BioShock and the Male Protagonist

I thinking writing a strong (as in, believable) female lead character is probably pretty difficult. I don’t think you can just paint tits on Gordon’s hazard suit and say you have a female main character (OTOH, given that most of Gordon’s physical abilities come from the suit, maybe that would be more believable than I first thought).

What did you think of “Mirror’s Edge?” I think this is a pretty good example because the main character, being female, has disadvantages vs. the (mostly male) antagonists–they are all big, beefy, well-armed–so she has to exploit her advantages (speed, agility, etc.). This isn’t to say that these are “natural” female traits, rather, it’s more believable to me that the heroine could be a gymnast and out-leap bad guys than that she could be a space marine and outgun them.

oliemoon :
I thinking writing a strong (as in, believable) female lead character is probably pretty difficult.
No more difficult than writing a strong male character. Women are human beings too, yanno!
it’s more believable to me that the heroine could be a gymnast and out-leap bad guys than that she could be a space marine and outgun them
Yeah, cause in the real world we don’t have any female marines or women who know how to use guns. The absurdity! And video games are all about depicting what is completely realistic and within the realm of physical possibility, so you really have a good point there.
Also, “tits”? Really? Really? This is a feminist blog, not a fucking frat house. Decency and respect for women is the bare minimum here, is that really so fucking hard?

Maybe I’m not being clear, or maybe you just enjoy taking potshots at people who essentially agree with you but don’t parrot your every thought…? Try to follow me on this one…

First, I think that basically action video games are a fundamentally male-oriented medium. It is effortless to create a shoot-’em-up with a male protagonist (e.g. any descendant of Wolfenstein 3D). This is just how we have received the medium up until now.

Now, if you want to have a female lead character, and you want her gender to matter in some meaningful way (e.g. she is not just eye candy, she is not a male character shoehorned into a role that just happens to be female, etc.) then obviously it takes work. The link LakeDesire provided clearly demonstrates that the producers of Mirror’s Edge recognized this and had to fight their less understanding and less imaginitive colleagues to ensure that Faith being female was not a gimmick.

So, yeah, I’m going to go ahead and say that creating convincing female characters is a hell of a lot more difficult right now than writing male characters. You might not agree with my reasoning, but I think it’s fairly obvious that if there were no barriers to creating plausible female characters in video games, then this entire post wouldn’t exist.

Second, let me stop you on your “female Marines” tangent. I’m prior service and I spent quite a bit of time around female Marines, and with rare exceptions none of them were combat-ready–mostly as a result of the Marines having no combat billets for women and therefore no combat training for women (although I have met a few female Marine martial arts instructors who could break me in half without breaking a sweat).

You noted that video games don’t need to be all about reality–sure, fine, but there are varying stages of suspension of disbelief that you accept along with the premise of the story, ok? As I pointed out earlier, there are any number of plot devices you can use to avoid having a woman in typically male role of “killing machine” be incongruous. Stick her in an HEV suit, make her an exceptional person in extraordinary circumstances, or maybe rewrite history so that women are accepted as equals in the military. But if you fail to do something like this, then you can’t exactly expect to drop a woman into the lead role in Modern Warfare 2 and do her any justice as a character.

So, again, female marines and the Robin Sherbatskys of the world notwithstanding, it is going to take work to put a female into the kind of role to which the FPS genre lends itself. I happen to think they made a hell of an effort and did a spectacular job with Mirror’s Edge (thought the game has a few faults).

And finally…y’know, it’s kind of strange to me that you would take offense at a word and completely ignore whether or not the actual sentiment is something you agree with. Because, y’know, I think it is. But in any case…since you have such a high opinion of our women in uniform…I used to work for Martha McSally, and she wouldn’t flinch if someone said that word. Neither, apparently, did the author of the post, so, I apologize for breaking your content rules, but I’m not going to apologize for offending the overly-sensitive.

If you want to invent a futuristic or fantastic scenario in which women get to be warriors, fine, but so far as plausible storylines go, a female in the lead role of, say, Modern Warfare 2 just wouldn’t work (e.g. the idea of a G.I. Jane in an elite fighting unit would be poor storytelling).

OTOH, as I pointed out earlier, you could come up with any number of consistent plot devices to explain why your lead character is a female and a killing machine–make her a special case, or give her a HEV suit, or rewrite history so that women are accepted as

some of whom were . If you want to invent a futuristic or fantasy game where women can be warriors, fine; but do you honestly believe that having a female protagonist in Modern Warfare 2 would work?

Brinstar :
Petey Wheatstraw: Firstly, do keep in mind that this blog is a feminist space. Be mindful of our discussion policy. Using disrespectful language about women and women’s bodies is not permitted here. If you wish to continue commenting, it would behoove you to remember this. If you cannot refrain from using derogatory gendered language that objectifies and disrespects women, you are not welcome here. I would also suggest that you carefully refresh your memory of the discussion rules before commenting again.
Secondly: You appear to have a very low opinion of the ability of writers to create believable characters. Whether a writer creates a male or female doesn’t seem to be much of a hindrance to writers who are at all worth anything. You also seem to have a rather unfortunately limited and narrow idea of what women should be capable of, if you’re finding it difficult to stretch your imagination to encompass the notion of women space marines.

It actually didn’t occur to me that you would have rules like that, partially because you folks linked this blog on reddit, which is not exactly the kind of place you want to advertise if you’re the Caspar Milquetoast of the blogosphere, and partially because I have never seen anyone at Feministing or Pandagon cringe at a simple word. But, your rules are your rules, so, I apologize for the offense.

As for the rest of your post:

Re-read what you wrote here:
1. “You have a low opinion of writers.”
2. “If writers are worth anything, then they won’t have trouble making believable male or female characters.”

Yes, you hit it on the nose: It is BECAUSE there are so few good female characters in video games that I have a low opinion of their writers. Capisce?

You also said I have a narrow and limited view of what women are capable of. This is incorrect. But there is a wide gulf between “capability” and “likelihood.” As I said in my reply to oliemoon, I think if you take a typical male-centric POV in a video game and simply say the character is female, then the gender doesn’t really mean anything. So, in Portal, Chell’s gender was a meaningless detail for the male audience, ok? It’s also poor storytelling if you make the gender a gimmick, or if you make a character female in order to please the male gaze (e.g. any of the sexed-up characters in Tekken 6), or if she plays into received gender roles (e.g. Alyx Vance playing the distressed damsel to Gordon Freeman’s knight in shining armor–complete with actual armor). What all of this means is that to do a decent treatment of a female character in a video game, you have to take into account that very, very few women in the armed services are physically ready to complete training for combat, ergo, if you have decided to make a realistic modern combat sim, having half the soldiers be female would at least raise eyebrows. Saying this doesn’t imply that no women can shoot or that none are physically fit…only that writing the story this way would result in junk.

By contrast–look at Halo. Probably a third of the space marines are female, right? Well, you can assume that because this is the future, there are no longer political (or medical) barriers to women serving in combat, and in fact there is an incentive to get the other half of the species behind the trigger. So this is a wholly plausible plot feature.

If you look at Mirror’s Edge…Faith is a tiny, 90-lbs. girl, like several of the women with whom I work out (crossfit) on a daily basis, and like those women, she can probably do ten pullups to my one. So she is an outstanding fit for a game where you are not supposed to brutalize the cops, but rather artfully Gymkata your way through and around all of these dangerous situations. I’m not going to say it’s amazing storytelling, but the producers of this game took these challenges head on and I think they did a pretty good job.

Again, sorry for violating the forum rules…then again, you are jumping on me in a case where we probably already agree. Think about that for a sec before you fire another warning shot up my nose, ok?