NetHack allows you to choose your gender, but it is exactly the kind of game where it doesn’t matter very much which gender you picked. There isn’t much of a story there at all. A modern, full-fledged, story-driven RPG, on the other hand, might provide a better immersive environment if NPCs actually had different things to say to you depending on who you are.

I don’t think shorter games is a big problem, but developers can probably find a way to give plenty of value and give female game players who care a sense that they are allowed to play the game, too.

I do enjoy playing the protaganist as a female, but because of the storylines I can always see why the hero is male in so many of these games. The ones that could just as easily be either male or female don’t tend to interest me much for that very reason.

I have to say, I think the reason that this “choose male or female” button wouldn’t work for many of the games is because in order to do so, the main character would have to go back to being well… bland. Blander than Squall in FF8. Only other option is to make the game bigger and add in completely different storylines, add this into the mixture of bigger and better graphics being the mainstay these days of RPG’s (I put forwards the laters Final Fantasy games as my example!), they are just getting shorter and shorter. Needing more memory to put in an entirely new story for the opposite gender would bring our game time down to around fifteen hours (seven once you remove the video parts designed to make everyone stop and stare but not actually play anything).

A lot of my friends and I tend to throw ourselves into the spirit of the game anyway right down to actually playing the parts of the men and women when we write our own versions of what the characters get up to.

I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t worry Overly much about the survival of the female gamers. We’re not only remaining, we’re increasing, as more and more of us are getting into the whole aspect of RPGing and the ideas of feminine stereotyping that girls “shouldn’t be playing computers” are being wiped out.

Besides, some of us actually quite enjoy seeing the world through the other gender, it helps us to understand men more:-D

Also, I can’t help but feel that the majority of game writers are male, so can’t really blame them for not wanting to try to guess into the whole female psyche, easier to stick with what they know right?:D

Well, that’s my tuppence on the subject.

Reb.

Speaking of female leads in games, there’s several games that come to mind (shortened since I could think of some others if given enough time to think… ):
Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure – PS (Atlus/Nippon Ichi)
Magic Knight Rayearth – Saturn (Working Designs) – three female leads in this one
Threads of Fate – PS (Square Enix) – You can choose male or female lead
La Pucelle – PS2 (Mastiff/ Nippon Ichi)
Phantom Brave – PS2 (Atlus/Nippon Ichi)
Harvest Moon – GBA, Gamecube, Wii, etc (Natsume)
Phantasy Star – Genesis, GBA (… I forgot who made it…

i find it funny that you haven’t played females in games until Morning’s Wrath. i can think of a slew of games with the option – Pokémon is foremost in my head. i usually DO pick the girl given a choice, i find that i like the sights and sounds more that way. in most of the games i’ve found myself playing a female role in, though, the actual gameplay wasn’t affected by sex. i stop seeing the graphics after a while and see the mechanics underneath.

i actually hate the lara croft games. control is sloppy and story is boring for the games i’ve played. thought i’d throw that in

in any case, i don’t actually care about the gender of the character i’m playing with. thats about it.

Katie:
As I said, my true passion is action/adventure first-/third-person games. I refuse to use the term “shooters” because I believe there’s more to these games than just shooting around; I rarely like the ones that only revolve around shooting. It would be easy to have a gender switch in such “shooters”, however, since as you said it would have a much less involved plot.

A game like Unreal Tournament, for example, lets you choose the gender of your character because as a matter of fact it won’t make any difference on the game’s end, you will still get out there and shoot anything that moves! Although I do like Unreal, and a few select others; this is not my favorite type of games.

Many other games with such less involved plots, depending on the level of this involvement, should also have an easy-to-accomplish gender switch. And actually, after putting some thought into it, I can probably name a few games with slightly more involved plots that can still accomplish such switch with not much more than re-recording a few conversations as “she” instead of “he” and maybe slightly changing some parts of the game.

The difficulty, however, is not for such games. What I meant was mainly the kind of games that I *really* enjoy playing; the kind that stays in one’s mind long after and that you might wanna replay just for the fun of it, even if replaying didn’t add any new elements. Such games, at least for me, have deeply involved stories and highly mature characters.

I’d imagine it’ll be a little difficult to add a gender switch to Metal Gear games, for example. Although every one I remember playing had a female character (usually more than one) with high story influence, I doubt the game would make much sense if you could simply change the character with which the game is played – male be it or female. The character is infused in the game’s story, and the story develops this character as its events progress.

In my opinion, the game designers would be faced with this same dilemma with any such game where the character is more than just a drone or a reflection of the player himself. It’s just like movies; you can make a movie with a male lead, and a movie with a female one; but I don’t think we’ll be seeing a gender switch in the DVD version of any movies anytime soon… That one – seemingly slight – change would more or less alter the whole story, and would require either a specific amount of creativity to get the right blend, or simply a re-do of the whole thing to cope with this change. But then again, that’s just how I see it; no expert opinion there!

On your note about the number of female gamers, I did some investigation in my surrounding community. It must be noted that I’m a Computer Science senior, so it’s obvious that this said community is a bit of a concentrated sample. More or less, it turns out many more girls around me than I thought do play games. They are still not the gameaholics that myself and my male friends are; I can’t recall seeing one of those girls psyched about this new game’s release or that, but they do play the occasional game and some even have some few select favorite titles.

The reason that might have given me this impression is that they rarely even talk about it, and they get extremely uninterested when we guys start talking about games and usually drift off into their own conversations. It even turned out that my own girlfriend (same college, same year) did at some point like playing video games, at least until the early years of high school or a little before that. After reading my comments here, her response was that that was actually not the reason why she had stopped, but the fact that it seemed all the games out there were nothing but “shoot-em’-ups”, which didn’t interest her much. She mentioned a few games she had played back then, which were mainly ones that had a “meaningful” story or idea behind them.

On that note, I promised I would get her some less-shooting-more-meaningful games as soon as we finished exams and she would see whether she likes them or not…

I see what you mean about Lara Croft — I really don’t have a problem with the character, and I honestly enjoyed the movie and think that she can be really awesome (from one perspective on “strong female character”, at least). The big problem really is sitting there going “you know, they designed this game thinking I’d never play it”. It’s one of those things that just sits there and irritates you, and it sucks a lot of fun out of a game.

BTW, there really arn’t so that few women playing games. There’s been some stats out that would put the numbers higher than you’d think. One of the reasons that you might think that there are less women gamers than there are is that a lot of women conceal thier gender on-line for fear (usually warented) of harrasment.
If you find yourself without a “female opinion”, don’t worry too much. Try getting ahold of LinuxChix — the mailing lists are mostly linux-based, but everyone there is very helpful and I’m sure that you’d find a ton of help designing woman-friendly (but not woman-sterotyped) games.

Some great games that had female leads: No One Lives Forever (my personal favorite), and Beyond Good and Evil. Also, playing the Baldur’s Gate series with a female character was fun, although in BG2 playing a male character gave you three romance choices (females only got one — that pompous prig Anomen).

I’m still trying to think of lame games that had female protaganists. I’m sure they’re out there.

Katie: I suppose RPG is one genre where you can easily make a game gender-neutral. Although I like a good RPG, and I liked Neverwinter Nights; RPG isn’t really my genre. For first-/third-person action games, I think it’s much more difficult to have a gender-neutral game without at least a certain amount of creativity. I do believe, however, that having female-targeted games as well as gender-neutral ones is not only fair but necessary.

Thinking about Tomb Raider, I can attribute a significant percentage of my liking Lara to attraction towards the opposite sex. I won’t pretend to be a saint, of course the outfits were part of it; but I think it’s mainly the character itself that captured me, her strength, her sense of adventure, and her extreme defiance. Of course, there’s the fact that her main life’s work was desecrating graves, but that felt as unreal as shooting opponents with infinite ammo guns. I loved the game for different reasons, however, and character aside it’s still a pretty good adventure game. But then of course, although one of my female gamer friends is nothing short of a Lara Croft wannabe, I can totally get why you wouldn’t want to play such a game; Lara’s outfits (especially the classic one) seem to have been designed with only one goal in mind.

This, the Vampire the Mascaraed’s avatars, and many more examples are yet another clear-as-day reason why lots of females simply don’t play games. Right now, I can think of so many games that, had I been a female, I definitely would have crossed off my shopping list, and so very few that I would have liked to play. As someone who hopes to one day make games, I know the kind of games I would wanna make is the latter. And I already know that the team I want to have with me while I do that would have to have a strong, effective, “female opinion” for that to happen…

– Gender Stats from the Game Developer Magazine Market Survey 2007:
> Programmers: Female: 3%, Male: 97%
> Artists: Female: 9%, Male 91%
> Designers: Female: 7%, Male 93%
> Producers: Female: 18%, Male 82%
> Testers & Q/A: Female: 5%, Male 95%
> Audio: Female: 10%, Male 90%
> Business/Legal: Female: 17%, Male: 83%

I like the idea of offering the player a chance to replay the game with a different protagonist, because it allows you to show another side of the same story and that’s a powerful tool, especially for moral tales.

Knights of the Old Republic, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Jade Empire, and Neverwinter Nights 2 all had the “female hero button” that would end up substantially altering the relationship portions of the game (usually the romantic side plots). The only other alterations to to game were pronoun usage (which was problematic — even playing a female character, I get “he” more than I would like ). All of those games were build-your-own-character RPGs (3 using the d20 system), so they already had the structure for dealing with the protaganist having different names anyway.

Neverwinter Nights & Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines also let you create female protaganists, but they had no real impact on the gameplay. I loved Neverwinter Nights! They didn’t do anything special to attract female gamers, just gave us our own avatar and let us run with it! VTM, however, was definately NOT writen with the idea of attracting female players in mind — if you played a malkavian female, every single outfit was striper clothes. Since I need third person perspective to play, I ended up having to stare at my avatar’s butt (either entirely uncovered or in a short skirt that floped up as ran). I was so annoyed that I never finished the game (this is also why I have never played Tomb Raider). This is the kind of (likely unintentional) sexism that annoys me so much in video games (and comics) — can we write/draw something for a gender-nuetral eye, please? I highly doubt that game sold more because one of 8 or 12 playable characters was nearly naked, but it did certainly turn me off from buying any games made by that development company again.
Seriously, given the chance I will by maxis, obsidian, bioware, and stuff by the civ guys as an impulse buy. Anything else? I’m going home to research (preferibly feminist reviews, if I can find them) how annoyed I’m likely to be before I bother to spend my money.

Also, Islam — I get what you mean, and I am definately not reading your statement as sexist (and ask GBGames here — I get offended and loud easily and often ). That is the same reason I don’t tend to play male characters.

I will, however, argue with your idea that more creativity is needed to attract both sexes to a single game. Hit the Kotor fanmedia site — you’ll notice that that game managed to attract a large ammount of female plays without doing anything different from the male game-play. All the did was create a good RPG that let you play as a female character! Having talked to many female gamers (casual gamers included), and women who say things like “I would get into games but …”, there isn’t a big demand for a massive re-thinking of how video games are writen; the big demand is for games to get rid of the sexism and stop actively driving us away! Getting away from the male-only protaganist is a big part of that, yes, because that means getting away from the idea that men are the only ones who play games, and there are a lot of other small changes that can follow that(please please please if you’re making a game with armor, don’t give the women something that exposes thier abs — gut wounds are bad!!).