The best video game with a strong female protagonist that I've played is NOLF. Criminally underrated and almost never noted these days, even in feminist discourse.
Anyway, this is apparently a DLC pack to a ludicrously well received game called The Last of Us, which honestly I had not heard of before. I can't help but think the reviewer is overly dramatic here, though.
Finally, I want to address this:
Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable.
This is a fallacy as it only takes up the raw total percentage and completely ignores some critically important details: gender distribution by genres. That makes a huge difference.
For instance, women make up very high numbers for things like casual games, World of Warcraft, The Sims and others.
On the other hand, a lot of major AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry and Mass Effect enjoy only small female audiences (14-22%).
That's why there's not much of an incentive. Don't just grab the whole percentage and throw it around like a gospel of injustice when you're going to voluntarily ignore the complexity and fragmentation of the market.
> Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable.
Double false claim. Women certainly don't make half of gamers (unless you consider people playing Tetris and phone games real gamers, and that's a very different subject altogether).
Fewer are playable, false claim as well. Tomb Raider, Bayonetta, Most adventure games from Roberta Williams, Lots of japanese games have female lead characters too (too many to list here), and a lot of these games were very much liked by male gamers as well. I'm personally a huge fan of Bayonetta, and the fact that the character is a female had a huge part in this preference.
Well, yeah, Tetris is a game. But it's a game in the same way that a termite is also a living species just like an elephant is another one. They just do not benchmark on the same scale.
I strongly disagree. A game should be first and foremost measured by its gameplay, and Tetris easily beats 99% of the games released each year on that department.
I wouldn't picture myself playing Tetris all my life, just like tons of games in the same time that you find nowadays on mobile phones, so I strongly disagree with your view. I wouldn't count Flappy Bird as a "game" as well - for me it all goes in the same bucket as Tetris, i.e. something to kill the time, but nothing I would consider to be a serious game in any measure.
Anyway, this is apparently a DLC pack to a ludicrously well received game called The Last of Us, which honestly I had not heard of before. I can't help but think the reviewer is overly dramatic here, though.
Finally, I want to address this:
Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable.
This is a fallacy as it only takes up the raw total percentage and completely ignores some critically important details: gender distribution by genres. That makes a huge difference.
For instance, women make up very high numbers for things like casual games, World of Warcraft, The Sims and others.
On the other hand, a lot of major AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry and Mass Effect enjoy only small female audiences (14-22%).
That's why there's not much of an incentive. Don't just grab the whole percentage and throw it around like a gospel of injustice when you're going to voluntarily ignore the complexity and fragmentation of the market.