Gaming’s uneven progress towards diverse female figures

NEW YORK – The intergalactic bounty hunter in the 1986 sci-fi video game Metroid was outfitted with a sleek helmet, red and orange armour, and a deadly arm cannon. What lay underneath it all was emblematic of the late 1980s.

If a player defeated the game in less than an hour, the character Samus Aran would flash until that armoured suit was suddenly gone, replaced by a blonde woman in a pink bikini.

The industry’s hyper-sexualisation of women continued through the 1990s with characters such as Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider archaeologist with short shorts, prominent breasts and an often bare midriff; and Morrigan Aensland, the bat-like succubus of the Darkstalkers series.

As the audience for video games has become increasingly diverse over the past two decades, developers have intentionally worked to better represent a spectrum of women who do not conform to 20th-century sexual stereotypes, either in what they do – some characters are resistance fighters and photojournalists – or how they look.

Yet, not everyone is on board.

Online influencers such as Jeremy Hambly, whose YouTube channel has nearly 1.8 million subscribers, have attracted audiences with reactionary videos about social issues.

He is known for divisive commentary on video game culture, posting daily videos with titles such as “Woke video game massively flops” and “Internet fixes ugly female video game character and leftists explode with rage”.

One user-made list on the Steam game storefront criticises games for what it calls “overtly pro-LGBTQ messaging” and having “multiple female heroes who are front-line combatants”. It is called Woke Content Detector.

Platforms like Twitch and the social site X can similarly act as echo chambers where disaffected players make derogatory remarks about modern female characters, arguing that video games are defeminising women. They yearn for an era when curvaceous bodies and minimal clothing were common.

In 2022, some people were irritated by the natural hairs on the cheeks of Aloy, a character from the Horizon games (2017 to present) that take place in a 31st-century post-apocalyptic United States.

After the next Fable game was announced in 2023, complaints swiftly rolled in that its female hero was an example of the “uglification” of women and that the game looked like a “woke disaster”.

During this summer’s annual cycle of video game announcements, Twitch and YouTube chats were filled with disparaging messages at the sight of a black woman onscreen or a female soldier toting heavy artillery.

The online fervour has led to the harassment of developers and others who work to undo negative female representation, including a small narrative consultancy company that helps with sensitivity readings and other projects.

It is a vestige of Gamergate, an online harassment campaign that started in 2014 and targeted women across the industry.

Those same critics try to elevate games that they believe actively reject leftist values, coalescing this year around Stellar Blade, which stars a scantily clad female hero.

At first, they cheered the game, whose main character, Eve, was designed with accentuated breasts and legs, and could wear an array of revealing costumes.

When developers – in what they called an internal creative decision – added a small piece of lace that modified the low-cut bodice of one of Eve’s outfits, those same players were driven into a frenzy, leading to a petition against what they labelled censorship.

Associate professor of film and digital media Soraya Murray, from the University of California, Santa Cruz, said arguments about how video games depict female characters are not new, but have been amplified by social media.

“Those with vitriol against how games have been forced to reconcile with the more sophisticated expectations of players have a platform for grievances and angst that games aren’t exclusively about them any more,” she said in an e-mail.

Attempts to undermine the move towards more considerate diversity in game development derive from the same argument that comes up whenever an LGBTQ character or a black protagonist appears in games where “historical accuracy” is considered sacrosanct.

There were flurries of racist comments online when black characters were cast in The Rings Of Power (2022 to present), Amazon Prime’s The Lord Of The Rings series, and when game developer Ubisoft revealed that one of the main characters in the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which is set in Japan, is an African samurai.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) received similar complaints about its diverse cast.

Despite the backlash to this broader representation of society, the industry has made considerable headway.

In the early 2000s, Alyx Vance, a resistance fighter in Half-Life 2 (2004), was part of the pivot away from overly sexualised portrayals. Jade from Beyond Good & Evil (2003) was a journalist and heroine whose story was naturally grounded in the world of that game.

A decade later, the episodic adventure Life Is Strange (2015 to present) featured a number of queer characters. Zarya, of the hero shooter Overwatch 2 (2022), is a Russian bodybuilder and beefy tank character.

“At its best, the industry has offered compelling and well-written female characters” that “feel more real and reflect the world around us”, Prof Murray said, pointing to Aveline de Grandpre in Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation (2012) and Ellie, the teenage protagonist from 2013’s The Last Of Us.

Prof Murray added that the video game industry was fertile ground for academics to study the nuance of female representation in the digital space.

“It hasn’t been a neat arrow of progress moving from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ representations across time,” she said.

When Lara Croft made her debut in 1996, Prof Murray said, she was an unflappable and capable adventurer with the unrealistic proportions of a Barbie doll.

Her character model would undergo slight changes with each new game, but she was transformed completely for 2013’s Tomb Raider. The franchise reboot focused on deeper storytelling, introduced a more inexperienced explorer and swopped her shorts for jeans. NYTIMES