There’s a small controversy surrounding the new PVP shooter, Brink. The character customization options are really thorough, and you can have a huge variety of different looks for your character… over 102 quadrillion as the developers boast. That is, as long as you don’t want a female. Deep, but male-only customization options were also included, recently, in Crackdown 2, and WWE All Stars: the wrestling game that allows you to create dream matchups of your all-time favorite pro-wrestlers, as long as your favorite pro-wrestlers were not women.
I have complex feelings about this problem. From a pure target market standpoint, the Brink developers probably made the right decision. The kind of PVP-oriented tactical squad shooting that their game is oriented around has a very limited appeal for female players. Female players are a minority in PVP shooters to begin with, because of a variety of factors related to the appeal of competition, difficulty of some to navigate the spaces, lack of free time to invest in getting good, not feeling comfortable in the space due to rude men and shit-talking, and other factors. I know there are certainly women who want to buy and play Brink. But they are going to be in the minority compared to male players of the game.
The typical argument that a developer makes when confronted with a lack of options for female players, is that it’s a “matter of resources.” It’s a basic equation. Why use up 50 percent of your character design resources on what may only be 10 percent of your audience? You’re going to get a little pushback from a small section of the game press for not including this option, but this will be brief; what you’re after is sales figures and a good metacritic, so being gender-inclusive doesn’t really make that much of a dent.
The problem though is that women could be your audience. That’s just not what you’re choosing. So if a developer says, “We decided not to devote the time and energy in to creating a female option for our players, because it’s a matter of resources,” they need to confess, and finish that thought with… “…Because we aren’t really all that interested in appealing to women with this title.” That’s already unspoken in your thought. We aren’t the target audience.
I get that some things are not for me. Brink didn’t appeal to me hugely anyway, purely for gameplay reasons, and now that I know I can’t customize a cool woman soldier the appeal is zero.
I’m trying to imagine an alternate universe where Brink only had female soldiers, and no male. Imagine that, but everything else about the game is the same. I think that, from a marketing standpoint, that would be absurd. It would be “that game with the chick soldiers.” People would accuse it of being a paper-doll simulator with shooting. You’d have to be a pervert to pick it up.
But then I consider this. It was a huge output of resources for Bioware or Atlus to totally redesign huge singleplayer story games to allow for the possibility of a female protagonist. Not only did this require new art and animations, and voice acting, but it also required new dialog to be written and new game options to exist. They did it anyway. Is this really smart from a marketing standpoint? In Mass Effect, only Male Shepard is used in the marketing materials, and 80% of players play as the male Shepard. This is actually a staggering statistic that suggests they might be fools to even bother with the female option for Shepard. Of course, most people also play Soldier, so maybe it’s silly to have other classes. And most people play Paragon, so maybe it’s silly to have Renegade options. Reductio ad absurdum.
Or maybe options exist so you can have options. Maybe only 10 percent of your Brink players will want to play as the really skinny guy. He’s in the game anyway.
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