Also failing the Bechdel test: pretty much all puzzle games, facebook games, and mobile games, which is basically the majority of games that are being played.
I play lots of video games. This past June I started a weekday blog on games. I went back and looked at every games I’ve talked about in my blog. Two passed the test, one passed if you choose to play a female character and didn’t if you choose to play a male, two failed despite having characters that actually talk to each other, and fourteen failed because the games did not include conversations. Of the two that failed, one failed because it had a gender imbalance (three male characters and one female character) and one failed because it has only two characters who engage in conversations and one of them is not human.
I also watch people play video games on the internet. Of those I have watched in the last few months, six I can think of have no conversations, and all of the rest pass the test if the protagonist is female and fail if the protagonist is male. From memory (I don’t have a handy record like I do on my blog) that one had a female lead, two had a choice of male or female lead and six or seven had a male lead.
I think what I said above is completely justified. But the majority of video games I play and watch are going to fail the test simply because, unlike movies, they really aren’t about conversations. For the majority of games that have conversations the Bechdel test only tells you whether the protagonist is male or female. You can make what you will of the fact that more protagonists are male, but you don’t have to invoke Bechdel to point it out. One game I can think of that I have played/watched is a real, legitimate failure of the Bechdel test because it really does have multiple characters who have their own storylines and somehow the female characters never even talk to one another (I think they did once but it was purely about the whereabouts of a male character).
