@Lena_P: You keep arguing against stuff I'm not saying, for some reason.

So why couldn’t he have been? Why can you say, “He’s male because he is,” but can’t say, “Chell is female because she is.” If Chell being female has to “do something for the story”, why don’t you prove that Master Chief’s masculinity “does something for the story”? Point out how his masculinity is key to the story. If Chell has to justify being female, Master Chief has to justify being male.
Why do you keep interpreting this as "justification?" If someone asked "why can't you change Chell to male," then I would say "she's female because she is."

Look: take Halo and Portal, and swap the gender of the main characters. Have you irreparably damaged the games? Almost certainly not. But have you added anything? No. It's a zero-sum game.

But remember, duh, nobody's interested in just female characters for the sake of having female characters! It's only because I'm a sexist railing against angry feminists that I would even suggest that anyone wanted a quota.

Alexander’s point was that female pc’s aren’t detrimental to a game’s sales. Using two games with very good sales and female pc’s proves her point.
Alexander's list of female characters in games was immediately after a section lamenting the lack of diversity in games. To claim that there was no should implied is completely disingenuous. And should is fine; there does need to be more diversity in games.

But female characters just for the sake of having more female characters is "diversity" in name only. "I don't care if they're interesting female characters, as long as they're female." If you call for diversity and then give examples of characters who could just as easily be male with absolutely no effect, then that's the same as a quota. If you call for diversity and then list characters that "aren't detrimental" by virtue of being female, then you've done nothing to say why they should be female. That's a quota.

We may not know Chell’s hometown, but we do know she’s a woman who can take care of herself and survived against a rogue A.I. that had massacred a lab’s worth of people. She’s a female character whose costume wasn’t designed to titillate, and she didn’t sit around until she was saved by a plumber.
She's in a cell at the beginning of the game, and forced to go through lab experiments. She didn't survive against the odds, she sat around until released by the AI. That's irrelevant to the topic, but whatever.

Female warriors are not stand-ins for male characters. Why can’t there be female space marines in the future when there are female marines in the present?
[...]I don’t understand why authors such as Tamora Pierce, Anne McCaffrey and Wilkie Collins can write stories with female leads while games are “made by dudes making games that they believe other dudes will enjoy” and where “Characters in so-called AAA games ‘default’ to male because AAA games are still predominantly adolescent male fantasies.” I think the men and women of the video game industry are as capable of creating stories about women as novelists are, and I think male gamers can enjoy playing as female characters just as much as female gamers enjoy playing as male characters.
I'm so glad you reminded me of that, because this whole time I've been saying that women don't make good marines, that there shouldn't be female characters in games, that women shouldn't be making games, and that I wouldn't want to play as one.

When anyone tries to turn any argument of nuance into an argument of "women are every bit as capable as men," that's a huge part of what I call lazy in-name-only feminism. It would've been a reasonable argument back in 1976, but most of us have moved on since then. Anyone who says "women can't do this" or "chicks don't sell" isn't worth arguing against, and you're not going to convince them anyway. And when you try to argue that with people who already accept that as a given, you haven't accomplished anything.

If you want to claim that female leads are the norm in combat-oriented fantasy and science fiction stories, good luck with that. I don't tend to read those, so for all I know, they may be. But I know it's damn well not the norm in movies or comic books. (Just as male leads aren't the norm in romantic comedies). Male lead characters are the most common in AAA videogames. You can rail against a strawman and say that it's a case of rampant sexism throughout the industry, that the "chicks don't sell" mentality is endemic instead of the one example Alexander gives. Or, you could say that it's because AAA games are predominantly testosterone-driven shooters made by men trying to appeal to men. It's as simple as that. Don't assume widespread discrimination and sexist publisher interference when there's a much more obvious explanation staring you right in the face.

Anyone who wants to argue that women could just as easily be the main characters in testosterone-driven shooters, have fun arguing that against someone who disagrees. I'd rather get past the notion that "as good as" is acceptable, and instead acknowledge the differences between the genders, and celebrate them.

And don’t give me the adolescent dude fantasy line. Alien is quite popular with adolescent males, even with Sigourney Weaver starring.
The Alien series almost perfectly illustrates my point. If I remember my movie history correctly, Ripley was originally written as a man. Obvious sexism! Or, maybe, it seemed perfectly natural that in an R-rated science fiction horror movie, the crew of space truckers would be men. But Sigourney Weaver campaigned for the part, she impressed the filmmakers, and they changed the character to a woman.

The movie benefited a lot from having a Sigourney Weaver in it, because she brought a lot to the part. But did the change from male to female make any difference to Ripley's character? I say no. In the first movie, the character's basically gender-agnostic, and I can't think of a single scene or line of dialogue that would've changed appreciably had it been played by a man. (She probably wouldn't have spent so much of the movie walking around in her underwear).

(Like movies, videogames can be improved by a great performance. But unlike movies, it's extremely rare for a character to be written with a specific actor in mind, and the choice of actor is usually made late in the process.)

When it came time to make Aliens, though, they knew that Sigourney Weaver was going to be playing the part. Just as importantly, it was made by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, who made a career out of making movies emphasizing strong female characters. And with Aliens, Ripley's gender suddenly makes a huge difference. The maternal relationship between Ripley & Newt, and the contrast of that with Ripley and the Alien Queen — it's all fantastic stuff that adds a ton of depth to what could otherwise have been a straightforward action movie.

(They contrast Ripley with Vasquez, too, the woman who's not just every bit as capable as a man, she's better than most of the male marines. I still wouldn't want to watch a movie with Vasquez as the main character).

So among AAA games these days, we get the Alien situation at best. People keep telling slight variations on the same stories. Occasionally someone gets the idea to "increase diversity," so they treat gender as a purely cosmetic difference and let the player choose whether their personality-devoid character has breasts or not. Or they take their existing male character and make it a woman who does exactly the same things.

What the industry needs more of is the Aliens situation: the game is conceived from the start to have a woman as the main character and really make that meaningful and relevant.

I fail to see what is so damn contentious about that.