Current Events > 74% of Women feel underrepresented in Video Games XD

(+) Yeah! (+)

Why do fat people need representation? Its not a healthy lifestyle

This implies that there's little more to being a woman than being a sexual being.

For example, the one time Nintendo of Japan decided to make a more deep examination of her character, they dropped the ball hard.

There exists such a concept as a female character who is distinct from her male contemporaries in similar games without being A) the exact same as a man no changes or B) "This is what women are like, right guys?"

Samus is an icon, but she's been poorly utilized for the concept of "woman character".

To be fair, if you're just looking at the biggest AAA releases of the year you'll find this, but go look up the "female protagonist" tag on steam and look at all the indie titles that have come out in the last few years and it paints a very different picture. This is where wanting "representation" starts to turn into "by representation I meant specifically only within the biggest budget titles of the year and not overall".

If women were only getting starring roles in small arthouse films, they would be right to say they are being underrepresented in cinema. Visibility is part of representation. Citing "but there are hundreds of shovelware Steam games coming a month" is obviously a silly move.

According to steam there are ~150 female protagonist games released every month:
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=7208

Over 95% of games on Steam are indie games:
https://vginsights.com/insights/article/video-game-insights-2021-market-report

If the argument is that significant representation in the overwhelmingly majority of titles isn't sufficient than the issue isn't about representation. Indie isn't just shovelware, either, and that's a disingenuous depiction of it. Undertale. Cuphead. Hades. Binding of Isaac. Hollow Knight. Rocket League. The Telltale games. Celeste. Limbo. Cave Story. Journey. Minecraft! Many of the most beloved games in the last decade have been indie titles, and they've been incredibly successful.

These are titles that people will praise and talk about for years. Nobody is sitting back and reminiscing about Gears 4 or AC 5 or Madden 21, even if those are AAA titles.

You said there are 150 female-protagonist games released every month. I'm not calling all indie games shovelware. I'm calling shovelware shovelware. I imagine over half of them are also porn .

There aren't even 10 Celestes coming out every month, let alone 150.

Framing all indie games as culturally impactful and all big-budget games as yearly sports titles is a clearly dishonest argument. You're mad that people think women aren't starring in enough games and looking to shut down the conversation

I'm not saying all indie games are culturally impactful, but I'm saying enough ARE above the usual AAA shit like FIFA that it's not so black and white as saying representation in indie "doesn't count" when talking about representation. You wanted to argue that games like Celeste don't count towards representation because they're not some big budget flop like Forsaken. Take away the endless churn of AAA sequels, sports games, shooters, etc that come and go and people forget about them the next year and ask yourself which is better: representation in places where people will fondly remember those games for decades, or representation in a wet fart that cost $100M to make that everyone forgets a week after release.

• In 2022, games where the only option was female made up 45% of games without player choice.
• In terms of all playable characters, 39% were female for multi-choice games
• In terms of "more or less", only 28% of multi-choice games had more female choices than male, with an additional 26% having an equal amount

We studied every game released in 2022, according to Game Informers game release schedule, between January 1st and May 18th (the date we published our research). This does not include every tiny indie game released into the world, but includes the vast majority of major titles and a large number of indie games too, across PC and consoles, and includes games developed all over the world.
There were 152 games released within the timeframe of our study.
We started by eliminating every game that was a re-release, remaster, or had previously been released on a different console. We didnt think it was fair to include these as examples of a 2022 release if they actually werent first released in 2022 at all. Sound good? We think so. 83 of the games were defined as re-releases, leaving us with 68 games to analyze.
We then determined which games had only preset playable characters, which games allowed users to customize their playable character (e.g. they had character creation functionality that allows players to change their gender, appearance and more), and which games had no known playable character (e.g. theyre never mentioned, or youre an inanimate object such as a car). 46 games had only preset playable characters, 12 games had fully customizable characters, 7 had no known character, and we eliminated 3 games due to being based on non-fictional sporting rosters (Rugby 22, MLB The Show 22 and WWE 2K22).*
Our study focused on the 46 games that only allow you to play with preset characters, meaning their gender and appearance were predefined by game developers, rather than chosen by individual gamers via freewill.
*Both Rugby 22 and MLB The Show 22 include no female teams or players, though these games were excluded from our findings.

FWIW I looked for actual, hard data on the subject, and this is the breakdown from 2022:
https://diamondlobby.com/geeky-stuff/female-representation-in-games/
Summary:
* In 2022, games where the only option was female made up 45% of games without player choice.
* In terms of all playable characters, 39% were female for multi-choice games
* In terms of "more or less", only 28% of multi-choice games had more female choices than male, with an additional 26% having an equal amount

Here is their methodology:

Now, I guess you can argue that 45% of major games released in 2022 isn't parity, but given that estimates put women at 48% of gamers, that seems pretty damn close. Some will note that they did a different study last year only looking at "main character" breakdown in the 10 highest selling games from each year, but they removed any games that let you customize a character. That study put the number at 27.7% female representation among main characters.

Thinking about it, I also think women feeling underrepresented being 74% seems really high. What games are they playing?

According to this ad, games with playable badass female heroes.

Why do fat people need representation? Its not a healthy lifestyle

Are they saying 74% of women are actually fat and don't feel represented by female heroes? Are they expecting developers to make all the female characters fat? What are they even saying? Seems to me women will never be happy, according to this ad. No developer can cater to delivering every woman's exact image of themselves in a video game. If we went by that logic, 90% of male gamers probably aren't represented either because the average male gamer damn sure doesn't look like the average video game character.

I mean being a mass murderer isn't a healthy lifestyle either but they have plenty of representation in video games lmao

I have a question.

Does a character have to be the main character and playable to be classified as representation?

I feel like the issue here in the video is that it focuses on appearance. Which is stupid. But can the claim be made that women are represented, just not as the playable character?

Thinking about it, I also think women feeling underrepresented being 74% seems really high. What games are they playing?

I'd say look at a game where you can create your character, like Fallout 4, and see what women create. You can certainly be fat in that if you want, and add all sorts of cosmetic scarring and tissue damage to your character. Does anyone do that though? You'll be lucky to find a few fringe cases. Most people accept the 'fantasy' part of a game and don't do their utmost to create themselves or their real life circumstances in a game.

Its more so unless you are a cartoony character like Mario, people expect someone like an action hero who runs around all the time, vaulting things and climbing stuff to be at least not be overweight. No expectations to be ripped or in peak human form, just not obese.