@Anon-2: First, that business about how calls for inclusivity are actually hidden accusations of misogyny: that's exactly the kind of defensiveness I was talking about. It's what turns pretty straightforward statements about the diversity of the audience and equal representation, into ridiculously hyped-up "controversies."

The internet's a big place, so sure, you can find people who want to scream at Rockstar for being complicit in the patriarchy. Just like here in the comments, you can find guys killing time until their testicles drop by shouting "We don't wanna play no chicks! No girls in the treehouse!" That's how bell curves work, and I don't want to be associated with either extreme.

For the rest of it, I think you're just missing the point. I have a lot of issues with the idea that creators have to make arbitrary changes to established characters, and I have for years. But there's enough about that to fill another blog post.

The difference here, though, is that the characters already feel arbitrary because they're so lazy and predictable. Again, it's: Goodfellas version of Tony Soprano, low-level black drug dealer, and white trash psycho. Anybody trying to argue for the artistic integrity of those characters has his work cut out for him.

I saw somebody on NeoGAF getting all irritated that I brought up Kill Bill and I was "making demands" that Rockstar turn GTA into something that it's not. Again, missing the point. The examples from Kill Bill show how you can make these characters 1000x more interesting without losing anything. It's purely a win-win scenario, so why are people so threatened and intimidated by it?

While I'm at it: same person on NeoGAF said that Kill Bill wasn't about masculinity but a callback to 70s female heroes of exploitation movies. No, that's Jackie Brown. Kill Bill has Uma Thurman wearing Bruce Lee's tracksuit, for God's sake. And Lucy Liu taking on a table full of male gangsters with a monologue about not questioning her authority. Of course it's a movie about masculinity.

The bigger problem, though: you're making lazy assumptions about "Rockstar's audience." Just like Rockstar is. It's 2013, we have to stop acting as if the video game audience is the same as it was 10 or even 5 years ago. Saying "it's just not for you" is as dumb and arrogant as my "why would women even want to be represented in a GTA game?!"

We've got dozens of examples of people outside the predictable 16-24-year-old male demographic — both women and men — saying, "Yes, we do want to play this game." And you can't sustain a game with a >$200 million dollar budget by playing to the same narrow audience over and over again. This isn't like your titty bar example, where they can go on saying that they are just playing to some narrow audience. This is all but guaranteed to be the biggest-selling game of the year, and for better or worse, it's going to represent "video games" in the mass media at large.

You think that's unfair? We should all be so lucky to be the victims of such injustice.

So you've got people saying they want to play the game because it looks fantastic, but they're either feeling excluded because all the women are nothing more than background objects. Or like me, they're feeling excluded because the narrative is just willfully juvenile and stupid, but it still won't shut up and just let me play. How and why would anyone be so arrogant to say that we just don't matter? That we should play something else because this isn't for us? That's not even defensive anymore; it's just plain aggressively assholish.

This is the definition of an "I'd love" argument. Hence the repeated mention of "missed opportunity." And that's not mutually exclusive with a "you're doing it wrong." I'd love a game that was this pretty and this huge in scope, but that wasn't so dumb and lazy.

And again, the whole thing is stupid because it's just so easy. Making a female lead character wouldn't fix all the problems with the GTA series, not by a long shot. It'd still be a hell of a lot more interesting than what they've shown us so far. In fact, we should all be kind of embarrassed than in 2013, having a female lead character would be such an interesting novelty.