Female Leads

I'm wondering if we are going to be coming up on a time when female leads are going to become prevalent, acceptable, and commercially successful in games. Life is Strange left a ripple in the industry, and coming up we have ReCore, Detroit, Mirror's Edge 2, Adrift, and probably more. The new Star Wars gave us a female lead character. The often used line is that games with male leads sell better and are more easily marketed. Is this even true still?

It would actually be very interesting if the games industry got to a decent parity more quickly than Hollywood… and I'm starting to think that might actually happen.

I'm currently replaying Beyond Two Souls on PS4, which also has a female lead. As an aside, anybody want to get the co-op trophy wth me? :-p

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I'm wondering if we are going to be coming up on a time when female leads are going to become prevalent, acceptable, and commercially successful in games. Life is Strange left a ripple in the industry, and coming up we have ReCore, Detroit, Mirror's Edge 2, Adrift, and probably more. The new Star Wars gave us a female lead character. The often used line is that games with male leads sell better and are more easily marketed. Is this even true still?

It would actually be very interesting if the games industry got to a decent parity more quickly than Hollywood… and I'm starting to think that might actually happen.

I'm currently replaying Beyond Two Souls on PS4, which also has a female lead. As an aside, anybody want to get the co-op trophy wth me? :-p

To post the obvious: hasn't Tomb Raider done pretty well for itself?

Also, something that has become much more prevalent is the ability to play Male or Female characters in games.

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There's a huge shift right now that's started a few years back, but is pretty well going mainstream. It's feminism's turn to be at the forefront in gaming. It won't take over everything but we will see that angle on things for a while before it stabilizes out into a happy medium of "something for everyone". And I do think that this has been happening with movies as well, although for longer but at a slower pace. It's picking up a lot now though.

And I don't think that's a bad thing either, lest someone get the wrong idea. But for the record, I don't think the old way was bad either, just aimed at different demographics, regardless of who was playing.

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The main character's gender has never been a major factor for me as long as the character themselves is interesting. It is nice to be able to customize all aspects of a player avatar, but I think it's a bit worthless to have a female lead who's defining trait is bragging about her gender. We've had awesome 80s/90s female characters like Ripley from Aliens, Lewis from Robocop and Sara Conner from Terminator and no one blinks an eye because the characters have intrinsic interest outside their gender. Most Bond girls on the other hand are pretty forgettable because they are defined mostly by their gender.

From the games side we have had interesting female leads, or the option for them, for some time. It's mainly been the slow realization that boys will play girl characters, and girls will play boy characters, that is the major change.

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From the games side we have had interesting female leads, or the option for them, for some time. It's mainly been the slow realization that boys will play girl characters, and girls will play boy characters, that is the major change.

I think it's very odd that this has taken the gaming industry so long to figure out. I mean, part of the reason I play games is to do in games what I can't do in real life. I know that sounds normal, weird and sketch at the same time but it's true.

Most of my friends make fun of my for almost always picking female characters but to me, that is something new. I also mostly like how female characters play in games. Light, agile type characters.

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...I want it to be female!

;)

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A definite bonus. I don't know if my wife would agree. Well, I don't know if my wife would agree with me looking at a man's either... I'm confused now.

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A definite bonus. I don't know if my wife would agree. Well, I don't know if my wife would agree with me looking at a man's either... I'm confused now.

Make your avatar look like your wife!

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A definite bonus. I don't know if my wife would agree. Well, I don't know if my wife would agree with me looking at a man's either... I'm confused now.

Make your avatar look like your wife!

Oddly enough, sometimes I actually do.

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A definite bonus. I don't know if my wife would agree. Well, I don't know if my wife would agree with me looking at a man's either... I'm confused now.

Make your avatar look like your wife!

Make your avatar slightly thinner and more attractive than your wife, then SAY you made it look exactly like her. Same principle as purposefully guessing low on a woman's age.

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I play a lot of female characters in RPGs. It started with Fallout 3, where a particular perk made it objectively better to play as a girl, since then I have done it as novelty or as luck. In Borderlands, it looked like they had the coolest stuff, in GTA online, it was the random that it gave me when the thing barely worked, and in Destiny I had a plan to make six dudes, one of each gender and race before I found out it limited you to three. Hence, got stuck with two girls.

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I play a lot of female characters in RPGs. It started with Fallout 3, where a particular perk made it objectively better to play as a girl, since then I have done it as novelty or as luck. In Borderlands, it looked like they had the coolest stuff, in GTA online, it was the random that it gave me when the thing barely worked, and in Destiny I had a plan to make six dudes, one of each gender and race before I found out it limited you to three. Hence, got stuck with two girls.

Initially I created 2 male characters and one female. My main Titan was modeled after Prince Adam/He Man, my Warlock was supposed to be modeled after a Robotech character, but the hair wasn't right, so when rerolling it to play w/ my bro-in-law I swapped the gender to female & modeled it after Miriya, but they just didn't have her hair right either. Seriously, why can't I have any decent Zentradi hair for my awoken?

Anyway, back on track, I've now seriously played 2 male & 2 female characters in destiny.

edit: changing the subject to better reflect my lament over lack of good zentradi hair.

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I love you for somehow managing to involve Robotech in all this. :P

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Perhaps you meant Macross?

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It took me over a week to notice that in SLR the primary view of my character was a female ass. Yet once I noticed I didn't find the sparrow design awkward or hacked in order to make it less sexual. It was well done.

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Four out of six of my guardians are female. Well, two of the females are Exos, but they're ostensibly female.

My femshep is a much more interesting character than my broshep.

My favorite character from a video game is, without a doubt, Ellie from the Last of Us.

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All 3 of my Guardians are female, I always play a female in Bethesda RPGs, I played only as Femshep in Mass Effect, I use a female Spartan in Halo, etc. Most often it's just because in all of those games I find the female avatars more aesthetically pleasing. I'm probably just sexist for wanting to look at pixel butts or something though.

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All 3 of my Guardians are female, I always play a female in Bethesda RPGs, I played only as Femshep in Mass Effect, I use a female Spartan in Halo, etc. Most often it's just because in all of those games I find the female avatars more aesthetically pleasing.

Apart from the obvious, I totally agree. I did play as a DudeShep once and he was kinda a babe though.

I'm probably just sexist for wanting to look at pixel butts or something though.

If that makes me sexist then I am Satan.*

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Four out of six of my guardians are female. Well, two of the females are Exos, but they're ostensibly female.

My femshep is a much more interesting character than my broshep.

I think the best part about that is both examples afford female audiences to properly reflect themselves in a wonderful universe. I'll never forget the faces of my Shepard or Awoken Hunter because I felt like in a way that was me. In every possible way games that allow you the ability to create a character with deep resonance in the events of its narrative a gender option is essential.

There needs to be a greater attention paid to leading girls and women in video games as characters set in stone. I think this year was pretty good, especially with the likes of Life is Strange where a young woman and her relationship with another young woman was the nucleus of a bunch of nachos.

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I'm wondering if we are going to be coming up on a time when female leads are going to become prevalent, acceptable, and commercially successful in games. Life is Strange left a ripple in the industry, and coming up we have ReCore, Detroit, Mirror's Edge 2, Adrift, and probably more. The new Star Wars gave us a female lead character. The often used line is that games with male leads sell better and are more easily marketed. Is this even true still?

It would actually be very interesting if the games industry got to a decent parity more quickly than Hollywood… and I'm starting to think that might actually happen.

I'm currently replaying Beyond Two Souls on PS4, which also has a female lead. As an aside, anybody want to get the co-op trophy wth me? :-p

I'm probably going to be getting that with Sammy first, but afterwards, sure. :P

As cAddi pointed out, Tomb Raider has more than proven itself (A million units sold in under two months while competing directly against Fallout 4, and indirectly against Call of Duty and Halo 5) as a successful, female-driven franchise.

I don't think that gender of protagonist is really that important... For example, Gone Home has players playing as a female, but it doesn't really have any effect on the game, though the true "protagonist" of the game is her sister, whose gender does somewhat affect the plot of the game (and is actually contrasted... without really going too much into spoiler territory).

Black Ops 3 is also the first Call of Duty game to have a female lead (though Finest Hour did have a female player-controlled character), if one chooses her. The player's borderline-love interest deuteragonist is also female, which causes some implications (though the game doesn't draw attention to this fact). Three of the nine multiplayer characters are also female (against five males and one genderless robot).

Warframe generally introduces new characters on a "one male, one female" sequence, and there is some public outcry when they break from the pattern (heck, they even introduced a dual-gendered character, Equinox).

I think more and more games will simply let players choose their gender, and more folks are opening up to the idea of choosing to play as a female when given the option (Mass Effect, Destiny, etc.).
Heck, I have more of a personal connection to my female Hunter on Xbox than my male Hunter on PS4. Who knows...

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I'm wondering if we are going to be coming up on a time when female leads are going to become prevalent, acceptable, and commercially successful in games. Life is Strange left a ripple in the industry, and coming up we have ReCore, Detroit, Mirror's Edge 2, Adrift, and probably more. The new Star Wars gave us a female lead character. The often used line is that games with male leads sell better and are more easily marketed. Is this even true still?

It would actually be very interesting if the games industry got to a decent parity more quickly than Hollywood… and I'm starting to think that might actually happen.

I'm currently replaying Beyond Two Souls on PS4, which also has a female lead. As an aside, anybody want to get the co-op trophy wth me? :-p

Of the games I played in 2015, I think all had either female leads, or gave you the choice of which gender to play, or at least had females in strong important secondary positions. We're also apparently at the point where games gets criticism if they don't have female characters like Assassin's Creed did a couple of titles back.

So, prevalent? Check. Acceptable? Check. Commercially Successful? Check.

I think we're there already! :)

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This reminds me.

First day back at work. Ask my office neighbor, a guy about my age, what he thought about The Force Awakens. He launches into this speech about how good he thinks it is that they have an interracial couple in the movie.

First thought: Well, maybe they're a couple, but I didn't get that vibe--I mean, Finn seemed like he might be interested, but Rey less so. There's much less of that kind of spark between them that you saw, say, among the leads in the first Star Wars.

Second thought: Does anyone even think about this anymore one way or another except for old white people? (More particularly, racists and secret racists who compensate by bragging about their approval of interracial couples?)

P.S. No offense intended here--just thinking out loud.

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Second thought: Does anyone even think about this anymore one way or another except for old white people? (More particularly, racists and secret racists who compensate by bragging about their approval of interracial couples?)

P.S. No offense intended here--just thinking out loud.

That is inherently a racist statement. That means you are guilty of DOUBLE RACISM!!! which is TEH WORSTEST!

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First thought: Well, maybe they're a couple, but I didn't get that vibe--I mean, Finn seemed like he might be interested, but Rey less so. There's much less of that kind of spark between them that you saw, say, among the leads in the first Star Wars.

Yeah, I didn't really get a romance vibe from them either. Just loyalty and friendship. Definitely not anything like Luke's very obvious crush on Leia.

Second thought: Does anyone even think about this anymore one way or another except for old white people? (More particularly, racists and secret racists who compensate by bragging about their approval of interracial couples?)

I do, all the time. Maybe not in the way you mean, though. I'm not wrestling with the idea internally. Just noticing how far things have come and being glad about it.

Edit: took out the spoiler tag from the subject since I had already removed the spoilery thing in the message body.

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I do, all the time. Maybe not in the way you mean, though. I'm not wrestling with the idea internally. Just noticing how far things have come and being glad about it.

I don't know, stabbim. I think thinking about it all the time is problematic, no matter how enlightened we see ourselves, but this is probably a discussion best continued elsewhere.

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First day back at work. Ask my office neighbor, a guy about my age, what he thought about The Force Awakens. He launches into this speech about how good he thinks it is that they have an interracial couple in the movie.

It's weird that he pointed out that they're an interracial couple, but neglected to mention they're a gay couple.

The couple in that film is obviously Finn and Poe, not Finn and Rey.

(For the record, I totally don't see that or expect it to happen, but I've seen people shipping Poe and Finn really insistently.)

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But seriously.. It's hard to argue that Zelda is the protagonist of the Zelda games.

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But seriously.. It's hard to argue that Zelda is the protagonist of the Zelda games.

Mass Effect isn't about the mass effect (though the name is a metaphor).
Metroid isn't about the Metroid.
Bioshock Infinite isn't... Well...

Heck, there was hardly any Tomb Raiding in Tomb Raider...

And nobody dies in the Dead or Alive games, or is indeed even a fugitive at all...

And all of those have a female lead...

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Ha, I totally get that. I read his post as a list of games with female leads.

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You are Link, and your long lost sister is Zelda, the queen of Hyrule. You don't know that Zelda is your sister, only finding out in the third game when your old master, Jumpman, tells you on his death bed, after he got destroyed by two sibling eskimos called The Light Warriors who climbed up his ice cave he defended with barrels.

You jump around and shoot enemies with your arm gun, which you find in the wild, catch, level up and battle for experience. Over time, you go through 8 worlds, receiving badges, until you finally reach the end castle. After jumping over the big spikey turtle guy and destroying the bridge, you reach the end, where a toadstool says "the queen of Hyrule isn't here."

You then take off your metal cyborg suit, and YOU were Zelda the whole time, thereby making Link/Zelda the protagonist.

I didn't have a Nintendo, so I'm not sure if all the details are accurate.

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Back when I was a kid(I never played Zelda, so that's why) I literally thought Link was Zelda. 10 years later--wait, the game isn't even about him!?!

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Back when I was a kid(I never played Zelda, so that's why) I literally thought Link was Zelda. 10 years later--wait, the game isn't even about him!?!

Yeah... it took me a long time to found this one out too. I kept referring to the character as Zelda until one day one of my friends was like "Dude, Zelda is the chick, that's Link." I honestly think that my first response was "well that's a stupid name"

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Female Leads (Gaming)

Female Leads

I've never cared

I've never cared

If I'm looking at an avatar's a$$ all day...

If I'm looking at an avatar's a$$ all day...

+1 confusion.

^ so much win ^

Simple solution...

Simple solution...

Simple solution...

Isn't that Jack's excuse?

No Good Zentradi Hair.

No Good Zentradi Hair.

Robowhatnow?

speaking of that, Bungie did a good job

Agreed. I should also note all my avatars are male. ;)

Agreed. I should also note all my avatars are male. ;)

Agreed. I should also note all my avatars are male. ;)

Agreed. I should also note all my avatars are male. ;)

Agreed. I should also note all my avatars are male. ;)

Female Leads

Female Leads

Female Leads

Female Leads

Female Leads

Female Leads

Female Leads

Perfect Dark, Portal, Zelda and Metroid come to mind...

Zelda's a dude!

To be fair...

To be fair...

I'll argue Zelda's the main character right now.

Surprisingly spot on.

Zelda's a dude! Reallly!

Zelda's a dude! Reallly!