The ‘spoiler warning list’ from the notes in this video looks like an excellent start.
It’s easy to turn Sackboy into Sackgirl in LittleBigPlanet.
A protagonist that isn’t heteronormative? Kirby, perhaps?
I’m sure there must be at least a few indie games around. Big, expensive, household name games though? No.
I did think ‘homosexual romance options’ were a nice touch when I started noticing them in games, even though plot wise it didn’t usually mean anything (again, Ultima VII, Fallout). Better than not having the option at all, at least?
There is definintely a spectrum of female protagonists: Chell? Oh, um, in passing, if you line up your portals right it looks like you might be female for this one… BloodRayne? Definitely there for reasons involving an ideological opposition to the evils of fascism…
Between these there are, of course, a wide variety of more and less clear examples, with some extra complexity from game worlds that have gender roles issues that your character may or may not get to interact with in some interesting way.
Nearly all of the “casual gamer” category of games assume a female lead, There are hundreds of such games. Head over to bigfish.com and check out the “hidden object” section. The name is a bit misleading, as these games have evolved tremendously over the last few years and hidden object searching is just a small part of the overall game play, but the name has stuck.
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I’m probably not qualified to wade into the deep water of what qualifies as a ‘genuine female voice and perspective’; but it is worth noting that some(not all; but some) of the structural focus of games is determined by available technology.
Even games that are largely not aimed at guns 'n explosions gamer bros (like the notably zillions-selling The Sims series) fall very, very, heavily into the fact that it’s strikingly difficult to get a computer to emit something that isn’t word salad, much less pass the turing test with sufficiently high marks to be an even vaguely interesting character. In the case of The Sims, basically all social interactions, needs, and relationships get boiled down to integers that can be bumped up and down (pretty much exactly what you do with hit points and battle axes in an RPG) because nobody has anything that can do convincing characters and interactions without having humans write, voice-act, and substantially animate(even in games that have partially automated mook-diversifiers, characters you are supposed to care about are generally handled by the art team). RPGs are the ones that most commonly do this in loving detail, games from other genres sometimes do as well.
Things that can be boiled down to numbers, and handled with adequate verisimilitude by much simpler models(doesn’t have to be violent, city-building, puzzle games, etc. all qualify; but violence certainly comes under this heading) are easier and cheaper to make games from, and easier to make games with replay value because the entire world doesn’t have to be manually scripted.
Even in games that are violencetastic power fantasies (Black & White, say) tend to stumble badly if they try to break the mold. Throwing fireballs? Worked fine. ‘Training’ a creature? New definition of pain and suffering. Interacting with your worshipers? Wildly simplified and still largely sucked. Other examples would be the ‘stealth’ and ‘stealth/FPS’ hybrid games: Making guards that respond even vaguely plausibly to noises, line of sight, discovery of comrade’s bodies, missing patrols that they should know about, missing patrols that they have no reason to, etc. has been a very, very, difficult area of work. Even in generally highly rated games in the genre(Thief, Dishonored), it’s still pretty primitive.
In RTSes, ‘fog of war’ is another such example. The real-world breakdown of situational awareness, information transmission, etc. that occurs is very hard to model, so most games go with ‘unexplored’, ‘explored, no line of sight’ and ‘visible’ and call it a day.
None of this pretends to explain the distribution of game themes(which are, in large part, pitched and marketed much like summer action movies); but it is the case that some topics are genuinely far harder than others, and a realistic conversation is much harder(unless scripted) than a realistic shot to the head.
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Isn’t “hidden object” what used to be called “adventure games”, back before those died?
Biologically speaking, Kirby appears to be a bacterium or something. Devouring your enemies and gaining their abilities is totally normal, if you are some asexual cell blob that uses plasmids.
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Not really. They’re really a subcategory of Puzzle games. There’s no fighting. You’ll almost never find a weapon in your inventory. If you have a knife, you’ll probably use it to cut a rope, rather than to stab an ogre. Originally, they were just a series of static images, where you had to find the hidden items in the provided list, usually within a specific time period. With “Madame Fate” a story line was added, and you had the option of untimed play. From then on, the games become more and more about the story, with puzzles integrated into the plot, than the hidden object scenes.
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Sounds like a fine distinction. There sure was a lot of puzzley, non-fightey, clickable-object-searching, clever-object-matching action in the classic adventure genre.
At least two I can think of that I played on the original Xbox that aren’t here. One is “Defender”, which had a female protagonist. The second is 'Jedi Starfighter", which had two protagonists, one of which was female.
That’s the sort of game play I was thinking of too - my favourite being Sam & Max from LucasArts.
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Missing Terra from final fantasy 3/6
I was happy to see the listing “Nancy Drew Series” among the games with female protagonist, but those three words don’t do justice to the dozens of games available in the series from HER Interactive. I haven’t played them all but they aren’t just the same game done over and over with Nancy wearing a different wardrobe in each one. I’m a middle aged guy and I know that there are plenty of adult fans of the series out there.
I love point and click adventure games and I’m glad that they aren’t completely dead.
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I’m right with you. Even if the game has a woman at the lead, it can still be a very problematic game in terms of attitudes either because of physical character design or because of storytelling and unfortunate implications. Samara in Mass Effect 2 always bugs me for that reason. Jack’s lack of attire makes sense. She’s rejecting social norms, being aggressively unclothed. Miranda’s catsuit is even marginally understandable given how she sees her appearance as something she didn’t earn and a tool to exploit. The camera, on the other hand… But Samara’s blatantly sexual character design is so at odds with her celibate warrior monk characterization that I just can’t ignore or justify it.
Interestingly, Lara Croft moved from almost a BloodRayne or Bayonetta level of sexualised fantasy in older titles to a much better take in the most recent game. Her character had some odd quirks and there were some weird gameplay/story segregation problems, but overall she actually reminded me of a woman I know and respect a great deal. That happens so rarely with characters of either gender in games. Most characters are just archetypes and are relatable, but not on a personal level (Dragon Age had this problem in varying degrees and so did Mass Effect). As a result, I was really impressed with new Lara. She’s a big step in the right direction, in my opinion.
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Died? I guess I’m not in the middle of playing a Tex Murphy that came this year, after finishing one where you’re a roach after a nuclear war.
Well, it’s the baseline. If there’s a general romance option in an RPG, it takes more effort to make it exclusively heterosexual. The funny/sad bit is that being able to create male and female characters makes NPCs bisexual by default. I’m not sure I would call accidental diversity laudable. In Skyrim you can marry pretty much anyone or anything, but that makes the relationships themselves almost meaningless.
As to the other thing, the AAA industry will never lead the charge towards any kind of innovation. At this point, it is creatively, if not morally, bankrupt. It is Hollywood, but without accountability or higher aspirations.
You may be interested in this Wikipage. While most early characters listed are NPCs, they are often supporting characters, with important roles to play in plot.
Several playable gay characters from games are listed on the page. I recommend you start looking for them with Acclaim’s 1999 South Park Rally. Big Gay Al was a playable character.
How could anyone forget my favorite game that I never beat: Maniac Mansion?
