“The Gaming Trifecta: Understanding the Exclusion of Female Video Game Protagonists”

by Kathryn Asay | Xchanges 13.2, Fall 2018

Implications and Conclusion

The gaming trifecta, which causes the unequal representation and exclusion of females in video games and in video game culture, provides the complex and circular location for blame in gamer experience and reception, developer creation and perception, and financial risks and restrictions, but the cycle is seemingly impossible to stop. Gamers call for equality but when presented with female-led games, they provide negative reviews due to poor quality and system issues. When developers notice the gamers’ negative reviews about female-led games and the sales numbers associated with those games, they conclude that gamers must not like games with playable female protagonists; furthermore, developers recognize that their poor sales numbers from female-led games do not bring in the same amount of revenue as their male-led games, so they are inclined to create female- and male-led games using unequal budgets. In fact, “female-led games received roughly 40 percent of the marketing budget as male-led games” because the industry believes that female protagonists simply won’t sell (Zatkin qtd. in Chambers, 2012). If the female-led games aren’t receiving as much funding as male-led games, it’s no wonder they aren’t selling.

In the spin-off Assassin’s Creed games in which there were female protagonists, like in Liberation or Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China, players found that the games were too short (only lasting about 6–10 hours) for the amount of money they were being asked to spend on them. Furthermore, the games were often riddled with glitches and bugs, had uninteresting or incredibly predictable plots, and unpopular side missions and/or main quest objectives. Gamers simply aren’t interested in a game that isn’t fun, engaging, and well-constructed. Thus, the endless cycle of the gaming trifecta.

Remaining within the gaming trifecta’s cycle only decreases the percentage of video games with playable female protagonists, particularly in the Assassin’s Creed franchise where the gender discrepancy is already incredibly high. Unfortunately, unless Ubisoft is willing to take a financial risk by developing and releasing a fully funded female-led game to the public instead of a minimally funded and poorly designed game, quantitative female exclusion will continue to rise, and female representation will remain an indeterminate goal for the future, barring gamers from agency and preference without so much as a second thought for the rhetorical causations between gamers, developers, and finances.¹

[1] All research for this paper was conducted between January 2018 and April 2018.