We live in a pluralistic society. That means that there are different expressions of gender, race, sexuality, ideology and culture. Different people are represented in different identities and that is good. It brings diversity. It brings richness. So it is understandable that culture has also changed over time. For example, in video games, we have more and more female protagonist characters. Women who are not just narrative excuses, prizes for protagonists, but key characters with motivations and a heroic arc just like any man’s. Even if there are many people out there who can’t accept it.
Why does this happen? This is a very interesting question. If we ask people who complain about female representation in video gaming, they will probably give us a series of arguments that we have all heard. That women don’t really play video games. That a character’s identity doesn’t matter when it comes to feeling represented. That they make all women ugly now because the feminist agenda hates female beauty. And regardless of whether these are good arguments or bad arguments, they are arguments. And to answer the question that really interests us, why is representation, female or otherwise, important to the video game and to all media, let’s answer these three arguments with as much good faith as we can muster.
Do women play video games?
The argument that women don’t play video games is not as old as many people may think. Although it is true that there has always been a certain air of suspicion towards them, it wasn’t until the mid 90s, and particularly the early 00s, that the argument that women don’t play video games became strong among gamers. Mainly because that is what was sold by the specialized press and the industry itself: video games were a boy’s thing.
If we look at the ads up to that time, they were virtually all starring boys and girls equally. There wasn’t such a clear gender bias. The kind of games weren’t even that segmented, even games, particularly on consoles, didn’t seem to have a gender focus. F-Zero wasn’t a boy’s game. Pokémon wasn’t a girl’s game. Mega Drive was not a boy’s console. Game Boy was not a girl’s console. But the marketing and press began to shift from the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 generation onwards, focusing more and more on a genre segmentation of the market, which reached its culmination in the PlayStation 2, Game Cube and Nintendo DS generation, where it became clear that there were boys’ games and girls’ games. That the former were more valuable than the latter and that by extension, it would end up becoming that girls don’t play games. Or that what they play are not real video games.
The Sims today may be considered a “girl’s” game, but it is not as it was perceived upon its release on January 31, 2000. In the same way, girls today may be perceived as not playing video games. What the data says, however, is that the reality is quite the opposite.
According to a study by Mat Piscatella, CEO and video game industry analyst at Circana, 47% of console gamers are women, 50% of PC gamers are women and 54% of mobile gamers are women. There are as many women as men playing video games. Many men might then ask, where are these women, why are they absent, never appearing under their radar, making them believe they don’t exist? While the answer is obvious – no woman wants to be perceived as a woman when she knows that’s a reason to hate her – the following questions will help us develop it.
Is the identity of a character important when playing a video game?
Historically, most video game protagonists have been male. When they have not been names, they have been coded with masculine traits. Aliens or monsters or entities with deep voices, relatively square in appearance and given to violence. Even when they have been female, they have shared male traits – violent, lethal and with a quip always on their lips. Lara Croft may be a great female character, but the problem is that she’s a woman coded with the traits befitting a man; she’s exactly like all the other protagonists of the era, but sexy. Where male protagonists didn’t need to be sexy and yes it is Lara’s main attribute.
That means that boys have a mirror to look into and girls don’t. Or worse, the mirror they have is broken and distorted. Or worse, the mirror they do have is broken and distorted. They have manly figures to imitate, for better or worse, and they have either passive objects to be rescued or coded male protagonists, which if imitated would be considered “unfeminine and unacceptable” behavior. In other words, since the second half of the 90s, the space of interest for women in video games has been greatly reduced.
What is the point of having female protagonists? So that girls can have mirrors in which to look at themselves. Examples they can identify with. To prove that women can be strong, funny, intelligent, cultured, good, sweet, candid, but also evil, cruel, brutal, ironic, weak, or any other positive or negative trait, as men can be. That’s what having more female protagonists is for. Or black. Or Asians. Or gay. Or trans. So that people can relate and can know that their life, what they are, is something normal, not an anomaly, where the protagonist is always a middle-aged white man with a square jaw.
Why can’t a female character be sexy?
That brings us to answer the last question, why aren’t female characters sexy by default anymore? But at this point the answer is easier by asking the reverse question, why aren’t male characters sexy by default?
If today’s female lead characters are not necessarily attractive to the average heterosexual male’s canons of beauty, it is because they are not there to be attractive. Neither have male lead characters ever been. They are there for people to project themselves onto them, to feel represented and to conceive of themselves as an ideal to aspire to. Can that ideal be one of beauty? Yes, but it doesn’t have to be. The classic hypermuscled male protagonist, unlike what many men believe, is not an ideal of beauty, but a fantasy of power. By the same token, female lead characters don’t have to be sexy. Or spectacularly beautiful. They have to be aspirational for a female audience. Something where the male perspective counts less than how women perceive it.
A protagonist character is, practically always, aspirational. That’s why they can have attributes other than physical attractiveness to create a connection with the player. If this can be understood with male characters, it is not difficult to understand why the same happens with female characters. And while it is true that we can empathize with characters regardless of gender, it is no less true that, living in a society divided by gender, it is easier to do so with those of our own identity.
Brief conclusions (or why it’s good to have female protagonists)
That’s why it’s important to understand why video games need female protagonists. They are half of the players. They need role models. They need to see themselves represented just as men do. In the same terms. It’s not hard to understand and, when you remove the veil of misunderstanding, it’s easy to see: they need that space too.
Those who are unable to understand this are people who refuse to understand anything that escapes their perception of reality. People who want to believe a very specific account of reality, where they are the heroes or the victims of some sort of conspiracy. The reality is that when there are more and more female protagonist characters and more women are declaring themselves gamers it is not because of any kind of political struggle or attempt to appropriate something that is not theirs, but because of something much simpler: because there is a group of people who want to feel represented and are willing to make an effort to achieve it. There are no conspiracies. It’s not an attempt to erase men or women as men like them. It is simply a matter of fairness. But to understand what is justice, you first have to want to listen to how others feel, not just what suits us.
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