Your list of straight characters. Yes, you have listed that. And? There's a reason that they don't make games with predominantly female heroes. Allow me to cite a Penny Arcade article covering a report about a study done by the EEDAR (Electronic Entertainment Design and Research). They found that out of 669 games, 24 had female protagonists. 300 gave the choice of a female lead. They then looked at three months of sales data for the game. As the man interviewed explained, "If you look at the first three months, with the smaller quantity of female-led games, they did not sell as well. The ones that were male-only sold better," The article also says that male-only heroes sell better, but the ones where you choose gender will get reviewed now. The article, by the way, can be found
here.
You're partially misrepresenting this article through omission. The article writer posits that a potential and major reason that female-led games sell less is because less money is spent on marketing. From the article:
“Games with a female only protagonist, got half the spending of female optional, and only 40 percent of the marketing budget of male-led games. Less than that, actually,” Zatkin said. So is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Do publishers send female-lead games out to die without proper support? “I think it might be, and I think in some cases, though this is a guess, that these games may be considered more niche, and you advertise niche games less,” Zatkin said. It’s also hard to draw many broad conclusions from this data. There are so few games with exclusively female heroes, and those few games are given such a small marketing budget, do we even know how well a large-budget, marketed game with a female hero would perform?
I believe publishers
think games with female protagonists can't sell well, but, as the article says, the current data isn't sufficient to reach a real conclusion here. Did Portal sell less well because both the main character and the main antagonist are women? Good games sell.
I think that the point Furry Sparks is making (and please correct me if I'm wrong, Furry Sparks) is that "variation" makes for more interesting gaming experiences. You can debate this, but it's a pretty subjective point. I know
for me having a more diverse set of characters makes for a much more fulfilling experience. It's much more fun to take the lives of people of different ages, genders, skin colors, sexual orientations, etc. -- because those differences have effects on all of us, even if those effects are subtle -- and see what you can do with that in a game. It also reflects the actual entertainment audience better. The largest demographic may be straight white males ages 18-24, but they're certainly not the only demographic.
It's also important to not take white men as the default. They have a race and gender just like everyone else. I'm trying to think of a simple way to explain this, because I was a gender studies minor in college and that comes with a lot of academic jargon. Basically, think of a cutout or silhouette of a person, like the type you might see as the old default profile picture on facebook. Most people would assume that's a man, and most people would probably also assume that's a white man. That's partially because we see so many white men in our entertainment, so our brain is sort of "trained" to see white men as normal. Anything else, like the addition of a dress, is something that marks or changes the default. Because of the dress, we then see a woman. But we had to
change the default to get there. The basic idea is that we shouldn't think of white men as the default (look at the world population -- they're not!) but as simply another option for characters.
I am not -- and I don't think anyone else is either -- calling for the end of white male protagonists or anything. But I would definitely like to see more variety, and I can't see any real
problem with that. What do we stand to lose from a game with a black protagonist, a gay protagonist, etc.? I'm really curious about any answers to this. I don't feel like potential loss of profits is a secure argument, because not many people have really tried. Heck,
The Walking Dead made an astounding amount of money for being such a niche genre, and the cast of that game is super diverse. I barely ever hear a gamer or a game critic say they didn't like that game.
A final bit that's more on topic: Play as any gender you want! If there's anything I've learned in life, it's that there will always be someone around to question your choices. There's nothing wrong with making your avatar however you like, so go for it.
but that's my thoughts, feel free to disregard anything I say...
Glad all's well now! *sips tea*
