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This post is a rant, for which I make no apologies. Opinions will be stated, and facts will be cited.

Mostly... I was inspired to write this rant simply out of annoyance with the lack of attention the gaming industry gives female gamers. I look at every new FPS game to be released on Steam... and... not a single one lets me play a female character. This might seem petty-- and I know ther's plenty of worthless people out there that would flame me for holding this position-- but there's already a googol of male characters, and most of them are the same. It would be nice to see a well-done female character in an FPS game that was actually PLAYABLE in the single player and multiplayer modes.

There's, inevitably, going to be someone saying that "you shouldn't have to have a female character to enjoy the game". No, I don't... I quite enjoyed a lot of games with male leads-- from the days of DOS gaming (Quake, Duke Nukem, etc) to more modern games such as Half Life 2, Metro 2033, and Call of Honor / Medal of Duty series.. It's just that that's pretty much every single one, and most of them blend in together where I can't tell one game's characters apart from another, and there is barely a one where one can play a female character, never mind a female lead.

Most recently, I was looking at Home Front on Steam. Its setting was awesome, and it was a perfect setup to allow for female characters-- but they didn't put them in, saying it was too much work to do it. And just like that, there goes my anticipation for the game... it's extremely disheartening to see, time and time again, that game developers really just don't give a damn about your demographics.

Looking at the list of FPS games that came out this year. This is based mostly off of searches and the company's own previews, as well as personal knowledge in the case of games that I actually own.

MAG: No playable female characters.
BioShock 2: Female playable characters in multiplayer only.
Aliens vs. Predator: No playable female characters.
NecroVisioN: Lost Company: No playable female characters.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2: No playable female characters.
Operation Wolfsburg: No playable female characters.
Metro 2033: No playable female characters.
Red Steel 2: No playable female characters.
Terror Attack: Project Fateh: No playable female characters.
Sniper: Ghost Warrior: No playable female characters.
Singularity: No playable female characters.
Terrorist Takedown 3: No playable female characters.
Halo Reach: Option to be female as the lead.
GoldenEye 007 Wii: No playable female characters.
Call of Duty: Black Ops: No playable female characters.

So that leads this year to be a total of two thus far... but only if you count multiplayer-only as one (let's call it one half, as that's really only half the game anyway). So 1.5 female leads this year, and 15 male leads. A pity Halo Reach isn't going to be released any time soon on the PC, because I really wanted to try it out... but I don't have a 360 (nor am I going to in the foreseeable future). And when it IS released, it'll be on Vista or 7, not on XP (similar to Halo 2's release on Vista only), meaning I'll have to do hardware and software upgrades to play it when ti's released... and by the time it gets released on PC it'll be old news. Saddening... it looks like a great game.

Well, that's enough ranting from me. I'll go over here and get in the flame retardant suit now.

Could you make a list if all non sports games and whether or not they have playable females? Just kinda curious if this is just a FPS thing or if it's across the board.

That would be a TON of games I'd have to go through...

But MMOs and RPGs are much better at this than FPS games, that's for sure. I also didn't include 3PS games, either, but they aren't much better.

What about mass effect??!?!?!?

Being a dude, I don't share your disappointment in games that lack playable female characters - that said, I certainly appreciate the option when it's there. I usually play a female character when I get the chance, partly out of boredom of the vast array of generic male leads.

Ok. Understandable.

Anyways, it sounds like most of those games have the single player mode based around some fake war. It could be nothing other than Generic Armyman shooting other Generic Armymen with Lemming-like survival skills = profit!.



Asherian Command: That was an action role-playing game. If she adds Mass Effect, she might as well add Fallout New Vegas.

Metro 2033 had a nice storyline. Sadly, women were basically relegated to sitting on the sidelines weeping (I wish I was kidding).

GoldenEye 007 for the Wii has Nataylia for online

It does?

That's weird, it doesn't show her on any of the videos.

I know it won't be until next year (at best) but I believe Brink will have the options for Female Player Characters ( They are allowing you to customise damn near everything else. Would look stupid if they didn't add gender.)

You know, I don't understand this either: Sex sells, so you think more FPS' would have female leads.

Of course, if they did that, you know that at least ONE game is going to be made where you can't see straight underneath your femme fatale.

I can see exactly no reasons for avoiding upskirt shots

Did left4dead2 come out this year or last? I can't remember. It has a playable female lead.

What about games with no playable male leads. Tomb Raider, Portal... Resident Evil?

At some point a game designer has to weigh story, and development costs versus diversity. If they need to record separate soundtracks, body captures and all for two characters instead of one, the development costs increase.

I throughly enjoyed portal, even though it didn't have a playable male character. I don't think it is all that serious a concern for roughly 10% of the titles to have female leads given that only roughly 10% of the players are female. (And yes, I know women make up a significant percentage of gaming as a whole, but those stats are skewed by things like farmville, which counts as a game. Women are not a sizable percentage of FPS gamers.)

Slarg232 : Don't want too many 12 year olds playing with thier joysticks I guess.

Redbeard wrote:Women are not a sizable percentage of FPS gamers.)

Cite your source on this, or define "sizable"

Regardless, I would say that a good deal of the reason why FPS games don't attract women is precisely because of this. All the games are marketed towards men to begin with. And the number of female gamers in all genres is increasing as time goes on, so that's more reason to produce such titles.


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Redbeard wrote:I throughly enjoyed portal, even though it didn't have a playable male character.

Yeah, and I enjoyed Half Life 2 despite it having a male lead, that doesn't make my concerns any less valid.

Melissia wrote:Metro 2033 had a nice storyline. Sadly, women were basically relegated to sitting on the sidelines weeping (I wish I was kidding).

Well, it was based off a novel. The storyline was changed a fair bit, but gender-flipping the lead character would have been going too far.

As for the relative lack of women: Artyom is out in the tunnels or ruins of Moscow for most of the game. He doesn't get to explore stations much. Read the novel, and it's a totally different story.

And yet, it's still the case in the game.

Just because it's based off of a novel doesn't mean jack to me... besides, the game was really only listed as a game that I enjoyed, regardless of the gender of its lead.

Melissia wrote:
Regardless, I would say that a good deal of the reason why FPS games don't attract women is precisely because of this. All the games are marketed towards men to begin with. And the number of female gamers in all genres is increasing as time goes on, so that's more reason to produce such titles.

Quote your source blah blah.

See, I don't believe the number of female gamers in "all" genres is increasing at the same rate as the number of gamers is. The number of gamers is going up across the board. But men and women are attracted to different things in their games. Men prefer head-to-head competition, women prefer cooperation. Men are more likely to play sports games, women are more into games with stories.

You're right, the number of female gamers in all genres is increasing, but that doesn't mean that the percentage is increasing in any specific genre. There are more games being produced that appeal to women, but they're not FPS games. The people in marketing at software companies aren't stupid. You market games that boys prefer to boys, and games that girls prefer to girls. That might not be your preference, but that's how it is.

Yeah, and I enjoyed Half Life 2 despite it having a male lead, that doesn't make my concerns any less valid.

It might not make your concern less valid, but you completely failed to address the very reasonable explanations for why it is this way. I work in the software industry. All projects run over budget and over time as is. You're asking them to add complexity and cost for a very minimal difference in sales. You disagree? Get your legion of chick FPS players to boycott any game without a female lead, and see exactly how much (or how little) they notice the difference in sales.

As an aside, be careful what you ask for too. My wife, and most of her friends (who are also gamers) are huge Final Fantasy fans. (Go figure, it's a game with a story and a plot, so the girls like it). But FF11 (I think) had some feature that was clearly aimed at women, (powers changed when the characters changed their outfits, or something like that), and they all hated that one, for that reason.

There's two ways to include female leads. One is to target them to male players, ala tomb raider or tekken. Give her huge tits and show some skin and voila, female lead character. The other is to make realistic female characters that are obviously targeted for female players (Zoey in Left4Dead). Given that FPS games are marketed towards males (and you can complain all you want about how this isn't fair, but that's the economics of the situation), I'd be concerned that asking for more female leads results in more of the first type and not more of the second.

Redbeard wrote:Quote your source blah blah.

Myself, as a female gamer. I was only offering an opinion from my own point of view. Quite a few reasons why I often skip over some games is because this very reason. It's not like there's any shortage of them.

It's not like I'm the only one.

http://www.gamesradar.com/f/9-things-real-female-gamers-hate-about-gaming/a-20100326161620941082

You market games that boys prefer to boys, and games that girls prefer to girls.

... which are not as different as you think they are.

And actually, first person shooters is one of the areas that women are stated to play in "significant numbers" by industry insiders such as Torrie Dorrel (VP of marketing for Sony Online Entertainment).

http://articles.cnn.com/2008-02-28/tech/women.gamers_1_women-gamers-female-gamers-entertainment-software-association?_s=PM:TECH

"Women are out there in significant numbers playing MMOs, action games, first-person shooters," Dorrell explains. "What is lacking in the equation are women behind these games."

That's right, the VP of marketing in Sony Online is saying that the industry has a marketing problem. GAming is a young industry, it hasn't yet figured out how to market to all of its potential demographics.

I could probably toss links at you all day if I wanted to. I just hope you aren't like the last dude who asked me to cite my sources and just toss them aside without providing anything to support HIS assertions...

Melissia wrote:

Redbeard wrote:Quote your source blah blah.

Myself, as a female gamer.

Okay, I can buy that. My sources, therefore, will be my wife, and her female gamer friends, all of whom are rabid gamers owning multiple consoles (yes, the consoles are all hers, I play PC games) and handheld platforms.

Not one of them plays a FPS. I tried to get my wife to play Left4Dead, as it's a cooperative thing and we both have steam, but she's just not into it. What she likes:

Final Fantasy - most any of them.
Harvest Moon, plus sequels
Plants vs Zombies
Professor Laten(?) puzzle games
Angry Birds
Gardening/Cooking mama
Mario games

And this is pretty typical among her friends too. FPS games and sports games are simply not on the list. Certainly no less empirical than you citing yourself.

And while I don't want to completely discount the link you posts, you have to consider the source. The real women I know like the 'games for girls' that your 9-things link says they don't. Okay, those two women writers might want to play Doom. But are they representative of most female gamers, or just the most hardcore competitive types who would write a blog about gaming? I think the part of that article where she said "we don't always want to talk about games" is pretty indicative of most female gamers. My wife spends 10-20 hours a week playing her games, during commutes, or downtime in the evenings, but she rarely talks about them, and certainly doesn't feel the need to write a blog about it. She picks the games she likes and plays them, but they don't define her.


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And another source - I've developed and run an online world for 13 years. In that time, there have been several thousand people who have played it, and it's been mentioned on a video game TV show in Australia (of all places, and if I could recall the link, I'd post it).

Now, as with most online worlds these days, there are various things people can do. They can go beat up monsters. They can go beat up other players. They can talk, form political groups, or craft items and build into the game world. They can even hook up and create child characters.

So, with my several thousand players as my data source, I can say pretty definitively, that the female players are more interested in crafting, politics, jocking for position in organizations, and roleplaying/telling stories, and the male players are more interested in building up their characters and seeing who can kill each other.

There are some exceptions. There are some male players who play crafters, and some female players who are into the whole player-killing competitive thing. But these are just that, exceptions. When given a free-form environment to play in, the genders really do tend to pick these same options. And it's been like that for years.

I would go so far as to say that the Vice President of Marketing at Sony would have a SLIGHTLY higher sample.

Redbeard wrote:

Melissia wrote:
Regardless, I would say that a good deal of the reason why FPS games don't attract women is precisely because of this. All the games are marketed towards men to begin with. And the number of female gamers in all genres is increasing as time goes on, so that's more reason to produce such titles.

Quote your source blah blah.

See, I don't believe the number of female gamers in "all" genres is increasing at the same rate as the number of gamers is. The number of gamers is going up across the board. But men and women are attracted to different things in their games. Men prefer head-to-head competition, women prefer cooperation. Men are more likely to play sports games, women are more into games with stories.

*lifts up shirt*

well, they don't look any bigger.......

I know a girl who likes FPS's, MMO's, fighting games and RPG's. She might like other genres but I don't talk much about video games around her so I wouldn't know, probably helps that I don't play them much myself.

I don't talk about games much, myself. I tend to talk about the lore of 40k more than the game. And yet, that doesn't stop me from playing. Nor does it stop me from playing an FPS game which doesn't have much of a semblance of a story, such as Team Fortress 2.

Melissia wrote:I would go so far as to say that the Vice President of Marketing at Sony would have a SLIGHTLY higher sample.

Sure, but she said the same thing I did. That article isn't talking about female characters in games, it's talking about female game developers. As a software engineer, I can attest to this fact - there are very few female developers in either gaming or business development.

But, let's put out the other quotes from the article you linked that back up what I'm saying...

In fact, Dorrell spends so much time gaming, she has risen to the level of "officer" in a "guild" playing "EverQuest 2" online.

The first example given of a female gamer, and look, it's just what I said. She's doing the politics thing, playing the guild aspect of the game.

Studies and sales data have shown that women are more likely to play hand-held casual games, such as the Nintendo DS, along with social oriented games such as "The Sims," where women make up more than 55 percent of players.

Oh look, there she goes again, presenting industry data that backs up what I said, and what the empirical evidence that my wife and her friends provided. Women like to play casual games and social games.

You're right, the VP of Sony's gaming division has more data. But her data doesn't support your position. As I stated earlier, development dollars go where the market goes. That means that they market the games boys like to boys, and they market the games that girls like to girls. I'm sorry you're one of the exceptions and that you can't find your female lead, but I hope that you can, at least, understand why that is.

Redbeard wrote:Sure, but she said the same thing I did. That article isn't talking about female characters in games, it's talking about female game developers.

... and yet, if you read it, you would notice that the quote I gave came directly from the article, stated directly by her.

That women make up 55% of Sims gamers means very little to the percentage of women who play FPS games, which she said was "significant". They are two separate genres that can be enjoyed by the same person.

I've played sims-like games myself...

I think it's worth mentioning that most developers are staffed by males (an assumption but I don't think it's too far-fetched). Naturally they are going to write stories for male leads, animate male characters, voice them, and so on. Just feels more natural to use the same sex as yourself. If you were creating anything I would think you were more than likely to use your gender as the one for your lead charcter.

Watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8ZVZRsy8N8

BrookM wrote:Watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8ZVZRsy8N8

I like the way this guy thinks.

That said, being upset a genre that is dominated by multiplayer, with single player as a side show in most cases, doesn't enough enough chicks in the lead role is a little silly. FPS games have never been particularly well known for their stellar story lines and marvelous character development. They're known for circle strafing, fragging, tea bagging, and twelve year olds screaming HACKER who shouldn't have the game in first place.

I would hands down take a fps game with no female character over one that had the generic barely clothed metal thong wearing one shoved in to "Balance" the gender ratio.

I have never been turned off a game due to there not being a female playable char, but I have been by the female presence being stupidly oversexual. Some Genres do need a decent balance to hit a certain level of realism, mostly RPG's. Action games are rarely story based enough to actually be effected by only having a 1 sex lead, and it is very rare for them to not have a strong female presence, which is a combo taken directly from the vast majority of action movies.