"The Gaming Trifecta: Understanding the Exclusion of Female Video Game Protagonists"
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Download PDF About the AuthorKathryn 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 |
Implications and ConclusionThe gaming trifecta, which causes the unequal representation and exclusion of females in video games and in video game culture, provides the complex and circular location for blame in gamer experience and reception, developer creation and perception, and financial risks and restrictions, but the cycle is seemingly impossible to stop. Gamers call for equality but when presented with female-led games, they provide negative reviews due to poor quality and system issues. When developers notice the gamers’ negative reviews about female-led games and the sales numbers associated with those games, they conclude that gamers must not like games with playable female protagonists; furthermore, developers recognize that their poor sales numbers from female-led games do not bring in the same amount of revenue as their male-led games, so they are inclined to create female- and male-led games using unequal budgets. In fact, “female-led games received roughly 40 percent of the marketing budget as male-led games” because the industry believes that female protagonists simply won’t sell (Zatkin qtd. in Chambers, 2012). If the female-led games aren’t receiving as much funding as male-led games, it’s no wonder they aren’t selling. No gamer wants to buy a game that isn’t up to the same standards as the male-led games produced by the same company. . Figure 3: The Gaming Trifecta In the spin-off Assassin’s Creed games in which there were female protagonists, like in Liberation or Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China, players found that the games were too short (only lasting about 6–10 hours) for the amount of money they were being asked to spend on them. Furthermore, the games were often riddled with glitches and bugs, had uninteresting or incredibly predictable plots, and unpopular side missions and/or main quest objectives. Gamers simply aren’t interested in a game that isn’t fun, engaging, and well-constructed. Thus, the endless cycle of the gaming trifecta. Remaining within the gaming trifecta’s cycle only decreases the percentage of video games with playable female protagonists, particularly in the Assassin’s Creed franchise where the gender discrepancy is already incredibly high. Unfortunately, unless Ubisoft is willing to take a financial risk by developing and releasing a fully funded female-led game to the public instead of a minimally funded and poorly designed game, quantitative female exclusion will continue to rise, and female representation will remain an indeterminate goal for the future, barring gamers from agency and preference without so much as a second thought for the rhetorical causations between gamers, developers, and finances. It may be possible that Ubisoft will make more attempts to create female-led games in the near future[1] or, for the sake of monetary security, games with optional female protagonists. This possibility, as well as the hundreds of other video games with their various protagonist options, could point the way for future research and analysis of female representation in video games under the gaming trifecta. [1] All research for this paper was conducted between January 2018 and April 2018. |