Something is rotten in the state of gaming. Even though almost half of all gamers today are women, girls in games continue to receive little love from developers. So what the hell is the deal?

At E3 last week, Ubisoft dropped themselves in it by announcing that the upcoming Assassins Creed Unity will only feature male playable characters. The reason given was that creating two sets of voices, animations, textures and so forth — one set for the male characters and one for the women — was outside the multi-million dollar scope of the game.

This is despite the fact that there are nine separate studios working on Unity and that Assassins Creed Liberation featured a playable female character. Ubisoft later backtracked and claimed that women were absent from the co-op part of the game since all players are actually playing as male lead, Arno.

The unfortunate truth however is that women are not playable in Unity because Ubisoft didn’t want there to be playable women characters. Just as Rockstar didn’t include playable women in GTA V, not because of the difficulty of animating them, but because they chose not to. Same goes for Halo, Far Cry, God of War, the Batman series, Bioshock, Uncharted, etc, etc.

There is an argument to made about how certain characters could only be fulfilled by men, like Halo’s Master Chief, but I don’t buy it. Sure, I get it, Chief is a hardened warrior, who was literally bred to fight since he was a child. He’s macho and strong and unwavering. But here’s the thing; in Halo canon, there were women Spartans as well. Is it so unthinkable that we might have played as Kelly instead of John?

Don’t get me wrong, I like playing as Master Chief; he’s a bad-ass. But do I have to play every game as him? Can I not play as someone who isn’t a raging mass of testosterone every now and then? I feel like game developers want to keep me shackled to my own masculinity, as if being given a powerful, strong female character is going to somehow emasculate me. Perhaps they are scared that I’ll forget I’m a man and never by a Halo game again?

In other entertainment mediums, you find great female characters all the time, often occupying what you might call traditional “male roles”. Take Battlestar Galactica’s Kara Thrace, a.k.a “Starbuck”, for an example. That role was originally played by a man, but in the re-imaged series Katee Sackhoff took Starbuck and made her into probably the best character in the entire show. She was a hardened warrior. She was macho and strong and unwavering. She wasn’t a woman trying to be a man. She was woman that knew who she was and, crucially, knew she was better than all the men. Starbuck was the ultimate badass. Now, how can anyone say that a character like that wouldn’t sell games?

I wanted to get a girl’s take on this so I spoke to Ashley from blog to see what she made of it.

“I think one of the biggest issues is that game developers think they need to cater to women.  A good character is a good character.  A good plot is a good plot.  If you’re not making a game that’s inherently sexist, any character that exists in that world will be worth playing. But there is such a strong focus on the graphics and visuals and less effort is going into plot and personality development.” 

This is such a valid point. Gamers, both men and women, don’t want games that feature female characters that have been included just so the dev could tick a box that says, ‘this game has female characters’. Just as players of Tomodachi life don’t want same-sex marriages to be included at the expense of everything else. What we want are great stories and great experiences. If the writing is good and the narrative holds up, then it really doesn’t matter if the character you can play as is a man or a woman — or gay. Some people want to play as a women, so why not let them from time to time?

As a man, when a game offers me the choice of playing as a man or a woman, I almost always choose the woman. The reason why comes back to the reason I play games at all; that I’m looking for an experience that is different from my own reality. Sure, playing as a male vault dweller in Fallout 3 is pretty different from my reality, but playing as a female vault dweller just adds another layer to the roleplaying. I asked Ashley if she opts for female characters over males and her answer surprised me.

“If it’s a uniquely female character, I’ll usually opt to play her.  Take something classic like Street Fighter. Of course I wanted to play Princess Kitana! On the other hand, I’m not a fan of choosing the female version of a character, like Mass Effects’ Commander Shepard. To me that’s not a female character.  That’s like picking what outfit your character is going to wear. In situations like that, I’m going to stick with the male version mostly, because 99% of those types of characters were originally designed or imagined as men. I’m not going to play a girl character just for the sake of feminine solidarity.”

For me, playing as female Shepard was the more rewarding experience, not just because she was a women, but because the voice acting by Jennifer Hale was leaps and bounds ahead of Mark Meer’s efforts. But I can see that it would be pretty annoying to be offered up basically window dressing in an attempt to appease female gamers.

All this makes me wonder if the people that want playable women characters the most are actually guys? If developers are churning out the Master Chiefs and the Delsin Rowes to satisfy their ‘core audience’ of male gamers, perhaps they are making a mistake in not bringing more awesome female characters to their brands. Of course we have do have at least one strong female lead that sells millions of games.

“I don’t think you can talk about female characters and not talk about Lara Croft.  She’s such a great character and although she has been highly sexualised over the years, she’s wearing more clothes nowadays!”

There is no doubt that Lara Croft changed the perception of what a women in a video game could be. But she first appeared 18 years ago and in the intervening time, the role of women in games hasn’t progressed much at all. In fact, as Ashley points out, it’s only recently that developers have started to focus more on her character and less on her bust size.

We’ve just started out on the new generation of consoles and commercial VR could be right around the corner. Developers talk all the time about “moving gaming forwards”, so when are they going to start moving in the right directions? Women as playable characters in video games need to stop being considered optional extras, and be given the same treatment that men have had for decades — gamers, both men and women, deserve better. Given a choice between a Starbuck character and an Aiden Pierce, I know who I’d choose.

Ashley is a and gamer.

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