Fair Game for Girls

Games Radar has a pretty good article on the way women have been portrayed in games.

(Historically, women in games were the prize or the victim,) says Phaedra Boinodiris, from WomenGamers.com. Whether it’s Elexis Sinclaire from SiN: Episodes, looking like she crawled out of an S&M club, or the chicks with Space Hopper breasts in RPGs, women in games are often sexualized to the point of deformity. (This is laziness,) says Ragnar Tørnquist, creator of The Longest Journey and its sequel Dreamfall. (It is a lot easier to create an easily digestible and titillating stereotype than a real character. Beauty is fine – I’ve no problem with characters being pretty – but if there’s nothing inside, it feels shallow and we stop caring about them.)
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(Adventure games are more reliant on plot and character development than any other genre,) explains the brilliantly named Randy Sluganski, editor of Just Adventure. (Female characters in adventure games are more concerned with big brains than big boobs.) Randy name-checks April Ryan of The Longest Journey and Dreamfall and Kate Walker from Syberia, and its sequel, as the best female adventure characters yet. (Both are reluctantly thrust into a journey of self-discovery and along the way change not only their own lives, but the lives of everyone they touch,) he says.

Ragnar Tørnquist muses on the creation of April Ryan and Zoë Castillo, Dreamfall’s heroine. (The protagonists of both The Longest Journey and Dreamfall were always meant to be female,) he says. (This was an integral element to their stories and journeys. While it’d have been possible to tell similar stories with male protagonists, their gender allowed both games to focus more naturally on communication and problem solving rather than direct action, and to have their interactions with other characters reflect this. Also, I like writing female characters. I have no idea why. I just find women fascinating.)

As long as there are videogames, there will be an expectation to see brutish men shooting each other in the face. In that respect, men in games are as typecast as much as women – besotted with violence and power. Similarly, publications like Cosmopolitan magazine present a homogenized version of the perfect woman: one built to attract men. At least chicks in games kick ass. But, whatever side of the gender divide you fall on, you can’t deny that games across the board will be better if they feature strong and realistic female characters.

Spotted on RPGWatch.