By “Girl-Game,” I do not mean “game designed for girls”; I mean “game featuring a female protagonist which I’m calling ‘girl-game’ for the sake of alliteration.” I was asked to make a year-in-review post for The Learned Fangirl – so here it is.
Originally, I wanted to make it a top ten list. But then I discovered that I couldn’t find ten major releases with female protagonists. In fact, several of the games that make most lists of “female-protag” games don’t actually have female protagonists as the game’s central hero; they have females as secondary protagonists, such as Ellie from The Last of Us (which won Gamesradar’s Game of the Year this year) or Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite. It turned into a top five – but, really, the competition wasn’t that intense.
I guess this leads us back to the fundamental problem of games that have female protagonists… they very often just aren’t that good, OR they’re so concerned with the fact that they are games about female protagonists – like Gone Home – that they lose something in the way of larger narrative and/or mechanics. This has led, I think, to the misperception on the part of fans and publishers alike that games with female leads don’t sell. It isn’t that games with female leads don’t sell, it’s that weak games don’t sell, and many games with female leads are weak games. It’s correlation, not causation – after all, Metroid and Tomb Raider games sell and are good games. It just so happens that most games have male protagonists, so the percentage of good games with male protagonists is higher (because the percentage of GAMES with male protagonists is higher).
What I’d like to see in 2014 are good games that happen to have female leads, not games that force female leads just for the sake of feminism. I’d also like to see more games that allow for gender-choice, like Skyrim, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Saints Row, Fable, and Fallout, but I would also like more stories that feature women as heroes, as well as men. Really, I’d like to see a wider variety of stories, period, which (theoretically) would yield a wider variety of protagonists of all genders, ethnicities, ages, and cultures. Heroes that really reflect the vast diversity of the people who play them.