/ Rob Beschizza / 8:55 am Mon Mar 14, 2011

On female characters in games

[Video Link] "The reason this topic has been so long in coming is because we've been waiting for the industry to provide us with a good topical example of a well-done female character. Unfortunately, nothing really helpful has come out." [Escapist via Metafilter]

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  1. The lack of interesting female characters is pretty much the reason why I always select to play a female character when given the choice. This is almost always regulated to RPGs, but I figure if it’s my job to make the blank-slate character interesting to me, it may as well be female.

    For the same reason I also tend to select non-white characters. I spend my life as a white male, why bother spending my time gaming as one?

  4. Ugh, it sounded like a woman’s studies lecture.

    I’d just like to see them ditch the new stereotype of the “ass kicking” woman myth (which I don’t ever see in reality) along with the requirement that every woman character be hot with perfect hips and huge boobs. There is also the issue of why every woman in games travels in skin tight clothes with huge amounts of cleavage. If I want porn I can find it elsewhere.

    While they are at it they can address why all men are body builders without a trace of fat or lack any empathy. Two things that are rare in reality.

  5. Parasite eve—-because mitochondrial DNA is passed only from the mother, that character had to be female and that was an awesome game.

    1. As long as they don’t screw up mitochondrial eve as much as Battlestar Galactica I’m happy.

      I have never seen a series turn around and piss all over plot and science quite as much.

  6. Jeez, this may an essay on the ways in which it sucks to be a woman in general (and sometimes a guy). Perhaps that’s why I tend to like female characters that were never designed as female to begin with. Look at games where you can create your appearance like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. When you play through the game, you realize that only a scant few lines were tweaked to acknowledge the fact that you’re female. The game was not “written” for a female. You’re just as much the hero, just as much the badass as the guy, and no one asks questions. What is, perhaps, the biggest equalizer? The brothels in Dragon Age are set up for customers of both sexes.

  7. “games rarely show women to be more dextrous”… except for every fighting game where female characters are generally faster and more agile, but do less damage. Or many role playing games.

    “we’ve been waiting for the industry to provide us with a good topical example of a well-done female character. Unfortunately, nothing really helpful has come out.” … Alex Vance (HalfLife 2), Samus (pre-zero-suit, Metroid), Jade (Beyond Good and Evil), Ashley Williams (Mass Effect), Jack (Mass Effect 2), Faith (Mirror’s Edge), April Ryan (Longest Journey: Dreamfall)… Oh wait, the article mentions a few of these in passing. WTF?

    There are few really good male characters in video games, so it’s not surprising that there are few good female ones as well. I agree that the number of shamefully hyper-sexualized women in games is attrocious, but so is the number of murderous hyper-masculine males.

    Basically, this article just ignores any evidence that contradicts it’s thesis. C-.

    -RTM

    1. I cant help but feel you missed the point of the video because of this your ignorant grading scale is made even more meaningless.

      pay attention to what they are saying don’t just listen for name drops (of video games and characters) which have no effect but to set aflame the heart of fan bois.

      what you received was a concise breakdown of what the creators believed would help take female characters, and if applied broadly all characters, more than “shamefully hyper-sexualized women” and “murderous hyper-masculine males”.

      but it tends to be the “hyper” roles which get gamers’ pituitary glands pumping…*sigh*. i mean who wants to save the galaxy as a skinny armed/legged guy who has recently been developing a beer gut and whose number one frustration in life is his back hair which just wont stop sprouting? (well of course i’d want to but that character is me).

      AH HAAAA!! AH HAHAAA! it would be nice if i became the new hyper-masculine…but now i’ve gone and focused a great article onto myself and men yikes! Damn my indoctrination into the Patriarchy. C- for my response.

  8. on a side note, I’m really liking this genre of serious topics with clever visual cues presented in a video. that little lecture would have been boring as balls in text, but I found it really engaging and interesting as a clever video, and I remember its main points quite easily.

    also see:

  9. Wow, I didn’t expect that to be so good! Thanks for posting that!

    I was a little disappointed they didn’t highlight Jade from Beyond Good and Evil a little more. She was a mother-like character to a house of orphans who had to struggle to save them. I also couldn’t see that as being a male role.

    Still, I’m certainly not going to hold up one cult classic from seven to eight years ago (has it been that long?) as an example when there’s so little to hold up today. It’s all Ivy’s today.

  10. I would say that games have a problem with stereotypes (or perhaps even media in general has said problem) regardless of gender.

  11. Anyone who who reads Boing Boing and has even the slightest interest in Video Games (whether as an art-form or not) should be watching Extra Credits and (maybe) Zero Punctuation. Their commentaries are insightful, poignant, Yahtzee’s are occasionally obscene, but always *hilarious*!

  12. I agree that female leads are massively under-represented in gaming. However, the premise that they’re looking for a “well-done” female character is pretty ludicrous, given that writing and character development in gaming is terrible to begin with. Point out well-done male leads, please!

    99% of the male characters are either steroid riddled man-apes with the vocabulary of a 5th grade dropout or sexless caricatures of humans that giggle and are otherwise designed to be non-threatening guides in the game world. You’ve got Mario and Marcus Fenix, Pikachu and Kratos. How am I, as a man, supposed to identify with this 7′ tall 380 pound meathead that’s lugging around a minigun and taking dozens of bullets with little damage?

    1. Point out well-done male leads, please!

      Crono of Chrono Trigger. He may not say much, but does things because they are right and need doing. He’s what a man should be.

  13. As someone stated above, the character Aya Brea from the Parasite Eve series was quite a likable character. While badass in a way, she’s not as ‘flat badass’ like Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider series.

    However, in my opinion, Squaresoft has a knack for creating awesome female characters. Instead of the usual big boobed characters with guns that are way to big.

  14. Why did all the female characters that were drawn have long hair? That and it didn’t touch on existential or radical feminism, rejections of societal pressure that don’t just lead to a ‘destructive’ stereotype. ‘Goth’ was given as a stereotype of this, although areas of this subculture can be a good creative example of folk mixing up stereotyped ‘gender’ characteristics, i.e., members of either/any sex can have short or long hair, wear corsets/etc or baggy clothing, which leads to the topic of androgyny [or lack of in this video] where previously stereotyped characteristics become mixed to a point where they are no longer easily assignable to sex or gender.

    1. societal

      so·ci·e·tal
      [suh-sahy-i-tl]
      –adjective
      noting or pertaining to large social groups, or to their activities, customs, etc.

  16. ‘All the great characters we’ve discussed here are a blend of accepting and rejecting what society expects of their gender. Cuz, simply put, this is what real human beings do.

    So, if you want to create a truly great female character, you have to be willing to brave those few issues that are truly unique to the feminine half of our species, or you have to give us a human being responding to ordinary societal pressures, perhaps under extraordinary circumstances, and coming to their own conclusions about how to integrate them.

    A great character doesn’t have to be defined by their gender, but gender and the pressures society exerts on us because of it, are a big part of who we are.’

    I kinda want to speak up here for indifference, that vast gray area between accepting and rejecting. We are not all born equally sensitive to or responsive to ‘societal cues’ or ‘societal pressures’. The perceived individual successes and failures thereof do not equal accepting, rejecting or a glitch in integration. We do seem to place a higher societal value on those we perceive as being more sensitive to societal norms and more successful in integrating them. We have labels for people all along that spectrum.

  17. Makes me think of the Powerpuff Girls.

    The PPGs capture the femminist villian, Femme Fatale, who asks the girls as they’re flying her to jail, “Who besides you are female superheros?” Blossom, responds with Supergirl, Batgirl, and several other “girls.” To which Fatale retorts, that they are all just pale immitations of their better known male counterparts, and challenges the PPGs to name one other superheroine besides the PPGs and Wonder Woman who can stand on her own. After a few tense moments, Buttercup shouts, “She’s right! There’s no one else!”

  19. Great vid. I always liked Lucca and Ayla from Chrono Trigger – they were pretty interesting/unique for the time. (then again, that game is my favorite RPG of all time.)

  20. Who needs a strong dynamic female lead? Certainly not these games, which are marketed to young girls.

    They just seem kind of ooky to me. Why can’t games be marketed with equally badass characters? Why do little girls have to have their ‘own’ patronising genre

  21. While they aren’t as plentiful, to say there are no strong female characters in games is incorrect. Just a cursory look at my shelves reveals
    Aya Brea from Parasite Eve.
    Jade from Beyond Good and Evil.
    Cheryl/Heather Mason from Silent Hill III.
    Samus Aran from Metroid.
    Makoto from Street Fighter III.

  22. I believe part of the problem is that video game developers tend to rely on the action and the gamers choices to carry the game rather than actually have anything more than a bare bones plot. Some games have so many cutscenes they have been accused of being virtually movies, while others are so thin they really may well have not bothered.
    Halflife 2 is a great example (is because we are still waiting for episode 3), sure its linear as a straight razor, but for all that your path is pre-destined it tells a rollicking great story. By the end you really feel something for your companion Alex Vance and you want to rip the overlords a new one because they made her cry.
    Bioshock was another great game, though the good/bad mechanic was pretty flimsy. It was a fascinating world to explore.
    Fallout 3 on the otherhand, even though it was a wide open world was not so good, you had your goal to go for and there was a plot, but the fact that you could dick around forever doing side quests that had no other effect than to raise or lower your karma actually choked the fun out of the game. The Pitt and Point Lookout where both more fun and interesting than the main plot.
    If there had actually been consequences for dicking about, like the Enclave actually taking over cities or if your good deeds actually raised the quality of life of those around you then it would have meant more, but actually having the action or inaction of your character affect the world around it is harder to do when it isn’t pre-scripted.
    I would like to see a game that gives you an objective but leaves it up to you how to achieve that objective without having to pass sign posts pointing the way and how you do it has conseqences both good and bad… oh yeah we have such a game, its called real life :)
    Anyway clearly my thoughts have set me adrift, so let me conclude. Games don’t just need good graphics and gameplay, they also need a good plot and if developers want their games to succeed they should hire good writers to flesh out the plots and the worlds your character moves through, and perhaps along that path we will find that strong female character so often missing from games. After all the video game demographic has long since expanded past the point of the male gamer.

  23. Chun-Li – Street Fighter
    Aerith, Tifa, & Yuffie – Final Fantasy 7
    Any female in Chrono Trigger
    Jill Valentine – Resident Evil
    Samus Aran – Metroid
    Princess Toadstool – Mario
    Zelda – Legend of Zelda
    Terra – Final Fantasy 6
    Yuna – FFX
    Lara Croft – Tomb Raider
    Jaina Proudmoore
    Sylvanas
    Jade – Beyond Good & Evil

    Nice list of good female characters, although I guess there could be more lead ones.

    1. Many of those are the ubiquitous huge tits & kicking ass types. Then there’s a few stereotypes common in Japanese games. The weak and shy like Aerith, the bubbly airhead like Yuffie. Then there’s Princess Toadstool who’s only characteristic is getting kidnapped a lot. Well, there was that one game where her overflowing emotions were used as game mechanics. Don’t think that was a step in the right direction though. :)

  24. I think the general idea of a lack of decent female game characters is probably true for most genres of computer game. However, graphical adventure games seem to have been ahead of the field for a while here. Just of the top of my head:

    April Ryan, The Longest Journey.
    Nico Collard, Shadow of the Templar series.
    Kate Walker, Syberia (and sequals).
    Zoë Castillo, Dreamfall.

    I’m sure I’m missing out on many more I’ve played over the years but those stand out straight away…

  25. I think that another aspect of the gaming community that sould be adressed isn’t just that RPG games don’t feature enough three-dimensional female characters.

    There are tons of females playing video/computer games, but these games are regarded as a ‘lower class’ of games. There is this notion that unless it’s some epic war story or killing zombie aliens in dark, gritty spaceships, it’s not a ‘real’ game and not worth talking about. This strikes me as somewhat chauvinistic as well. Every game art or gaming community I’ve seen was overwhelmingly focused on stuff about armored toughies battling something. That’s fine, of course. I’m not saying it’s not important to give female RPG battle game players better and more diverse characters. But it would be nice for the large number of game TYPES that ALREADY overwhelmingly appeal to females to not be coldly dismissed as ‘lame shit’.

    There could be more puzzle, sim and problem-solving games (which already attract a huge female base) featuring more diverse and original characters and storylines. For example, off the top of my head, something like Machinarium which feature amazing art, a nice storyline, clever problem-solving and fantastic music… only with a female lead character ;)

  26. That was a tangled mess of statements that effectively said nothing and contradicted itself in many places. He was asking all the wrong questions; no wonder he didn’t come up with any good answers. Did he even consult the female games blogosphere about the topic before writing this?

  27. Considering the lack of complex and believable characters of either sex, I’d be ecstatic if developers just did away with the helpless-female-in-distress trope. I know its boring and reductive too, but I’ll take the dude-in-a-female-body trope every time.

    And yes, there are a few exceptions, a very few. But if I held video games to same standard I have for films, I would never play games at all. So I play for fun and compelling gameplay and ignore as much of the story/plot/character development as possible. Its just too stupid to think about, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

    rant: I HATED Ashley from Resident Evil 4 with such passion I would shoot her on principle whenever she went full retard. I’d even premeditate that shit and wait until I got to a save point and BLAM! Its not noble, but it sure helped with the frustration.

  28. Sweet, another video game journalist over-analyzing a video game that isn’t sexist and using it as the worst example of sexism. Congrats, feel proud of yourself.

    As everyone else and yourself have mentioned, there ARE good female characters, people just choose to ignore them.

  29. My Lady Z has been a voice (mostly giggling) in two different editions of Dead Or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball … we discovered much later that one of them features a secret pole dancing segment! We were amused … but surprised … Those games are, I believe, known at least in part for their state-of-the-art “breast physics” … therefore, “well-done female characters” I suppose in a sense … also interesting to me is that she always gets picked to play the Asian character … Z is certainly Asian by heritage but was born here and has lived most of her life in California

  32. What I took from that video is that the definition of a strong female character is more than just gender and anywhere that you can switch a characters gender without needing to change the plot in any meaningful manner is a failure of the writer to impart any significance to the characters gender
    For example in Aliens, Ripley is that character because not only does she rise above her fear and kick alien ass, she also has motherly instincts for Newt. Vasquez not so much, she epitomized the dude with boobs and you could have swapped her gender and all that would have changed would be to make her and Drake gay couple, which would have been quite daring for its time.

  33. Nice to see a half-second of Heather from SH3. Who

    SPOILER

    is arguably a motherhood characters.

  35. Coundn’t agree more with them on the Samus charater in Metroid. Anyone remember this commerical?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0BHnm0IGBw

    this is who I’ve always thought Samus Aran is supposed to be. Unless you aked her to take her mask off, you’d never know she was a woman, you’d just know that she was a tall bounty hunter in a yellow suit and not someone you’d fuck with.

    Look at how much they like taking her out of the suit now to sigh and stare wistfully in the distance in cutscenes.

    Its like in early 2000 somebody woke up and remembered that the character was a woman and softened her up, played up the blond hair and blue eyes, then turned her into an anime charater.

  37. Sooo…

    There are characters for whom gender is irrelevant (all male) and characters for whom gender defines their relationship to society (all female).

    Please let me know how this produces rounded female characters? Or, at the very fucking least, character *as* rounded as their male counterparts that make up 99% of all videogame protagonists.

    C.
    PS. Motherhood? Oh. Great. Thanks. I’m glad there is no other reason to have a female-led plot.

  38. Uh, I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned Chell from Portal. I kinda skimmed through the video though. Did they think of mentioning her?

  40. “PS. Motherhood? Oh. Great. Thanks. I’m glad there is no other reason to have a female-led plot.”

    Freakin’ exactly. I don’t want to bar this kind of plot from ever happening but why does it HAVE to happen?

    “we’ve been waiting for the industry to provide us with a good topical example of a well-done female character. Unfortunately, nothing really helpful has come out.” … Alex Vance (HalfLife 2), Samus (pre-zero-suit, Metroid), Jade (Beyond Good and Evil), Ashley Williams (Mass Effect), Jack (Mass Effect 2), Faith (Mirror’s Edge)…”

    Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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