"The Gaming Trifecta: Understanding the Exclusion of Female Video Game Protagonists"
|
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 |
Data/FindingsIn my search to uncover the reasons for such a limited number of playable female protagonists in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and in the gaming community as a whole, I discovered several disheartening but altogether unsurprising statistics about the gaming industry. In a 2007 study, data showed that “males were almost five times more likely to be portrayed as the primary character…than females” in video games (Burgess, 2007). Others would argue that there are plenty of video games in which players get to customize their characters or choose from several different avatars, but “even for games where players could pick the character’s gender, there were still more male characters (60%) than female characters (40%)” to choose from” (Robinson, 2008). In the Assassin’s Creed franchise, the gender gap between playable protagonists is even worse. From the research I conducted, out of the ten major installments of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, only two installments have optional or limited playable female protagonists while all ten installments have one or more playable male protagonists. That means that only 20 percent of the major installments feature playable female protagonists even though their male counterparts in the major installments are represented 100 percent of the time. Furthermore, the ten major installments only feature three playable female protagonists (all three of which are only optional or limited protagonists) while they feature 17 playable male protagonists, some appearing in more than one installment but most being primary, non-optional protagonists (see Graph 1: Major Installments). Out of 24 total major and spin-off installments (not including downloadable packages and extensions for the major installments, games designed strictly for multiplayer functionality, Facebook games, board games, card games, or games in beta stages), only four games have playable female protagonists (most being optional or limited) while 22 games feature playable male protagonists. Furthermore, in those 24 total games, there are only five playable female protagonists (only two are non-optional, primary protagonists) while there are a whopping 34 playable male protagonists in which some are repeat or optional protagonists, but none are limited protagonists (see Graph 2: Major and Spin-off Installments). In this scenario, female representation increases slightly to 20.8 percent while male representation increases to 141.6 percent. . Figure 1: Playable Protagonists in Major AC Installments . Figure 2: Playable Protagonists in Major and Spin-off AC Installments According to my data, the Assassin’s Creed franchise clearly lacks equalizing gender representation in relation to playable protagonists, and it isn’t the only video game franchise either. For there to be such unequal gender representation, rhetorical forces must be working behind the scenes within the gaming community’s two primary branches (also parts of the gaming trifecta): Gamers and Developers. In order to illuminate relational causes for the lack of gender representation in video games, I determined that I would need to understand how gamers and developers felt about the issue, how they reacted to it the issue, and how they understood the issue. In the 2014 Assassin’s Creed: Unity fiasco, when Alex Amancio claimed the development team didn’t have enough time to create the earnestly-awaited optional female characters, gamers lashed out ferociously. Hundreds of gamers took to social media platforms to criticize Amancio’s excuses with the hashtag #womenaretoohardtoanimate, all with similar messages claiming that the developers were capable of the extra animations but didn’t want to put the effort into designing women. Media critic Anita Sarkessian joined the call for equal gender representation, saying, “There is still a tendency for game studios to treat female representation as some kind of extravagant goal, rather than simply treating it as standard in the same way they handle male representation” (Sarkessian qtd. in Mulkerin, 2016). The backlash from the lack of female protagonists and representation in the Assassin’s Creed franchise demonstrates that many gamers are looking for more equal gender representation in the video games they play. Ironically, when video games with playable female protagonists are created, those games tend to receive far more criticism and negative reviews from players. In a Reddit survey of player’s favorite Assassin’s Creed game, only 0.25% of voters said that their favorite game was the female-led Assassin’s Creed: Liberation. Almost 2000 people participated in the survey, but only 5 people voted for the female-led game as their favorite. The three games that came in with the most votes were all male-led games (Reddit). In a spin-off game, Assassin’s Creed: Liberation, the predefined protagonist is a woman of African American and French descent living in New Orleans. The game was expected to have extraordinary potential and character development, but somewhere along the line, the expected potential missed its mark. In fact, several gamers reacted negatively to Assassin’s Creed: Liberation, claiming that the game would bug out several times in one sitting, causing players to restart different missions on multiple occasions, shut down their console when their female protagonist got stuck, and lose in-game progress for no apparent reason. Other players were less concerned with the obvious bugs in the system and more irritated with how developers made it easier for the protagonist to defeat high level guards and complete what should have been the more challenging missions in comparison with male protagonists from similar spin-off games. One player commented that the game is “only worth buying if [it’s] on sale with a serious discount.” Even those who enjoyed the graphics in the game and didn’t mind the frustrating bugs couldn’t deny that the game was created by developers who seemed uninterested in developing the female protagonist past an angry, determined female assassin without any depth or desire. Gamer reviews claimed that Assassin’s Creed: Liberation started out decently but progressively grew meaningless in part because the “character motivations [were] non-existent, barely discernable, nonsensical, or super-weak” (Yang, 2015). The developers had an opportunity to use their New Orleans setting and half-French, half-African American female assassin to promote serious character development like they had done in the past for other male-led games like Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood or Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, so why didn’t they? Temporarily turning from gamer review and preference toward developers’ understanding and logic, I began to understand why games with female protagonists are so lackluster. According to Geoffrey Zatkin, it’s all about money and gamers’ product reception: In terms of pure sales numbers, in the first three months of availability, games with only a male hero sold around 25 percent better than games with an optional female hero. Games with exclusively male heroes sold around 75 percent better than games with only female heroes. (Zatkin qtd. in Chambers, 2012) With incredibly low sales numbers and critically negative reviews of female-led games, developers viewed a larger picture where games with playable female protagonists just weren’t making the cut. The decision to include a playable female protagonist actually decreases the total amount of revenue taken in by the developers; however, the amount of money they put into female-led games may also affect gamer review and reception as well as affect general sales numbers. As I compiled data from various sectors of the gaming community including developers, gamers, publishers, and even the games themselves (what McAllister refers to as the Computer Game Complex or the totality of the game industry), I began to notice a distinct rhetorical framework propelled by three primary forces: Gamers, Developers, and Financial Risk (see Figure 1: The Gaming Trifecta). These three forces create a troubling sort of gaming trifecta that works to bar women not only from quantitative protagonist representation but from the gaming community as a whole. Ken McAllister stated that it is important to obtain a “comprehensive awareness of how the different agents are involved in making and managing meaning” (McAllister, 2004, p. 46). In order to fully understand how the three forces within my theory of the gaming trifecta use rhetorical context to create such meaning, it is important to identify how they rely on each other to reaffirm or revise their systems of understanding. |