I have a tendency towards big-picture, idea-based sort of thinking when it comes to forming opinions, and the kind of opinions I share here are not an exception. I was reading some forum thread or other about female protagonists in games when the discussion turned into an argument over just how rare female protagonists really are. Now I'm of the mind that there is no "right" amount of female protagonists in video games as a whole, nor do I think the gender of the protagonist is even very important when it comes to how good a game is or what kind of audience it is targeted to. But I realized that I do take for granted the conventional wisdom that there are substantially fewer games with female protagonists than male. Some people in the thread insisted "substantially fewer" meant "practically zero" (which I think is being willfully blind), some were like me thinking more like maybe ten or twenty percent, when someone went to Steam and decided to search on the new-fangled tagging system for "Female Protagonist" and came up with something like one percent of games tagged that way. This justifiably got people discussing the issues with searching in that way, including the fact that many types of games don't have protagonists at all (like strategy games), or allow you to choose your gender, and so the other 99% certainly should not be considered games with a male protagonist.
It got me thinking about my own preconceptions about how the video gaming space is made up and what I take into my thoughts about it, so decided to get some quick informal numbers in a way I could trust and understand the limitations of the collection method: by doing a survey my own collection of games :P. I came up with these gender-based categories based on the character(s) you control in a game, as opposed to which genders are a part of a given game, to keep with the idea of female protagonists that a player may be asking to identify with:
Male Protagonist: The character you control is male, or if you control multiple characters, all of them are male
Female Protagonist: Same as male, but for females :P
Mixed: You control multiple characters with at least one male and one female
Choose: You get to choose the gender of your character
Genderless: The character(s) you control don't have genders, or the gender of your character is unspecified (as is sometimes the case for silent protagonists)
None: You don't control a character at all but instead play "yourself" manipulating things in the world directly as a player (such as in puzzle games)
To make sure I didn't make uninformed decisions, I limited myself to games that I have actually played long enough to know who/what is being controlled, rather than the marketing materials for a game. And to keep it quick, I went through the two convenient lists I had for games I've played: my Steam library and my Xbox achievement record. Because I am apparently incapable of getting sick of a series as well, I had to make a decision about what to do for multiple games within the same franchise. To try to keep from double-counting, if multiple games in a series featured the same protagonist, I only counted it as one game, but if games in a series featured different protagonists, I would count those games separately. So for example, I counted only one Splinter Cell game as the tally for Sam Fisher, counted two Assassin's Creed games for Altair and Ezio, and counted all of the different Call of Duty games separately to reflect that in theory (were they not military games), each new one could have a female protagonist if it wanted.
Like I said, my impression is that something between 10-20% of video games have a female protagonist or mixed protagonists with at least one female. Before I went and counted, I also thought about it and guessed around 20% of my games allow you to choose your gender, and around 10% have you not controlling a protagonist at all. That left my impression that a small majority, 50-60% of games, involve controlling a male protagonist.
Here are my results from the quick-and-dirty survey of my recent/conveniently-accessed gaming history:
Male: 65 (42%)
Female: 12 (8%)
Mixed: 17 (11%)
Choose: 29 (19%)
Genderless: 17 (11%)
None: 16 (10%)
Total Counted: 156
I've been writing this up as I went, choosing how I would count, then making my predictions, then counting them up, then summing them up, so I have just calculated the percentages at this point. And I have to say I'm pretty happy with how close my vague impressions were on most counts! My guess for "None" games was a guess on how many puzzle and racing games I've played, and "Choose" was based on how many RPGs I figured I had, so if nothing else I have a pretty good grip on my own genre habits ;).
I do admit that I did not expect the female protagonist count to be quite so low. I did qualify my prediction for games with female protagonists by including games where you control at least one female (so including the "Mixed" category), but only because I usually group them together in my head as "examples of why people that say there are no females in video games don't know what they are talking about." My vague impression was that there would not be quite so many multi-character games in that bunch, though, leaving less than 10% with female protagonist(s) alone. I also wouldn't have guessed in a million years I had so many games with ambiguous or ungendered protagonists, so that was interesting.
As some final notes to put my personal counts into context, I am quite fond of action/adventure games that I can dig into and marathon through, which usually have a clear protagonist that you control that is decidedly not a proxy for you as the player, probably giving me a lower percentage of no-protagonist games than someone who might be more well-rounded than me :P. On the other hand I do not really play JRPGs, so multi-gender casts probably aren't as well represented in my library as they are in the realm of all games. Finally, my Steam library is the home of my Humble Indie Bundle games, so a good chunk of my list is downloadable indie titles as opposed to what you might see on the wall at a retail store.
If you would like to bore yourself, check my categorizations, or just look at a list of games from the past several years for the funsies, you can head into the post to look at my lists.
