Female Characters

[Elaro]

No Canada Day video this year, Graham?

[My pseudonym is Ix]

How many games are there where you can ONLY play a female character?

Off the top of my head I can only think of Tomb Raider, Metroid, Portal and some indies.
Compared to the 1000s of games that are male only.

Oh, there's Super Princess Peach too

The first one I thought of was Mirror's Edge. (Just adding to the tiny tiny list.)
ETA: Remember Me.

Assassin's Creed: Liberation
Recettear

...anyone else?

[Jamfalcon]

Just checking my Steam and GOG libraries, I only found two that haven't been mentioned yet, Beyond Good and Evil and Velvet Assassin. And the first reminded my that there's also Beyond: Two Souls, if you don't count the ghost.

[Master Gunner]

Alice: Madness Returns.

[Lurkon]

The Atelier games?

[ritchards]

A whole ton of hidden object games have females as the lead character.
Samantha Swift
The Clockwork Man
Mirror Mysteries
just to name three off the top of my library...

[mariomario42]

How many games are there where you can ONLY play a female character?

Off the top of my head I can only think of Tomb Raider, Metroid, Portal and some indies.
Compared to the 1000s of games that are male only.

Oh, there's Super Princess Peach too

Link here

There's a list of many, but not just ONLY.

Looking at my library, ignoring games that have the option at both, and shooters that have the protagonist male for war reasons, it's fairly even.

[Master Gunner]

From the associated Wikipedia article:

In a sample of 669 action, shooter, and role-playing games selected by EEDAR in 2012, only 24 (4%) had an exclusively female protagonist, and 300 (45%) provided the option of selecting one. Examining the sales data and review scores of these games, EEDAR found that the games that included the option of selecting a female hero obtained better scores, but the ones with male-only protagonists sold better than the others. However, games with a female-only protagonist had, on average, only 50% of the marketing budget of female-optional games, and 40% of the marketing budget of games with male-only protagonists.[5]

[Lurkon]

From the associated Wikipedia article:

In a sample of 669 action, shooter, and role-playing games selected by EEDAR in 2012, only 24 (4%) had an exclusively female protagonist, and 300 (45%) provided the option of selecting one. Examining the sales data and review scores of these games, EEDAR found that the games that included the option of selecting a female hero obtained better scores, but the ones with male-only protagonists sold better than the others. However, games with a female-only protagonist had, on average, only 50% of the marketing budget of female-optional games, and 40% of the marketing budget of games with male-only protagonists.[5]

That is incredibly interesting.

[Clypheous]

How many games are there where you can ONLY play a female character?

Off the top of my head I can only think of Tomb Raider, Metroid, Portal and some indies.
Compared to the 1000s of games that are male only.

Oh, there's Super Princess Peach too

Are you considering games like Bayonetta? Although, I would be curious to see a study where the exact same game is made except for it has a male or female lead and see which is more popular and if women are more likely to play the female version, etc. it seems like this must be market research that someone has already done, if not, that's an insane oversight by these big companies.

I'm trying to think if I've ever bought a game or not bought a game as a result of the gender of its protagonist. I can't recall ever having done that, at least not consciously, I generally just try to play good games, so I've played Tomb Raider and Far Cry and enjoyed both, but I think either would have felt identical to me if the gender of the lead was swapped, there's nothing really gender specific in either that couldn't easily be swapped out for something else.

[Yorick]

Isn't this the first topical LRR sketch for quite a while, if we don't count "EVERYTHING IS FINE"?

[WAYF]

I don't understand how EVERYTHING IS FINE is topical, except that EVERYTHING IS FINE, THERE'S NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT! WHY WOULD ANYTHING NOT BE FINE?

But either way, there was "The Whole Story: Football" just a couple of weeks ago.

[HG Pelts]

That robot-doge cosplay at the beginning is stunning. Who is that?

Also, someone has made Cam say "ovipositor jiggle physics" in front of a camera. Faith in humanity at all-time highs.

[Ptangmatik]

No Canada Day video this year, Graham?

Canadaman's too polite to impose on people every year.

[wizzerd229]

just hearing Ovipositor Jiggle Physics made me do a spit take

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

I think this is more on a case to case basis. Smaller companies that are trying to make a polished game, that work might be too much money/work for them. Character model is one thing, but any game that has equipable armor/clothing requires male and female versions of each.

I know female and male armour is practically identical. I mean, suites of armour were sort of mass-produced to a certain measurement. The only time you could have customised armour is when you commissioned it.
Look at Brienne's armour from Game of Thrones. That suite could probably be also worn by a man.

Armour made from leather and cloth might be different, since the material is more flexible. Cloth armour might be more "to fit". Would Leather Armour have straps, so it would be "One Size Fits All".

I know some people play these RPG games for the fashion and expression. But you're probably better off playing RPGs where the female armour sets are "anatomically correct" because they would have focused on prettiness.
-

My opinion on the AssCred thing:
To me, the protagonist of Ass Cred is like The Doctor. There is nothing stopping them being a woman/having the form of a human woman. Just so happens, thus far, they've always assumed a male form. Except for that spin-off Game on the Vita and PC port.

However, with Unity, it introduces 4 characters. Assuming there is a 50-50 ratio of men and women in the world, then presume perhaps the assassin career path is more appealing to men than women, it's still surprising if you think about it that at least one of the assassins isn't a woman.

[Dusk_Shine]

Is it too terribly strange that I would totally play an RPG that the LRR crew were at least partly responsible for helping design?
Although...I fell like Cam would somehow convince the dev team to make the minimum difficulty rather...high...

[RedNightmare]

...and shooters that have the protagonist male for war reasons, it's fairly even.

I don't completely understand why that last group is excluded. Could you elaborate what yo mean by that?

[Master Gunner]

For WWII-era shooters (and earlier, obviously), women were not allowed in direct combat roles in pretty much any military. So there it generally makes sense for the protagonists to be male, unless you're going for an "Alternate-History" vibe.

For modern and future-based shooters, however, there is no such argument for completely excluding women from being the protagonist. In Canada, women have served in direct combat roles since 1987, and other countries had integrated women into combat roles before then.

[Firbozz]

Barkeep's damn OP. As soon as you find out Barkeeps can get ye flask, the whole game's broken.

[DirgeNovak]

And to think Ubi could have avoided most of the flak by simply properly explaining the actual nature of their multiplayer instead of giving those dumbass excuses.

[mariomario42]

I know female and male armour is practically identical. I mean, suites of armour were sort of mass-produced to a certain measurement. The only time you could have customised armour is when you commissioned it.
Look at Brienne's armour from Game of Thrones. That suite could probably be also worn by a man.

Armour made from leather and cloth might be different, since the material is more flexible. Cloth armour might be more "to fit". Would Leather Armour have straps, so it would be "One Size Fits All".

I know some people play these RPG games for the fashion and expression. But you're probably better off playing RPGs where the female armour sets are "anatomically correct" because they would have focused on prettiness.

I can see this two ways. If you want a more historic game, it will come with the fact that the overwhelming majority a knights were male. For more fantastical worlds, with magic and the like, more designed armor can be used for advertisements and to make the world more interesting, so different different armor will be made for male and female characters. Not trying to change the subject to bikini armor here, but for fantasy games, there will be differences between male and female armor, resulting in a lot more work. If they don't, people may call it lazy design.

[Arakasi]

I don't think anyone's mentioned Perfect Dark yet, one of my favourite games.

This whole issue is of course silly, all a dev ever need say is that they don't think it is actually worth the money to add a female character. But of course if they said that, the internet would go out of their way to prove them wrong.

I suppose the only way you can win is by adding female character choices, which is probably a good thing.

[MowDownJoe]

However, with Unity, it introduces 4 characters. Assuming there is a 50-50 ratio of men and women in the world, then presume perhaps the assassin career path is more appealing to men than women, it's still surprising if you think about it that at least one of the assassins isn't a woman.

It's also surprising if you consider that Unity takes place during the French Revolution, whose most prolific assassin was a woman. And women were heavily involved with everything in the French Revolution. And Ubisoft, as a French company, should know their nation's history. If they knew they were doing the French revolution, they should have readied what they needed for female playable characters, even if it's only for Co-op.

[Sampy]

My wife and I have a joke whenever we see a Surface in a TV show that Microsoft now pays for "all of TV."

Good to see we are branching out into web comedy as well. Welcome to the corporate family!