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Why video games should have better female representation.
How many games do you think have no female protagonists? How many games do you think only have male characters? How many video games’ main protagonists are female? In a Wired article (1) which talks about female representation in video games shows a graph on female protagonists related characters in video games. The graph (I’ve put a picture of it below) shows the percentage of female, male and gender ambiguous characters in video games for example it says that 50% of video games have multiple character choices, 25% only have male characters and only 8% have just female characters. This shows how barely any video games have only female characters although one quarter of video games only have male characters.
Many video games have protagonists or characters you can play as, although they aren’t always that diverse. Most video games protagonists are male, this is most likely to be because of gender stereotypes. Also in many video games the female characters are normally minor characters. I think that video games should work towards becoming more diverse, including more female characters and protagonists. For example in GTA V the 3 protagonists are all males, there are a lot of other games like this too. I think that more video games should have more female protagonists since many female gamers may feel uncomfortable playing a male character.
I know that most games let you choose your characters and customise them to whatever gender or skin tone you’d like but there are still quite a large number of games that don’t have customisable characters and many of them only have male characters that you can play as. This can be an issue since I read an article on ghost (2) that 46% of gamers in the US are women and many games don’t even have female protagonists. Many video game players when customising their characters would rather the character they play look like themselves or how they would like to look. This may make them not feel as comfortable with playing the game considering they have to play as the opposite gender. Levelskip (3) said “There are over six times as many games about a sole male protagonist as there are about a sole female protagonist. In other words, for every Lara Croft, there are about six male leads.” I think this shows how many more Male protagonists there are compared to females protagonists. I believe that more games should add a larger variety of genders to video games instead of just male characters.
I’m not entirely sure why there are so many more Male protagonists compared to female protagonists but I think it’s to do with stereotypes about males and females. Headstuff (4), another video games article, says “History indicates that women began appearing in video games around the mid-80s. Sometimes these female characters were barely distinguishable from male characters except for one minor characteristic, such as long eyelashes. Ms. Pac-Man is a good example of that trend. Samus Aran, a heroine in the 1986 Metroid game, is considered the first playable female character, rather than a woman who merely appeared in the background.” They talk about the history of females in video games and about how and when female characters were introduced to the video game industry. They also talk about female representation in video games and what female videogame characters wear compared to males.
In conclusion I think that there are too many video games that don’t have female protagonists/characters especially considering that 46% of gamers in the US are female. I also think that this should change because I believe that video games should definitely be more diverse or have more diverse characters.
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