Halo is a very bad example of this, considering how powerful and important and central to the narrative Cortana (and Captain Keyes) is.

Well, yes. I agree that games hyped highly by the internet and Spike would make the industry seem male-centered. But what about the bajillion Petz, Imagine, movie based, Barbie, Bratz, and other games that appeal to women? Did she even consider Mario Kart, Wii Fit, Cooking Mama, or Nintendogs? I could go on and on with lists of games that appeal to women. And I could even argue that the movie industry is still male-centric with the summer being dominated every year by corny comic book movies.

^Khuutra
You can still see that in Gonarch, also known as the giant scrotum-crab thingie :) Mother (or father) of all those small headcrabs that like to violate the head of figures of male authority like scientists, soldiers and guards using what is clearly a "vagina dentata" :)
In HL2 it is even said explicitly that what they do is _mate_ with their victim.
Those guys at Valve are clever, and their writer Marc Laidlaw wrote some pretty disturbing horror novels (also rich of explicit and less explicit sexual undertones)

@Montana: Fair enough.

@WereKitten: Thank you for telling me that, I will have to look into Mr. Laidlaw's work, too.

 Those games are okay for little girls but hardly appealling to women.  In fact right now, excepting Wii Fit, the industry is pretty damn vacant of any content designed for them.   Now a lot of women do enjoy a Zelda, Final Fantasy or Lara Croft adventure but even those titles need to go a LONG way towards being design with that market in mind in the first place.  Not instead of males, but as well as.

First problem is that people think that demographics exist in the context of games. Females can like any game, there is probably some condecending under tone narrative... I know that no one likes being patronised. Regardless tetris, wiisports, wiifit and so many others could be understood as female centric because of that missing narrative? That is; perluding that one does exist.

Actually, while its good for a videogame, Halo I would argue that its characters and situations are typically oversimplistic (even allowing for Cortana and Captain Keyes). In truth they are more standard plot points than anything of a truly narrative nature.

I think the points made by Gamerace were fair enough - even if the Hero who makes a mistake is a cliche that's still a heck of a lot more of a character than the eternally calm Master Chief.

The truth is that most games like Halo, Gears, etc. do play to certain very rigid and adolescent archetypes. The young guys who love MC do so becuase he's cool, wins and never makes a mistake as such.

Almost no videogame I can think of have characters with true arcs and narrative discovery. I believe this is possible, if only based on a title like Silent Hill 2 which does take the lead character through one heck of a voyage of self discovery, to some very unpleasant places.

But while I would rate Halo very highly as a game, as a narrative it is a set of elements taken from other works (both film and literature) to provide a strong background to an extremely simple plot in the service of a lot of cool videogame mayhem.

Hrmm, I guess I should have emphasized female instead. My main problem is that people think that games need to be specifically designed for women, when in fact all there needs to be is more games with appeal to all the different demographics (which is something Nintendo has been doing for a while).

Gamerace, Zelda and Final Fantasy are also enormously bad examples. Tremendous amounts of women play those two franchises.

Would you mind looking at the post where I replied to the OP?

I agree that Halo is lacking as a narrative, I was referring specifically to how gender roles functioned in the game (the entire Halo universe is like that - it's not an inherently male fantasy unless you believe that war is inherently male). Gamerace was referring to the role of women in the game.

For the record - I recommend the Mother games, the work of Fumito Ueda, and certain Zelda titles.