That’s about the only thing I like about his writing. He knows there’s no reason why a badass hero can’t as easily be a badass heroine if there are no actual gender issues to be dealt with in the plot, and so he “goes out of his way” (all the while knowing he’s not actually going out of his way, since it’s no harder) to make strong and compelling female characters in his action movies. Some studio head might have tried in 1986 to tell him that Ellen Ripley couldn’t believably be so badass and that audiences would stay away if he tried to make her so (even Ridley Scott couldn’t resist having her menaced in her underwear), but Cameron has proven himself correct time and again. I just wish more writers would bother to do this as well, and that more studio execs would let them.
Knowing (and appreciating) the much-better-than-average gender bias for BB in general, I was glad to see we’d successfully attracted female players… not just so we could reach a quota or have token female players or anything, but because I knew there were awesome female players out there, I knew that many frequented BoingBoing’s BBS, and I knew they’d come if we didn’t do anything stupid to turn them off.
Like Chris, I played the last two Fallout games as female characters, and I did so again with the Mass Effect series, in large part because they’re role-playing games, and it’s fun for me to see if the female characters I play in such games have a noticeably more exotic day-to-day experience (in relation to my humdrum, non-apocalyptic and non-futuristic life) within the game than their male counterparts would. Sometimes, like in Mass Effect, the differences are almost entirely cosmetic. Every NPC affords FemShep the exact same respect (or otherwise) that they do to BroShep. The romances differ slightly, sometimes, but whatever.
But with our little postapocalyptic wasteland, I try for certain touches of verisimilitude, and if there is to be any hope for a future, then we’re gonna need a decent cross-section of humanity to survive. I don’t mean we’ll need women to breed; that’s not only crass and heteronormative and reductive, but doesn’t have much to do with hope. I suppose that a game about a postapocalyptic Los Angeles where everyone craps into their heavily-armored cars in order to go might seem tailor-made for the kind of 11-year-old straight white American boy I’ll always be on some level, but within that skeletal framework I’ve felt that there ought to be room for players of all sorts and tastes. Nuclear war doesn’t discriminate when it comes to gender; it could kill all of us as easily as it could some of us. I wanted our players to be able to imagine themselves (or an alternate self, bearing no real resemblance to their IRL persona, if so desired) surviving ten years in such a merciless and hostile environment, and to imagine what they’d do when presented with a definitive declaration that things on Earth weren’t ever going to get better, and with an opportunity to do whatever it took to obtain, for themselves and their species and maybe for some friends made along the way, some hope for a genuinely better tomorrow.
That always seemed to me as gender-blind a goal as a being could have, and hopefully we’ve sold the game that way to the players.
