You know why this is a non-issue? Largely because of what I call lib-trolls, those who use liberal issues to troll, and get attention and support from liberals for the simple sake of spreading chaos and getting attention. Dropping an "ist" or an "ism" pretty much gives one a personal army.
When you create a female character for a game, your typical, physically perfect "action hero" type, every bit the equal in idealism as a male hero, you invite criticism. Your lib-trolls run up and immediatly start saying it's sexist, or picking on elements of the game where the character is placed in jeopardy, and say beaten up, claiming that having anything bad to the character is a bunch of misogyny.
With a male character you don't have this kind of issue, you really have to stretch to make an issue of the guy, and usually it comes down to people QQing about how there aren't as many female characters rather than finding anything wrong with the so called "gun bro" in of itself.
Jim is correct as to the trends, but doesn't really get into WHY these trends exist, and how other arguements made, some by people who actually believe them, have contributed to the entire problem. Before we can have more female characters in games, the entire crowd that complains about things like the "Hitman Absolution" trailer, freaks out over the "Cyberpunk 2020" trailer, or cries about Lara Croft getting the crap beaten out of her, needs to be entirely silenced. Until that happens female characters will come with a ton of baggage, and it's something a game company does not want to deal with. Both in terms of more complaints about what happens to that character, but also in arguements that showing a physically ideal woman (the same as a guy with biceps bigger than his neck) is in some way sexist, or ironically that male gamers will feel like they are being insultingly pandered to the whole "oh look marketing thinks that we're all desperate nerds who will buy anything with a hot girl plastered on the front of it".
Like it or not, those championing so called "feminism" usually lead by a troll, have created the current monster and driven the industry increasingly away from it.
As far as romance and sex in video games goes, that's a touchy subject to begin with. To be honest when you get down to it there aren't really enough examples to point to a general trend, especially seeing as this is all fairly new to video games, and there is backlash over the very idea of sex in video games involving a very traditional/stereotypical relationship portrayal. Remember we are living in an era where Bethesda freaked out over fan made nudity/sex mods for Oblivion, Hot Coffee got attention from the federal goverment (and Hillary Clinton arguably wields more power than ever before, she spearheaded that one), and people freaked out over "Alien Sideboob" in Mass Effect. Homosexuals getting involved, a tiny minority of people, demanding massive representation as an entitlement hasn't helped matters either given that roughly 50% of the population in the US alone doesn't even believe they should be allowed to exist (at least not openly) which is why it's a major issue in politics, and why globally we see riots in France over pro-gay laws. When sex in video games comes up, this is close behind, when we haven't even gotten general acceptance of regular sex down (as this points out). Never mind issues like "The Old Republic" where gay romance was added in as requested and complaints STILL continue that it isn't enough gay because it isn't omnipresent through everyone's games.
To be honest there isn't a problem with the general view of female protaganists, I mean heck, huge numbers of guys who are perfectly straight create female characters in MMOs and such to play, which in of itself sparks internet debates and discussions from people who "don't get it" especially given the numbers... and things like "Second Life" have shown that a core of the gaming crowd will pretty much stomach, and even seek out, pretty much any kink you can think of, including (or perhaps especially) with women initiating it.
The issue is that gaming is becoming mainstream, sex has been an issue to begin with, and you really do need to see baby steps here when it comes to inclusion in non-pornographic games. We saw the same things with other media like movies. The first step is of course going to be to shut up, and stop tolerating, the lib-trolls and those who follow them. Do not pay attention to, or support those, making claims of an "ism" or an "ist" in an arguement when it comes to gaming. When someone makes a female protaganist or you see a girl get treated like a guy (brutalized, etc...) for dramatic effect in a game, do everything you can to shut down the critics. After all it's those critics and the noise they make that causes the industry to not want to go here. I mean heck, if we had pretty much done "Kane and Lynch" with a couple of scary sociopathic girls, just imagine the reactions to the torture scenes in the second game, instead of criticizing it for basically being crap (with the most glowing reviews calling it average) lib trolls would instead
have everyone focusing on it for being sexist. If you have a problem with a girl being tortured or whatever, but don't have a problem with it happening to a guy, no matter how justify it, your effectively part of the problem.
Hey, who knows, maybe we'll see a game with a BDSM relationship involved heavily involved in it's core, complete with graphic sex scenes, without the game being a straight out work of porn within our lifetimes. I could easily see things going that far, but as I said baby steps. Get it to the point where a typical "man takes the lead" relationship doesn't get attention, and people don't freak out every time something bad happens to an action-girl in a video game. Then maybe we'll start seeing more media where you have women being the truely aggressive ones (outside of porno games), and then from there perhaps into alternative lifestyles.
Such are my thoughts, I don't expect a lot of people to agree with me. I've said all this before, so I'm probably not to spend a lot of time argueing it here, since pretty much anything that can be said on the subject has already been said on these forums. I'm just including my point of view for the sake of completeness.
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