Gender of a protagonist

tok9

This is something that I'm sure is brought up a lot in several threads but never really discussed in itself and I just read a brief interview with Shu Yoshida and I just couldn't understand what they were so worried about.

There was a third reason that Yoshida was nervous to see how people would react to the game: Horizon's protagonist is a young woman.

"She's a female lead character," he said. "That has always been the vision by the team, but we had a discussion. Is it risky to do a female character?"

In fact, once development was underway, so many questions were asked about the protagonist internally, that the company brought in a marketing team to do some focus testing.

"The concern came after the game was in development," he said. "We started to show it to many more people internally and they had questions about it. So we worked with our marketing groups to do this focus testing.

"We wanted to see how people would react to some of the things: open world RPG, the set up of machine versus primitive weapons and the female protagonist. All of those things."

While the reaction was positive, Yoshida was still a bit nervous about the game's first broad unveiling.

"The focus testing reaction was positive and that made us feel good, but you know it's a limited number of people that we were able to test."

Sony worried about female protagonist

I think now we're obviously seeing more diversity in games with different protagonists both male and female. We can see that even with this E3 with games such as the one in the article, Horizon, Recore etc which do have a female protagonist.

But my question is has the sex of a protagonist ever affected your decision to purchase a game? I just find it so hard to believe that someone might see a game with fantastic reviews but once they saw the protagonist was female just thought to themselves: "No way I'm picking this up"

So what do other members of boards think? Do you have an issue with it or have you changed your mind for one reason or another?

brianregan09

Atari Jaguar

I don't care , and to be honest i'm getting sick of this conversation coming up in the movie threads aswell , Its ruining discussion when people start yammering on about , oh no the female was a stereo typical woman and the male was a macho man character some of the best games out there have female leads

Mirrors Edge
Tomb Raider
Resident Evil 1-3 and code veronica

My own personal opinion I couldn't give a toss as long as the game is good and the story is engaging basically

Retr0gamer

People that let the sex of a main character can be filed in the sane box as people that won't buy a game because it's too cute; Morons.

johnny_ultimate

I would be genuinely alarmed if anybody answered 'yes' to this question.

cloud493

I don't care

I can't imagine why anyone would care. Like, I know people do, but I have no idea why. Jim Sterling did a good video on this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wnTunPrQJo

tok9

I don't care

I would be alarmed too but at the same time there is a huge deal made about it. Every time a new game with a female lead is revealed, it's always a big focal point of the interviews with the developers and usually you hear there is a bit of concern in the background. I've just never understood why.

Calhoun

No

For me it's a yes, depending on the game. RPG type games that I get into I like it being a male protagonist for my own personal immersion.

Other stuff I don't really care.

Sonics2k

The gender matters incredibly little to me.

As long as the gender isn't just shoe-horned into the leading plot for the sake of appeasing people demanding more representation, and actually does work in lead role for the game.

I for one was happy to see that Emily is a lead in Dishonored 2, alongside Corvo. I'm not even a big fan of the game, but it was still great to see two solid leads for the game.

Shiminay

Atari Jaguar

Games with interesting female leads? Maybe 10. Maybe.
Games with interesting male leads? Dozens.
Games with fking moronic leads of either gender? About 90% of all games (that feature a human or humanoid lead character of course).

It's a big deal with there's an interesting female lead because we've had so few for so long and women make up more than half of the planet's population so why aren't we telling (and playing) their stories?

Gaming is a changed market. There are more women than men playing games now and all the "hardcore" gamers can say is "they're not real gamers" when the ladies don't want to play a yet another male power fantasy like 90% of AAA games are today - and why the frak would they?

Pac1Man

Atari Jaguar

It doesn't really matter however I do believe some roles are better suited to men - CoD & GTA as two examples.

That doesn't mean that the female role should be confined to the stereotypical vulnerable damsel either. Lara Croft transends that fantastically especially in the last iteration, paralleling herself with Nathan Drake.

Nariko from Heavenly Sword kicks some serious ass, as does Catwoman to a lesser extent.

Links234

I don't care

It's always a bit shocking to hear about development companies fighting against publishers who want them to change their main character to a male, you'd think seriously? In this day and age something like that's happening? But if I'm being honest, it shouldn't be too surprising considering some of the nerd rage I've seen over them adding female playable characters to Payday 2, quite a few people were ranting about how it was unrealistic for women to be bankrobbers, and although it was just a vocal minority, holy sh*t they were vocal! Considering there's been some truly great games with female protagonists, Portal or others that were already mentioned in this thread, they're shocking few and far between.

But I think there's a bigger picture here, because I find a lot of main characters really look very homogenous. You know the meme that goes something like gamers love brown haired 30-something white guys? That's not to criticize any characters in particular, Adam Jensen and Booker DeWitt are great characters, but it's the kind of thing that once I noticed it, I couldn't unsee it. Game protagonists do seem to follow a fairly set pattern, a narrow set of characteristics, and I don't know what it is, is it laziness or trying to homogenous as possible? I don't know, but it's something that's bugged me.

Kiith

Atari Jaguar

It would never change my decision on whether or not to buy a game, but when given the choice, i'll almost always pick male. I usually like a game for the story, and try to put myself in the characters position, even when a lot of game stories are pretty bad.

Links234

I don't care

Oh, you know something I'd like to see more of?

Two protagonists who's genders are more than just a cosmetic difference and are fully fledged characters like Jill and Chris from Resident Evil, because that was a great way to do things.

penev10

Atari Jaguar

Retr0gamer wrote: »

people that won't buy a game because it's too cute; Morons.

Even being an anime fan I'm still put off by overly moe characters in games. It's a question of taste, people prefer certain styles / art direction. I wouldn't dismiss a game due to it's presentation but it could put me off.

Robert ninja

This isn't even an issue among gamers despite what the media would like you to think. Seriously never met a person that wouldn't play a game because of a female lead alone (maybe 10 year old COD players or something). Although disliking the lead character, whatever gender, is a perfectly fine reason not to like or play a game. Lord knows I skipped Watch Dogs because of that (among many other things). I also skipped the new Tomb Raider games because I never liked them anyway and there was too many QTEs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EogjXitgw0

penev10 wrote: »

Even being an anime fan I'm still put off by overly moe characters in games. It's a question of taste, people prefer certain styles / art direction. I wouldn't dismiss a game due to it's presentation but it could put me off.

Go play Nekopara. I think I got diabetes from the sugar in that.

gizmo

I don't care

Robert ninja wrote: »

This isn't even an issue among gamers despite what the media would like you to think. Seriously never met a person that wouldn't play a game because of a female lead alone (maybe 10 year old COD players or something).

It's an issue in design meetings because it's an issue with publishers because it's an issue with marketing departments because it's an issue with some gamers.

The media report on it with varying degrees of accuracy because it is an issue. Anecdotal evidence on your side doesn't change this, hell look at this very thread, Links234 has seen it for the most trivial of reasons. Ignoring that though, who do you think the marketing department at Sony turned to in order to focus test the idea of a female lead?

Retr0gamer

penev10 wrote: »

Even being an anime fan I'm still put off by overly moe characters in games. It's a question of taste, people prefer certain styles / art direction. I wouldn't dismiss a game due to it's presentation but it could put me off.

There's cute and there's moe. Moe is evil in it's purest form.... Onii-chan.

YouSavedMyLife

Atari Jaguar

Isn't "No" and "I don't care" the same thing?

Don't care either way but in RPGs where i can create my character i tend to make females for some reason, pretty gay eh? :pac:

ERG89

The only game I wanted announced at E3 had a female protagonist(I miss you Jade)...I don't ever envisage myself as the lead character though so a female lead is no biggie.
Clementine is as cool now as protagonists get, Lara is great again & a lot of people prefer Femshep so I don't see the problem unless you read & take YouTube commentators seriously

K.O.Kiki

Atari Jaguar

If your only talking point is "our game has a girl!" then I'm wary you're not saying "it's a good game!" instead.

kunst nugget

I don't care

Retr0gamer wrote: »

People that let the sex of a main character can be filed in the sane box as people that won't buy a game because it's too cute; Morons.

I'll hold my hands up and say I'm the type of moron that would prefer to be blowing the head off a Nazi in Wolfenstein than going fishing with an anthropomorphic bunny rabbit in Animal Crossing but I have no issue with the gender of the protagonist. BJ could have been Cunnilingus and it wouldn't make any difference to my enjoyment of the game.

No

It doesn't bother me a huge deal, but I'm ashamed to admit that it does bother me in a minuscule way. Some games have overly sexy female characters - which I simply can't stand. I don't like supporting that rubbish. Sudeki, Dead or Alive and Bayonetta come to mind. Its perpetuating a negative stereotype and its just a pointless distraction. I don't like it.

Besides that, similar to how I find it slightly harder to relate to female singer's lyrics, I also find it slightly hard to relate to a female main character.

Would it stop me from playing a game? No (although possibly in the case overly sexualised characters)

Would I choose a female or male character at the character creation screen? Male every time

TerrorFirmer

Atari Jaguar

A co-worker of mine has an old Lara Croft mousemat, it's embarrassing to think of how she was portrayed just 15 years ago. A waist about 6 inches wide and a bra size that looks like a double letter somewhere in the second half of the alphabet.

Also remember when Dead or Alive almost sold itself solely on the fact that it had bouncing breasts?

Played Perfect Dark Zero for the first time recently, Joanna Dark went from being clad in an armoured body suit in the N64 version to a low-slung jeans, revealing crop top wearing, hair-over-one-eye emo clandestine agent in PDZ.

Also, more recently in Halo, the ridiculous over sexualization of your AI companion Cortana really bothered me. She gained several breast sizes, poutier lips, wider hips and a rounder ass since Halo 3.

Tomb Raider, Perfect Dark and Resident Evil spring to mind for strong female leads.

CiDeRmAn

I don't care

I never gave a monkeys about the gender of the character I was playing, certainly never made a difference. Be it Catwoman in Arkham City, Chell in Portal and its sequel or any number of female protagonists in fighting games over the years, and in the gunw@nk genre its more the gun your holding in 1st person and the ethnic minorities you are gunning down than the nature of the virtual junk in the pants of the hero.
I think story based games, be it RPGs or episodic adventure, the gender of a character will be critical as it will lend sense to the character and their drives and needs, providing context for their actions, but this can be enjoyed by any player of any gender as well.
As a parallel think of novels and, while there are plenty of best sellers involving the Alex Cross' and Jack Ryan's of this world, we still see big money being made by the Bones books by Reichs

the groutch

Shiminay wrote: »

the ladies don't want to play a yet another male power fantasy like 90% of AAA games are today - and why the frak would they?

that's quite a broad generalisation to make, not every female gamer is an Anita Sarkeesian wannabe you know.

Mr Freeze

Atari Jaguar

Do not care!

As long as the lead character is a good fleshed out character it makes no difference to me what gender they are.

Varik

I don't care

Voted no, but on second thought when I've played a woman in any of the bioware game i usually don't do any of the romance story. If it wasn't a choice i doubt I'd mind.

Some exceptions such as femshep & garrus and sera in inquisition.

Shiminay

Atari Jaguar

the groutch wrote: »

that's quite a broad generalisation to make, not every female gamer is an Anita Sarkeesian wannabe you know.

Yes, because every woman who objects to being asked if they wanna be another hulking dudebro character with a big gun shooting all of the things is that idiot Sarkeesian...

:rolleyes:

Stone Deaf 4evr

I don't care

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

.

Also, more recently in Halo, the ridiculous over sexualization of your AI companion Cortana really bothered me. She gained several breast sizes, poutier lips, wider hips and a rounder ass since Halo 3.

I'm playing through the master chief collection at the moment and thats very noticeable. I prefer to think of it as the hardware finally catching up with the developers vision though

Evade

Atari Jaguar

Shiminay wrote: »

Yes, because every woman who objects to being asked if they wanna be another hulking dudebro character with a big gun shooting all of the things is that idiot Sarkeesian...

:rolleyes:

If they're perfectly happy playing the same game as a hulking dudette sister is that not itself sexism?

Links234

I don't care

Hell, I'd love to play a game where the protagonist is someone more like Brienne of Tarth

Shiminay

Atari Jaguar

Evade wrote: »

If they're perfectly happy playing the same game as a hulking dudette sister is that not itself sexism?

I don't know if you're trolling or just not clever enough to spot the very obvious point that being a musclebound dudebro who shoots all the things and saves the day/planet/humanity is a MALE power fantasy. That's not the same as saying "women won't enjoy the game because it's a male power fantasy" but it is saying "this is a game aimed at men."

We don't seem to have many games that are aimed specifically at women.

Lone Stone

No

Depends on the type of game, if it's an rpg type I gotta be male, if it's a game where I play as a girl it doesn't bother me but I would prefer to play As a male can't say why tbh just do.

kunst nugget

I don't care

Shiminay wrote: »

We don't seem to have many games that are aimed specifically at women.

Ironing Simulator 6 with Folding Expansion Pack!

Robert ninja

Shiminay wrote: »

I don't know if you're trolling or just not clever enough to spot the very obvious point that being a musclebound dudebro who shoots all the things and saves the day/planet/humanity is a MALE power fantasy. That's not the same as saying "women won't enjoy the game because it's a male power fantasy" but it is saying "this is a game aimed at men."

We don't seem to have many games that are aimed specifically at women.

I always put it down to just being an easy concept to implement into gameplay. You could make a skinny looking guy/girl in a game and still be able to wield huge weapons and use them to kill lots of enemies. In fact, having an action game that doesn't have ridiculous amounts of killing yet still fun is actually a challenge the industry has been trying to overcome for a long time now (and to be fair has made lots of improvements)

Whether it's Drake from Uncharted or Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, you still end up with a body count that would cause any normal human being to have PTSD with the only realistic sequel being the protagonist in dozens of psychiatric sessions to try and stop them from having a panic attack every time someone pops a can of pringles.

That's not to say there aren't games aimed at men and women alike, that much is obvious. But these tropes that people try and relate to gender issues (like Mario saving the princess) are more often than not just there because they're incredibly easy to design in gameplay and relay the idea to the player.

Lone Stone wrote: »

Depends on the type of game, if it's an rpg type I gotta be male, if it's a game where I play as a girl it doesn't bother me but I would prefer to play As a male can't say why tbh just do.

I usually end up picking a female these days but not all the time. It really just depends on my mood and the character I wish to roleplay. I feel right at home cannibalising and cutting up people in bathtubs in Fallout but only as a character that's not me. It'd be weird to play these games trying to project myself in them... all I'd do is sit around and talk about technology to people in the vaults and try to be nice.

kunst nugget

I don't care

I always pick the female character in desperate hope there'll be the suggestion of lesbian action somewhere later on in the game…

Skerries

I don't care

I think we should have a fat, old black lady with cats as the next protagonist for COD

kunst nugget

I don't care

Skerries wrote: »

I think we should have a fat, old black lady with cats as the next protagonist for COD

Stephen 'Hawkeye' Hawking is my choice. The subtitle could be 'A Brief History of Kicking Ass!'

Links234

I don't care

Crazy Cat Lady Simulator 2015 on Steam Greenlight in 3... 2...

Generic Dreadhead

I don't care

Being a chauvinistic male I like to play as Female characters since It'll be third person and I'll have to look at an arse taking up 15% of the screen so it might aswell be a female arse.

I get to do enough sexist quips and leacherous leering in my real life to not have to play as another male in-game me doing it.

Also if the game requires dancing, well I'd kick all sorts of butt there with my female moves. /s

Evade

Atari Jaguar

Shiminay wrote: »

I don't know if you're trolling or just not clever enough to spot the very obvious point that being a musclebound dudebro who shoots all the things and saves the day/planet/humanity is a MALE power fantasy. That's not the same as saying "women won't enjoy the game because it's a male power fantasy" but it is saying "this is a game aimed at men."

My bad. I thought you meant the gender of the protagonist was what was putting them off, not the genre itself.

Shiminay wrote: »

We don't seem to have many games that are aimed specifically at women.

Is that just down to the over-saturation of shooters? The few girls that game I know of seem to lean more toward RPGs and platformers than anything else.

J. Marston

I don't care

ERG89 wrote: »

The only game I wanted announced at E3 had a female protagonist(I miss you Jade)...I don't ever envisage myself as the lead character though so a female lead is no biggie.
Clementine is as cool now as protagonists get, Lara is great again & a lot of people prefer Femshep so I don't see the problem unless you read & take YouTube commentators seriously

A female photo journalist who helps take care of orphans. Kinda surprising she exists at all if the worry about female protagonists is a real thing in marketing departments.

On another note, I wonder if GTA would ever feature a female protagonist?

jobbridge4life

I don't care

Certainly wouldn't make a difference to whether I played or not. As a child, if there was an option I would normally pick to play as a female not so much nowadays.

DoYouEvenLift

Atari Jaguar

Are the devs of this unaware of tomb raider or something?

Sonics2k

Links234 wrote: »

Crazy Cat Lady Simulator 2015 on Steam Greenlight in 3... 2...

I'm offended that she's white Links :P

Links234

Links234 wrote: »

Hell, I'd love to play a game where the protagonist is someone more like Brienne of Tarth

Would that game not be Dragon age : Inquisition

My Inquisitor was female and was most certainly all kinds of badass.

johnny_ultimate

Ahem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbYvqETR-xs

Meant to be pretty good I believe.

ShadowHearth

Atari Jaguar

Calhoun wrote: »

For me it's a yes, depending on the game. RPG type games that I get into I like it being a male protagonist for my own personal immersion.

Other stuff I don't really care.

I voted as I don't care, but you have a very valid point there.

When i play mass effect or dragon age inquisition, I play as male character as that is my direct version of me and how would I act in situation given.
When it comes to games like tomb raider, resident evil or other story driven games I really really really don't care what gender is protagonist.
When it comes to mmorpgs, games like diablo or borderlands I am pretty much exclusively go female characters for some reason.

I think a lot of media and developers making a problem where there is none.

pablomakaveli

Atari Jaguar

Deleted User wrote: »

Would that game not be Dragon age : Inquisition

My Inquisitor was female and was most certainly all kinds of badass.

Cassandra is actually quite like Brienne.

jobbridge4life

I don't care

DoYouEvenLift wrote: »

Are the devs of this unaware of tomb raider or something?

No doubt they view Lara as nothing more than a sexist trope.

CiDeRmAn

I don't care

The thing is, if the character is simply going to be another grunt/space marine it is entirely irrelevant what gender they are.
On the other hand if the character is masculine or feminine in terms of why they are driven to do the things they do in the game then fantastic.
In the otherwise ridiculous testosterone fest Gears of War and its sequels Dom Santiago was surprisingly well put together as a character, with his being a father and a husband being part of his arc, as well as the events that befall him.
The current iteration of Lara Croft seems to do the same thing, in particular the sense of vulnerability of a female and the threat that she suffers simply by having male antagonists attempt to dominate and frighten her, though she of course triumphs.
So, things are not so bleak for a more sensible approach to gender in videogames, but it is up to us the customer to appreciate good games with such well written parts instead of the same old brute tropes.