“Duh, obviously NO ONE was demanding that developers arbitrarily change male player characters to female! It’s insulting to suggest that they were! But as long as you brought it up: why COULDN’T Master Chief have been female?”

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.

And don’t give me the adolescent dude fantasy line. Alien is quite popular with adolescent males, even with Sigourney Weaver starring.

I don’t think Chell or Master Chief are great characters, but they’re fine for what they are, vessels the player inhabits to experience the story. 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. As a woman, I can verify Chell acted just as I would in that situation; she did her damnedest to get out alive. Men and women aren’t very different in that sense.

“I didn’t say that “Samus and Chell aren’t ‘female enough’ or making use of their sex or whatever” I said that their being female does nothing for the story. So putting them forward as notable female characters is a bad idea.”

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.

“I’m saying make female characters genuinely feminine, however the developer defines that, instead of just stand-ins for male characters.”

“Woman can shoot dudes as well as men — and definitely a hell of a lot better than this man — but that’s not what makes them awesome. I’m not that interested in playing that type of character, and if I were a woman, I doubt I’d be that excited about the escapism of playing a woman who acts like a man.”

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?

Tamora Pierce, the bestselling children’s author, beloved by librarians and 10-14 year old girls (and boys) around the world has written 24 books about young women who made their first kill before they lost their virginity. Her success proves that girls (and boys) love stories about girls who fight in wars, help orchestrate a revolution, hunt down criminals and just generally kick ass. A woman who can shoot dudes as well as a man is NOT a woman who acts like a man. There are women who like martial arts, hunting and action films. They are not acting like men, they are just being themselves. Tammy got started writing because she wanted to make the books she wished she had growing up, stories about women who were just as tough and strong as women she knew, books that millions of adolescents have loved.

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.