When it comes to games these days, there is one undeniable rule as far as female characters are concerned, either their included as eye candy or their not included at all, at least thats what most games seem to follow.
However, we can't deny how long we've come from saving the princess in Super Mario to having female heroines like Lara Croft or Chell from Portal, but we still have miles to go nonetheless.
Chell from Valve's Portal.
One of the first action heroines in games was Samus from Metroid, although her true identity wasn't revealed until the end of the game which surprised a lot of people back in the 80s. She became an important icon of video games and she is still as cool as she was decades ago.
But what separated Samus from other female characters is that, although she was revealed in a "sexy" outfit at the end of the Metroid games, she was still wearing a big and powerful suit of armor giving her powers beyond human level and yet still being something other than eye candy.
What gamers were "rewarded" with at the end of Metroid for the NES.
As video games began to grow up and its users along with them, the demands of gamers began to change. In the 90s a lot of the kids from the 80s were entering their teen years and this was eventually used by having female characters that exploited that demographic.
Lara Croft is an icon from that era, a voluptuous heroine that hunted for treasure and rare items across the world, a female Indiana Jones if you like. Still, she was eventually used as eye candy to promote the eventual sequels of games up until recent years. Its not that the games utilized her female body to sell the games because they were good, but it did create an image of women that for some reason still lingers around today.
There were other female characters in the 90s that also followed the idea of eye candy, fighting games were clearly one of them in series like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken and so on.
Female fighters from Mortal Kombat.
When we were fast approaching the 2000s, it seems that there was another shift in how women were portrayed in games, which I still tie to the gamers who played them. During this decade, we saw women starting to be portrayed with a little more respect and not just eye candy.
Some female characters like Alyx Vance from Half Life 2 or Violet Summer from Velvet Assassin, were women that starred in games that wanted to portray authentic female heroines, eye candy wasn't good enough to gamers now as their demographic had aged as well and demanded more.
Violet Summer from Velvet Assassin, a fictional character based on real life WW2 heroine Violette Szabo.
There are still a lot of lingering trends in games regarding women like I mentioned above, their still added for the most part as eye candy and very few games actually care for a respectful and honest portrayal.
Mass Effect from BioWare is an excellent sci-fi RPG that allows the player to choose the gender of the main character, who nonetheless behaves very "manly" through the game itself. Here, the player is allowed to flirt and eventually romance other characters depending on their gender, but a lot of the women portrayed in the game serve as eye candy, particularly Miranda Lawson an interesting character herself but still used in the same old ways.
Proper and respectful use of female characters in Mass Effect 2.
What seems to be interesting is that now women also play games and their an untapped demographic that developers could take advantage off. The percentage of women who play games is still not as big as that of men, but it is a bigger number than previous generations.
As a gamer myself, its not that I cringe when I see female characters as eye candy, but it does bother me that this is the norm still and their inclusion in games, particularly those of the action or shooter kind is mostly avoided. Is it because of authenticity? or scared to cause unwanted attention? or is it simply that we haven't reached a point where it doesn't matter whats between the legs of our heroes but what they do and stand for?
Anya Stroud, formerly a communications officer in Gears of War now suits for battle in part 3.
I applaud developers who want to do justice to female characters in games and I encourage them to continue to do so. Epic games finally decided to include women as combatants in their next installment of Gears of War, after a lot of requests from fans through the years.
There is some big potential to create female characters and heroines to be "cool" just as male characters are, it has been hit or miss through the years, but it seems were reaching that point, hopefully the male demographic understands and accepts that playing a woman is not "girly" or "weak" but a different way of seeing and experiencing games, their worlds, stories and characters.
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