Feminist writing has existed since at least as far back as Ancient Greece. Swiss women finally gained full voting rights across the country in 1990. Film and television grant increasingly prominent roles to female actors. And yet, the Triple-A gaming industry seems to be steaming in the opposite direction, continuing to treat female protagonists as more alien than sci-fi races.

The March 25 episode of Jimquisition explores the conscious effort to limit, if not completely eliminate, leading female roles in video games. It is a sad testament to the misogyny of mainstream gaming culture, but also answers the question many people (myself included) have been pondering for years: Where are the women? Outside indie titles and niche markets, female leads are rare, particularly if unaccompanied by a big strong male protector. Typically they're either second-tier sidekicks at best, contrived plot devices at w—actually no, there's a few rungs further down that I don't want to touch.

Even when women do play the hero, character development and psychology tend to be stymied. Samus' inner thoughts were never seriously explored until Other M, the title that butchered her established character by retreating into stereotypical gender roles. Lara Croft enjoys perhaps even greater iconic status (unquestionably due at least in part to her sex appeal), yet despite her 1996 breakout as a strong lead and a Darker & Edgier reboot in 2013, her personality remains nebulous to the point some describe it as tabula rasa; not exactly promising ground for substantive character development. At the far end we get the RE4 aneurysm Ashley Graham and the Dead or Alive series, whose greatest claim to fame is the attention given to bodily physics in beach volleyball mode.

It didn't have to be this way. Back in the early days of computer gaming, a surprising range of genres were equal-opportunity employers. Apogee's 1994 vertical-scrolling shoot-'em-up Raptor: Call of the Shadows devoted two profile pictures to women, of a total of four. Civilization II had a female counterpart for each male leader. One third of MechCommander's pilot roster was female. Yet this gender equity never translated into first-person-perspective games to anywhere near the same extent, and with the Triple-A's nigh-exclusive focus on shooters since the early 2000s, it is understandable, however disagreeable, that women have been, are, and continue to be marginalized in the mainstream. Sterling posits it as a chicken-and-egg problem: Is the lack of titles because female gamers are generally disinterested in the genres in question, or is the industry's unwillingness to broaden its appeal shutting them out? As far as I know, no substantive investigation into this question has been conducted, and from what Sterling reports, there is no serious interest in an answer either way.

What does the gaming industry lose by squandering one half of the global demographic? Variety, certainly; the over-emphasis on marines (space or otherwise) marinated in testosterone has turned me off of most of today's FPS titles, while plot-wise they are as bland and predictable as the fetid fondue of grey, brown, and anachronistic Kalashnikovs. There's also the matter of alternative perspective: sure, Mass Effect and Bethesda's latest RPGs nominally colour interactions based on the player's gender, but what we really need are games that harness the specialty of the female protagonist to produce an original story. Women gamers exist even in such male-dominated franchises as Halo (although God knows why given the average maturity of Xbox Live); heck, there's a mod in the works for TF2 that would add fully-voiced female counterparts to all the classes. An audience exists for such a venture. That no-one in the leading companies has sought to tap this latent consumer base betrays a thorough lack of vision. Feminizing the genre isn't even unrealistic; imagine Call of Duty from the view of Mariya Oktyabrskaya.


As with most perceived affronts to my egalitarian politics, the War on Women is something I've actively opposed in DYOS; there are a substantial number of senior female Union officers consciously chosen as such, although bringing their full potential to the forefront has been consistently thwarted by chronic delays and entire plots falling through. It's also become an on-and-off fixation of mine within IOT, beginning conceptually with contingency plans in The Aftermath and rolling out in full force in the Multipolarity series. I can't actually explain why it began, but I can certainly argue for the particulars of a feminine mind leading to a different approach to politics: however tongue-in-cheek its origin, the gender lens seemed increasingly viable as a means of discoursing the fundamental antagonism between the Lancers and christos' China over the meaning of democracy and definition of legitimate rule.

The point I was trying to make in this cascading stream of consciousness is that if fully and properly realized, female protagonists bring a new perspective to familiar scenarios, and so long as the mainstream video game industry refuses to break out of its protective male-centric mindset and at least try offering women leadership opportunities, it is squandering a potential wealth of innovative and original ideas. In every other social sector we are constantly told of the importance of female agency. It's the 21st Century, after all; it'd be great if we could act our age.