[ SECRET POST #2169 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2169 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 078 secrets from Secret Submission Post #310.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

03. http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/3735/littlebitangry.png

[unicornherds]

Agreed. On all of it.

[(Anonymous)]

THIS IS BASICALLY WHY I STOPPED GAMING. My favorite titles have a great big heaping spoonful of NOT GETTING IT in this way and I just couldn't anymore.

[(Anonymous)]

God, this, please.

If women have to play as men, then men can get over it and play as women for awhile.

[(Anonymous)]

For games like these, I can agree. But for games where gender/sex is part of the plot*? Never going to happen, sorry to say.

H-games are the obvious example. I mean, yeah, there are H-games are straight girls, and H-games for guys who fetishize lesbians, but the generic "one guy and a boatload of female romantic interests" isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

[(Anonymous)]

... I would actually feel incredibly uncomfortable playing a GTA game as a female character.

[(Anonymous)]

I do care about implementation. I feel better playing as a generic man-dude protagonist than I do as a woman whose name takes third billing after her right and left breasts... and that is VERY OFTEN what happens when a woman is the protagonist, default or not.

Hopefully this won't be an either/or choice in the future. Hopefully. Someday. Preferably before the sun burns out.

[greenvelvetcake]

I'd go far enough to suggest games without the option to play a male lead character. It's so crazy it just might work!

[saku]

i personally don't mind playing a guy. sometimes i prefer it. i don't think it needs to be an option for every game. it's up to the creators to decide if it fits their vision of the game. i write GDDs for my works and most of them don't include an option to change the gender. granted, i have plenty of works where the lead is female, or not male at the very least, but i understand where other game designers are coming from when they don't budge on this all the time for every single game, because i'm not willing to compromise for several of mine. i know some people disagree and that's fine but i wouldn't expect a designer to cater to everything i demanded out of their own creative work. i'm in charge of mine, they're in charge of theirs, and i don't have to play their games if i don't like something about them. they don't really owe me anything.

and really, as long as a game sells, the designers probably aren't going to care. and trust me, these games do sell, and they will always sell. if you want to change things i suggest getting into the industry, that's a good start. otherwise things won't change.

[(Anonymous)]

It's irritating as all hell how you can't play as women and if you do play as a woman they change the dialogue because ~*~women's ears are 2 delicate for DIRTY MAN LANGUAGE~*~........

[(Anonymous)]

IA. although maybe not with bioshock 2. a big daddy is...just a big daddy lol.

but i think i would play games like this more often if you could play a female :/

[forgottenjester]

I agree more games need a female option or a female default because we are woefully lacking in that area but at the same time I don't believe a game must have these things.

Sorry, I know the opinion is unpopular.

Edit: Also, this might be because I don't mind playing as a male character. I prefer neither gender.

[elaminator]

I don't mind playing as a male character (I even enjoy it) but I'd love it if all video games gave you the option to play as a female character too. (When given the choice I usually play as a woman. Games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age where I have multiple playthroughs I generally play both, but I do tend to have more female playthroughs than male in those cases.)

Sadly, I can't see this happening anytime soon.

[(Anonymous)]

Cry more.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, get OVER yourself. I'm a woman, and I have no problem playing as a man. If this tiny little thing makes you flip your shit, I seriously worry about you. Fact of the matter is, most gamers are male, so that's what companies are going to pander to.

Also:

http://www.giantbomb.com/female-protagonists/92-2287/games/
http://www.giantbomb.com/female-protagonists/92-2287/
http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/protagonist-female

There. Great big lists of games with female protagonists.

[(Anonymous)]

While I mostly agree with this secret, there really should be more female protagonists in games, some of the examples you listed up there would require more than just a few pronoun changes to make a female main character work. Any game with a silent protagonist would work with an interchangeable gender for the main character though, and it does kind of smack of laziness that we don't see it implemented more.

Unfortunately, until more women work directly in game production, it's probably not going to happen. As with most forms of entertainment, it is heavily influenced by who works in the industry, and since most game designers and writers are male, most main characters are going to be male, even when a female character could be put in with no discernible changes to the story.

As a final note I don't really get the whole resistance to playing as another gender in games, I've yet to actually run into anyone outside the internet that thinks playing as another gender character in a game could be counted as a negative thing.

[nynaeve_sedai]

I agree.

I say this because I love video games and there are a boatload of female gamers, but it does feel like gaming is treated like it's an all male endeavor. Dragon Age is one of my favorite games with regard to making it easy to be a girl.

[brightblueink]

While I'd love to see more female protagonists in games, optional or otherwise, I don't flip out playing a guy, so it's not enough to drive me away from the hobby or anything.

That being said, the 'Oooh guys can't relate to Lara Croft so we have to have her constantly be threatened with rape and danger so they'll want to protect her!" type thing is total BS and makes me want to slap someone though.

[ariakas]

At first I was like "no shit, why is this even a secret"... and then I read the comments.

In all seriousness, though, it's not even that you always play a dude. It's that you always play the same dark-haired 30-something white guy. Hell, at this point, I'd take a dark-haired 30-something latino or even a white ginger just for the sake of some fucking variety. The outcry over the new Bioshock's box art is heartening in this respect, honestly. It's good to see that a lot of male gamers are getting fucking sick of this shit, too.

[manifold]

I find it kind of bizarre that there aren't more games with female leads in some genres, because (for instance) horror movies have been making use of the Final Girl trope for fucking decades and it never seems to stop dudes from watching horror movies.

Some games really wouldn't work without the established male protagonist. But they're not the majority. Most just seem to have Male Protagonists because that's the default everyone assumes from the start of every project or something. Like how a stick figure is assumed to be male by default until you put a skirt or a ponytail on it.

[dethtoll]

On the one hand, I completely 100% fucking agree.

On the other hand, the examples you picked... don't dismiss Dishonored or Bioshock just because of that. It's going to take a while before gender equalizes in the industry; you might as well enjoy the games we have now.

[supermanda]

OP, your frustration comforts me. I get like this all of the god damned time, and I feel like I can scream as loud and much as I want, but nobody will notice or care. It's crap.

[(Anonymous)]

I am the only one that doesn't give a shit about what I'm playing? Unless I have the option to design them then I'm spending all day on that. Otherwise I don't really care about how they look.

[cakemage]

Originally replied to the wrong thread. Heh, whoops. Anyway, I agree. While I'll still happily play games with male leads as long as the story and gameplay are to my tastes, my favorite games are more often than not the ones that have either female protagonists by default, the option to choose the gender of the lead, or multiple protagonists of mixed genders.

[(Anonymous)]

... how is it not immersive? I don't understand this. When I'm playing a game, I'm invested in that character and their particular story. It doesn't matter to me whether they're female or male if their story is interesting.