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COKTOE said:

True! It was so long ago, I had to look it up, but the first game I owned with a female "lead character", and I use the term loosely, was Cabbage Patch Kids on the ColecoVision which I got in 1983. After that, outside of 16-bit (and beyond) JRPG's and fighting games, which both deserve a nod, the next game with a female lead I played was Tomb Raider on the PS1 in 1996. Quite a gap.

I found more than that, but that's because, as you might understand, I consciously looked for them. It was no small feat though and there were whole years without any that I noticed. I mean I didn't even notice or think about this stuff for a while, but after long enough when you find yourself playing in mixed company, you couldn't help it.

The game that actually got me into gaming for the first time was the original Metroid back in 1987. Apparently it was a big deal at the time that protagonist Samus Aran was revealed to be a woman at the end of the game. My take on it at age six was that...I always just imagined myself as the person in the suit instinctively anyway, so the revelation didn't even register as significant in my brain. Other, older people apparently just assumed that Samus was male because of the muscular build of her armored suit; they had more established prejudices that way. The instruction booklet I later noticed deceptively advanced that idea by using male pronouns to describe Samus. (Today she's probably be accordingly canonized as a transman, lol!) In time though, I came notice the rarity of characters like her in games.

I don't know if I'd really hold up old RPGs and fighting games as greatly exceptional to this rule either. I think you'll notice, on even just a cursory observation, that the female characters in JRPGs back then were almost always secondary characters in your team, and more specifically assigned to the healing, supporting type roles primarily. There were gender roles, in other words. In fighting games you'd have maybe one or two women to choose from and well let me use the example of the original Mortal Kombat to get at what I'm trying to say. In the original Mortal Kombat, there was one woman you could choose to play as. In the default totem poll, she was designated the lowest rung, meaning she was supposed to be the easiest to beat because woman. Her fatality move was the Kiss of Death because woman. (Imagine if there had been one other woman in the game to perform the Kiss of Death on! ) If two girls played the game in two-player mode, one of them had to use a male avatar, which of course was never weird or awkward. You could find maybe some secondary exceptions to these rules if you wanted to fish for examples (like Chun-Li from Street Fighter II or characters like Lucca and Ayla in Chrono Trigger or main protagonist Terra in Final Fantasy VI...these characters and some others didn't seem like stereotypes, but here we're fishing for exceptional cases. These examples were NOT the rule!)

And I mean the type of climate I'm talking about here isn't just confined to ancient history either. I'm not just talking about how things were decades ago, I'm talking about like 8 years ago. Things were totally different just like 8 years ago! There was a study that came out back then that found the male-to-female ratio of current-gen video game protagonists was 14 to 1. And of course this lack of quantity also came with a certain lack of quality attached as well that feminist critics have spoken to in more recent years. I'm happy things aren't still that way anymore.

Last edited by Jaicee - on 26 July 2020