lil-mizz-jay posted this good point about how no video games with a character creation screen have a default female character. Imagine the “outrage” on the internet if this ever happens. Like they say in the post below, there would be an obnoxious amount of delicious, delicious outrage from people who don’t want to admit they hate women, lol!
Source: lil-mizz-jay
I’ll just be the bad guy here. Noone would be outraged because noone cares. The majority of games are written by men so default character creation start with men. Alphabetically its: Man or Woman unless you’re doing Male/Female even then it’s single syllable then double syllable. The majority of stories also have male protagonists because Funfact: men created video games and guys like games. There are plenty of games with women as leads: Samus, Lara Croft, Jill Valentine, Cate Archer to name a few and if more women bought games then maybe they’d be catered too. In the topic of Pokémon, Ash Ketchum is the protagonist of the manga, anime and videogames, he’s a male so that’s the default. Also there are women game designers, famous ones at that and they could surely address this non-issue. So instead of complaining how games aren’t defaulting to women how about wondering why more female game designers aren’t representing women the way you want? Much like the WNBA, it’s not up to men to support something they don’t necessarily care about and that literally 50 percent of the populace can easily support. Instead of fake outrage about character creation how about outrage that female sports aren’t supported by women enough to allow them to make an equal wage to their male counterparts? Like I said, I’ll just be the bad guy and put it out there.
You don’t quite get the issue here, I don’t think. I’m going to guess that you are male, and therefore oblivious to it. Which is understandable – the problem is not listening to the people who have experienced it.
You did an amazing job of proving the exact point the post/article was trying to make. Great job.
Ash is the protagonist of the anime. Red is the protagonist of the manga and videogames.
I cant tell if this is a im14anddeep thing or this guy is so out of touch with reality but the “points” you’re making a) are the response shes talking about you have the fake calm of a man angry at women he is trying to talk down too b) just straight b.s. women buy games plenty it isnt 1999 anymore games aren’t meant just for boys so grow up c) women in game design and development are all over the people making final decisions are all just men who think they’re in mad men still or need to cater to the fragile male ego. Not to be the bad lady or anything jUsT nEeDeD tO Be sAiD
Still majority of gamers for those genre are male. For open world it is 86% male, western rpg – 74% male.
It is simple business decision, if vast majority of target audience are men, then design the product to appeal to men. Not much drama, really.
You’re cherry picking data. Bad science!!
All genres do this, not just the two you mentioned, and the ratios of female gamers is much higher when not artificially limited by cherry picking the data. Only 52% of gamers are male.
The oblivious hypocrisy of writing this many words to justify why it doesn’t need to happen seems beyond you. You’re literally already upset and ranting about the mere suggestion. It’s the opposite of “no one would care.”
“Just being the bad guy” doesn’t make you right, and just because you don’t care doesn’t mean no one cares. Typical person of privilege thinks he speaks for “the majority”.
Baldur’s Gate 3 defaults to a female elf, and you have to click the “male” checkbox to be male. If you switch to human the default is a POC. And you have the option to be non-binary, too.
Literally nobody has complained. Anywhere.
The new Saints Row defaults to a black female character and has a great deal of customization. And yes, there were a lot of people who threw fits about it.
Mass Effect Andromeda has a default female character, idk if people complained about that, but if they did it was drown out by the rest of the game’s issues
we never hear about the smaller issues because the most vocal players either only talk about “bigger” issues (Rider sucks! her personality is such a saltine mary sue!) or just constantly yelling about how the game sucks with no further insight. i actually liked Andromeda. was it as good as the original trilogy? no. was it the steaming pile of pyjack vomit people claim it to be? also no.
Yeah. Uh… Look up Rust on Steam. It’s a multi-player online survival game. Read the reviews. They made it so people respawn as a random gender and ethnicity and people lost their minds because they don’t want to have to play (sometimes, randomly) as, for example, a black woman. Partially because they “just don’t want to”, and partially because of how other players treat them.
Why dont you go do it then? Typical all talk and no action, if I knew how to do it and you asked me, fuck yeah why not but There is no way for me to influence this in any way, go hit up people who can actually do something about instead of crying on a forum
Although majority of games have default male character, I really like how it is done is the Sims (4 in particular) – it is just randomized, you never know what gender or appearance of a sim you get.
Dragon Age II starts with 6 characters to start with, and for me it was default on female warrior, but it depends also on where your cursor is before you start the new game. In Inquisition though, default is male.
This entire conversation saddens me. People as a whole are so bothered by every little thing now. I don’t give a wet fart about what my game character defaults to. It’s just a piddling thing to waste my time with in between hours of work and attempted sleep. No matter what you do anymore, people will get angry over it. I’m sorry that people are so wound up and unable to de-stress in a healthy way. I hope everyone experiencing negative feelings will find a healthy outlet. We need to feed the good emotions, not the negative ones.
I mean yes, it’s sad these conversations have to happen, but they are happening for a reason. You not caring doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.
Check out Horizon Zero Dawn (HZD) and Horizon Forbidden West HFW). The game doesn’t let you create a character – you get Aloy, that’s it, no other choice. Aloy has to save the world. Spoiler alert – SHE does!
Fantastic game! Good example since this game got so many bad reviews from male gamers before the overwhelmingly great game play overcame that, but I remember the filth from gamers on reddit as this was released.