a girl kissing a dude, I mean that's, you know, expected from a girl who fancies that dude. I think that if the players are to be blamed for this 'no female leads' bullshit, is because most of us have this completely cretinous opinion that a player character is someone on which you can project, and sort of bring yourself in that game. And that's not always true, in fact that's rarely true. Most of these blank slates are just characters with non-existent personality, and you can't even choose how to act based on the surroundings, which makes the whole idea of a blank slate pointless. While player characters with an actual character are much more fun to play with, IMO.

And to whoever thinks that "Women should't be player characters, it's as simple as that.", NOTHING is as simple as that. Ever. This, in fact, is the complete opposite of 'simple as that'.

And Jim, I don't think you were mean enough.