uanime5 said:
Pat Hulse said:
Entertainment industries are exclusively about appeasement. That's pretty much the entire definition of entertainment. It can be used to enrich lives, sure, but it is first and foremost used to be fun and distracting and give us something to do with our idle time. The better question is who we're appeasing, why we're appeasing them, and how that appeasement would negatively impact the appeasement of others.
We're appeasing those who buy our products to encourage them to buy more of our products. Anyone who doesn't buy our products doesn't matter.
My argument is simply that unless you can think of a counter-argument, changing a male protagonist in a game whose gender identity is not critical to their character (of which there are many) into a female protagonist whose gender identity is not critical to their character without changing much else would be trivially difficult, have a positive impact on communities who ask for such representation, and wouldn't have a significant negative impact on those who aren't asking for it. In my mind, if doing something is easy and would have a positive effect that outweighs the negative effect by a significant margin, it ought to be a no-brainer. We shouldn't FORCE people to do this, obviously, but there's nothing wrong with attempting to convince people to make this decision voluntarily if they find the arguments compelling and if they want to make work that's accessible to a wider audience.
The games sell better with a male protagonist, so giving them a female protagonist is effectively reducing the number of sales for no real reason.
You've also failed to realise that gender is critical for most characters. It's less believable that a woman would save another woman she's never met or fight hordes of minions in order to defeat their leader even when they're no threat to her.
Also you're a hypocrite, as there's little difference between trying to "convince" people to do something and forcing them to do something. If they don't want to do it then you should respect their decision, rather than complain about it.
It is commonly-accepted "conventional wisdom" that games with female protagonists don't sell, or at least they don't sell as well as they would with male protagonists. It is also commonly-accepted "conventional wisdom" that action films with female protagonists don't sell. This was often justified by citing films such as "Elektra", "Catwoman", or "The Brave One", all ignoring the fact that these films were all terrible. Then "Hunger Games" came out, a genre action film starring a female protagonist that is not overtly sexualized, and it broke box office records.
Similarly, I'm sure people arguing that female protagonists don't sell would bring up "Beyond Good and Evil", despite the fact that Ubisoft (who hadn't yet become particularly prominent) was focusing most of its marketing efforts on their "Prince of Persia" title, which had both name recognition and a unique and compelling gameplay mechanic.
They may also bring up "Remember Me", which got mixed-to-negative reviews, and "Mirror's Edge", which generally got negative reviews and was very experimental with the first-person platforming. Meanwhile, the new "Tomb Raider" had the best sales in the franchise since the 90's perhaps because, I dunno, it was a good game? It might not have gotten reviews as high as say "Uncharted", but for a series that had been critically panned for years to pull off a turnaround like it did is not particularly common.
The fact of the matter is, because of this "conventional wisdom", there are very few recent cases that actually support it. No one makes female protagonists because female protagonists don't sell, and on the rare occasion that one surfaces and the game doesn't sell well, it is attributed to the fact that there is a female protagonist. It's confirmation bias, pure and simple. Plenty of games with male protagonists fail, but because there are also games with male protagonists that succeed, no one assumes that's the reason games with male protagonists fail. However, because there are so few games with female protagonists and so few of those games are any good, it is difficult to accurately gauge what kind of impact female characters have on video game sales.
Your statement that women are less inclined to be brave or heroic than men would make me laugh if I weren't afraid you were being serious. I'm just going to err on the side of "you were talking out of your ass" and not dignify it with a response.
Trying to make an argument for something is not the same as forcing anybody to adopt a particular creative vision. More often than not, it's less a question of whether or not someone "wants" to make a character a man or if they are simply making them a man because that's considered the "default". By making the argument for more female characters, it helps creators ask the question of why they make a character male and whether or not they've even considered making the character female. I'd argue that a lot of them haven't, either because it just never occurred to them (people are inclined to make characters by drawing from characters they are already familiar with, which are predominantly male) or because they buy into the "conventional wisdom" that "male is default" and making a character a woman is tantamount to "taking a risk" or "making a statement".
More to the point, if a developer WANTS to have a female protagonist but executives are shooting them down due to the "conventional wisdom", being able to cite a large number of people demanding that kind of representation in games is probably a very helpful thing to have. If people who want better representation don't ask for it, people who want to include it in their games will never be able to convince the marketing department that there's an audience for it.
I'm not about restricting the creativity of people who want to make male characters. I'm just asking that they think about it for half a second if they haven't already, and also making it known that if someone wants to make that sort of a character, there's an audience for that.
