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Gender of a protagonist
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I don't care
You could well imagine a game from the perspective of a female French resistance fighter, but I think that goes to your point of the types of games and the settings that are being used.
The 2nd Medal of Honor game (MOH: Underground) had a character called 'Manon' if I remember correctly.
It was based around the french resistance....she was even on the cover if I recall. As said, she was a french resistance fighter and it worked great with the story.
(I'll double check this in a minute)
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Atari Jaguar
https://medium.com/@adrianchm/the-truth-about-e3-2015-and-female-protagonists-b006094e44b1SeantheMan wrote: »The 2nd Medal of Honor game (MOH: Underground) had a character called 'Manon' if I remember correctly.
It was based around the french resistance....she was even on the cover if I recall. As said, she was a french resistance fighter and it worked great with the story.
(I'll double check this in a minute)
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I don't care
Can we examine this collage in a bit of detail please because I think it highlights a few problems with the debate on the subject.
Are we really going to look to the likes of The Sims, choose-your-hero MMOs and RPGs and a bunch of Fighting games as examples of adequate female representation in games? By that I mean, is anyone really arguing that they're not present or are they arguing for more female leads, better written (female) characters and better representation of females in general, for instance, less reliance on women looking "sexy" on covers to appeal to the 16-35 male demographic?
As for the points made in the image, the first ones made in the HuffPost article were responding to comments made by the Executive Producer of the last Tomb Raider game, the author of the piece actually disagrees with the notion that Lara was vulnerable and needed protection. In the USAToday piece, while women may be feature in a number of games they have categorically not made up a large percentage of leading or significant characters in video games over the years. No one is saying games featuring female leads don't exist and of those that do, no one is saying some of them haven't been utterly fantastic. Finally the digitaltrends piece was referring to E3 this year, so they're correct in noting the general absence of female fronted games from some of the publishers listed compared to others.
In general though, we're not dealing with a "narrative" here, at least as far as I can see no one here is really interested in discussing one. What we do have is a publisher, who is mentioned in the above collage as having previously published many brilliant games with women, publicly expressing concern about a female protagonist in a new AAA game. We have examples of developers having issues with publishers specifically because their game has a female lead and of being under pressure to ensure that the female lead doesn't make the cover. We even have a research firm who is contracted by the publishers themselves to look at this specific area, publish a report stating games with female leads sell less copies and, on a very much related note, are generally given lower marketing budgets. These are facts, not some throw away ideologically slanted viewpoints being expressed and as such, it's very much a real story.
As I said previously, if the majority of gamers don't care about the gender of the protagonist but publishers are under the impression they do for whatever reason, isn't the correct course of action to be vocal and state this fact along with a general desire for better written characters? The latter point being important too because, to riff on the Aliens examples above, if the "solution" from the publishers perspective is to give us a slew of titles with Vasquez-like leads then they've still missed the point most reasonable people are making.0 -
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I don't care
I think that pretty much sums it up unfortunately.The problem is if say 60% don't care but 30% will only play a male protagonist, what do you think will happen? My read of all this is that with AAA games going for as broad an appeal as possible they (possibly mistakenly) plum for the male lead as it turns off fewer gamers than a female one even if the majority of gamers wouldn't mind a female lead.
I mean, I can see the difficulty some publishers face in this respect. To take Life is Strange as an example again, this is a brief exchange between Michel Koch, the Co-Game Director and Art Director on the title, and a poster during their Reddit AMA. While it's great the guy has come away with a more positive outlook on the game, I can imagine publishers sitting there wondering how in the hell they're going to market the game to such a wider audience when it's being pitched to them.0 -
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I don't careI think that pretty much sums it up unfortunately.
I mean, I can see the difficulty some publishers face in this respect. To take Life is Strange as an example again, this is a brief exchange between Michel Koch, the Co-Game Director and Art Director on the title, and a poster during their Reddit AMA. While it's great the guy has come away with a more positive outlook on the game, I can imagine publishers sitting there wondering how in the hell they're going to market the game to such a wider audience when it's being pitched to them.
The problem is marketing and it was ever thus once "big business" got involved in gaming. That's why I look forward to Battlefield 26.0 -
I don't care
With regards the EEDAR findings, that's pretty much it, yes. But look at how powerful that data can be when presented in such a manner. You have Naughty Dog, pretty much the jewel in Sony Worldwide Studios crown, being pushed to keep the lead female character off the cover in case it affects sales. It's utter madness and yet, that's the situation we're in due to the amount of risk/money involved in these projects and, unfortunately, the power marketing have in so much of the decision making process.I’ll refrain from responding piecemeal since I think we actually agree on far more than we disagree on.The EEDAR research is a stronger case that not marketing a game harms its sales than for any issue that the gaming community has with female protagonists. Not marketing a game with a female lead and then having that game do badly is self-fulfilling prophecy. This is, to me at least, divorced from the gaming community at this point.
Not to disagree for the sake of it but to be fair, Beyond: Two Souls was promoted on the back of the massively impressive Kara Tech Demo and a pretty slick trailer with both Ellen Page and William Dafoe's names featuring prominently. The gender of the lead character would have paled in comparison to those factors when it came to pre-orders. The post release drop off was, as you correctly point out, more than likely due to the fact that the game itself wasn't great.I think we both agree that the ‘issue’ with female protagonists is a publisher one, and not indicative of the gaming community. I use Beyond: Two Souls as an example because, when the pre-ordering fest was in full swing, would-be buyers had little to go on. They hadn’t played a demo, and the biggest piece of information they had was that the gender of the lead character. I’m not trying to claim gender is what motivated the pre-orders, only that gender wasn’t a turn off. That the game itself was dull and boring and little more than an interactive movie with little gameplay doomed it, but that only became apparent after its release. To use your phrase with the second example – “Tomb Raider is massively successful because it's Tomb Raider, not because it has a female lead.”
This is where it gets tricky. I don't think any of us can say, with any reasonable level of certainly, what the "gaming community" does and does not want or think. As I've said before, look at the hatred towards DLC and distaste towards pre-ordering visible online and then look at the numbers for each. Look at the bile directed at Call of Duty's annual entries and FIFA's updates. Now look at their respective sales. There's an absolutely massive disconnect there. So, do I think the majority of the community have an issue with playing as a female protagonist? Most likely not but that doesn't mean I don't also think there's a large chunk of them out there that do. As nesf said above, you'll have that chunk and you'll probably also have a chunk who don't care so the safe bet, from a marketing perspective at least, is to go with the most common denominator.Given that, and I think we both agree on this, the gaming community does not have (and I would argue never had) any problem with female protagonists, and given that (which I think we both agree on) the ‘issue’ here is one the publishers have….then why is not being reflected in the gaming press??? Most of what I read is insinuating that gaming is a cesspool of misogyny, sexism and hatred of women. If there were any truth to most of what has been published about my fellow gamers then it is almost quite the miracle that I haven’t been reaped at a gaming convention.
As for the content you've been reading and the rest of your post, I'd regard that as being a completely separate issue, relating only tangentially at best. It's also one I'm rather sure we won't really agree on so I'd much prefer if we just stuck to the topic at hand.
Yup, you won't find any disagreement from me there. The post you quoted me from is probably the nicest thing I'll say about games related marketing in this particular context.The problem is marketing and it was ever thus once "big business" got involved in gaming. That's why I look forward to Battlefield 26.
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Atari JaguarThis seems relevant to this discussion - let me pluck the most relevant bullet point:ÂBoth boys and girls aren’t more likely to play a game based on the gender of the protagonist
70% of girls said it doesn’t matter and 78% of boys said it doesn’t matter. Interestingly, boys care less about playing as a male character as they age and girls care more about playing as a female one.
For what it's worth, as I've gotten older, I find myself more likely to play as a female character.  My GTA Online Avatar is female and a strange handle like Shiminay means that plenty of people assume I'm a lady until I turn on my mic It has never gotten me abuse, but it has always gotten me additional attention. Lots of guys turn up in their sports cars asking me to go for a spin with them... 0 -
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I don't careTo give you an example, remember the backlash against the Battlefield 3 Premium Pass? Practically everyone I came across via the above mediums hated the idea of it, read through the forums here and you'll see nothing but bile being directed at it. One could quite easily get the impression that the "gaming community" didn't want anything to do with it, right? At retail, however, EA made over $120m from it, selling more copies of it than most games could hope to shift in their lifetime. When that kind of disconnect is present on a practical level, imagine how much it'll be there when it comes to something like ones feelings on the characters they want to see and play as in games.
An oldie but a goodie:
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