It is not a waste of time for developers to appeal to a demographic which is 44% of their audience. I already suggested that putting female characters in vaguely sensible armour would help with this, but I also think that they cannot be putting female gamers off too much if so many of them are playing their games.
It's more that there have been female gaming enthusiasts who have charged past all the issues that drive other women away from products, well, there's a few components, the with different severity of issue.
1.)
General inclusiveness. Being a part of the market who has partaken in these games, female gamers are starting to speak up about what they want from games and it so happens that one of those things is actually seeing themselves represented well with at least some regularity that one doesn't need to go out of their way to find niche products with female protagonists (or characters in general). This has largely been improving in the past few years, which is good, and even as a lot of the success is due to character customization RPGs while games with an established plot still use an overwhelmingly narrow set of traits appealing to what they feel is their strongest market. Now that the question has been raised, refusing to recognize the female market for these games is causing some negative feelings. Overall the approach to this is to criticize the homogeneous cast choices and advocate for games that challenge the idea that female leads (and in relation, female interests) should be ignored, since even if done for practical reasons there are implications in that decision.
2.)
Bad Representation. A general category that includes minor offenses that could use some discussion and illumination on why women might be put off by something, to "holy fuck why would you ever do that?" Mostly I see the former or somewhere closer to it on the spectrum I just established. In these instances, represented by things like... making female armor universally sexualized, placing the expectations of availability on them and otherwise taking their sexuality for granted, versus a more equal treatment in how men and women have access to "sexy armor."
Other issues lower on the severity spectrum may also be due to the issues of casting and common tropes, but they provide an easy trap to fall into since they largely coincide with real world problems, such as the contributions of women being overshadowed by men. This issue is still up in the air and tied to those discussions of wage gap, both from raw wages and how women (or other marginalized groups with even greater trouble - but I want to avoid that derail again) seem to be considered differently on some level that pushes them at least partially out of the spotlight in many occasions. To get back to video games... When video games reemphasize this permeating idea, feminist critics feel that it's essential to point out these stereotypes to cast light on their influences and make designers put more thought into how they go about representing women.
Of course there are going to be different ways these issues are confronted. Some may be more well measured than others, and there can be significant disagreement, especially over issues that cross lines of intersectionality. Sarkeesian, for instance, has had considerable criticism lodged at her by other feminists for the sometimes demeaning way she refers to sex workers (intentionally or not). Some of it is very harsh.
(pre-post edit: 8 new messages... well damn. Whatevah! Guess I'll quote to make it clear what I'm responding to, though looking back I guess I went into a tangent about previous arguments around sexualized armor and other kinds of criticism about gender representation *plop*)
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Topic: Females in Games? Thread (Read 167044 times)