"The Gaming Trifecta: Understanding the Exclusion of Female Video Game Protagonists"

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About the Author

Kathryn Asay is an undergraduate student in the English Department at Weber State University in Utah. She will be graduating summa cum laude in December 2018 at the age of 21 with a bachelor’s degree in professional and technical writing and a technical writing institutional certificate. She is interested in gender equality, female representation, and botanical studies and hopes to integrate her interests in her future career as a technical writer.

Contents

Introduction

Background

Methods

Data/Findings

Implications and Conclusion

Works Cited

Works Consulted

Introduction

Shortly before Assassin’s Creed: Unity was released in 2014, questions began surfacing about why Ubisoft had no footage of playable female characters despite them being on the company’s feature list for the game. In response to the rising wave of questions, Alex Amancio, Ubisoft’s creative director for the game, stated, “It’s double the animations, it’s double the voices, all that stuff and double the visual assets…It’s not like we could cut our main character, so the only logical option, the only option we had, was to cut the female avatar” (LeJacq, 2014). Amancio’s comments sent fans and professionals reeling in a flurry of anger, some taking up the hashtag #womenaretoohardtoanimate as a means of firing back at Ubisoft. The situation escalated when Jonathan Cooper, former Animation Director for a different Assassin’s Creed game, countered Amancio’s statement by saying, “In my educated opinion, I would estimate this to be a day or two’s work...not a replacement of 8000 animations” (LeJacq, 2014).

Cooper’s statement and many others (Borrelli, 2014; Lindsey, 2014; Burch, 2014; Moleman, 2014) led to the inevitable conclusion that women weren’t necessarily too hard to animate—the developers had constructed the entire city of Paris on a 1:1 scale with impeccable attention to detail—but that the task of creating playable female characters simply wasn’t a priority or even an assumed standard. The entire situation sent the message that females aren’t as necessary in video games as males are. If Cooper is correct about female characters not being too difficult to animate, then why is there still a massive lack of female representation in video games?

This article posits that the gaming trifecta—a network of gamers, developers, and financial factors—impacts the representation of female playable protagonists. I will examine the potential reasons why playable female protagonists are typically excluded from video games with unchangeable, set protagonists, specifically through a case study of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and identify the relationships among those reasons through my gaming trifecta theory, using a content analysis approach. This case study of Assassin’s Creed is important because Ubisoft has tried to integrate female protagonists into several of the franchise’s games but has done so in a way that players perceive as meaningless and mediocre. There continues to be a lack of female representation.

I have framed this paper around Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise. Not only is Assassin’s Creed the highest grossing Ubisoft franchise—one of its recent releases sold 1.51 million units during the first week of its release (D’Angelo, 2017)—but its games attempt to provide a platform for female representation that other video games lack. Through the experimental platform of Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft has tried several times to create non-optional and optional female-led video games. This situates the franchise as the perfect case study to examine female representation in video games that typically only have designated playable protagonists. Furthermore, the Assassin’s Creed franchise is known for its progressive ideals—they have a message that lingers on the screen before each game starts up that reads, “Inspired by historical events and characters, this work of fiction was designed, developed, and produced by a multicultural team of various beliefs, sexual orientations and gender identities.” Yet, for being so progressive and diverse as a development team, they don’t necessarily seem to consider diverse representation as an industry standard, but more like an indeterminate, long-term goal.