“The Gaming Trifecta: Understanding the Exclusion of Female Video Game Protagonists”
by Kathryn Asay | Xchanges 13.2, Fall 2018
Data/Findings
In my search to uncover the reasons for such a limited number of playable female protagonists in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and in the gaming community as a whole, I discovered several disheartening but altogether unsurprising statistics about the gaming industry. In a 2007 study, data showed that “males were almost five times more likely to be portrayed as the primary character…than females” in video games (Burgess, 2007). Others would argue that there are plenty of video games in which players get to customize their characters or choose from several different avatars, but “even for games where players could pick the character’s gender, there were still more male characters (60%) than female characters (40%)” to choose from (Robinson, 2008).
In the Assassin’s Creed franchise, the gender gap between playable protagonists is even worse. From the research I conducted, out of the ten major installments of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, only two installments have optional or limited playable female protagonists while all ten installments have one or more playable male protagonists. That means that only 20 percent of the major installments feature playable female protagonists even though their male counterparts in the major installments are represented 100 percent of the time. Furthermore, the ten major installments only feature three playable female protagonists (all three of which are only optional or limited protagonists) while they feature 17 playable male protagonists. Out of 24 total major and spin-off installments, only four games have playable female protagonists (most being optional or limited) while 22 games feature playable male protagonists. Furthermore, in those 24 total games, there are only five playable female protagonists while there are a whopping 34 playable male protagonists.
In the 2014 Assassin’s Creed: Unity fiasco, when Alex Amancio claimed the development team didn’t have enough time to create the earnestly-awaited optional female characters, gamers lashed out ferociously. Hundreds of gamers took to social media platforms to criticize Amancio’s excuses with the hashtag #womenaretoohardtoanimate. Media critic Anita Sarkessian joined the call for equal gender representation, saying, “There is still a tendency for game studios to treat female representation as some kind of extravagant goal, rather than simply treating it as standard in the same way they handle male representation” (Sarkessian qtd. in Mulkerin, 2016).
Ironically, when video games with playable female protagonists are created, those games tend to receive far more criticism and negative reviews from players. In a Reddit survey of player’s favorite Assassin’s Creed game, only 0.25% of voters said that their favorite game was the female-led Assassin’s Creed: Liberation. Almost 2000 people participated in the survey, but only 5 people voted for the female-led game as their favorite. In a spin-off game, Assassin’s Creed: Liberation, the predefined protagonist is a woman of African American and French descent living in New Orleans. One player commented that the game is “only worth buying if [it’s] on sale with a serious discount.” Even those who enjoyed the graphics in the game couldn’t deny that the game was created by developers who seemed uninterested in developing the female protagonist past an angry, determined female assassin without any depth or desire. Gamer reviews claimed that Assassin’s Creed: Liberation started out decently but progressively grew meaningless in part because the “character motivations [were] non-existent, barely discernable, nonsensical, or super-weak” (Yang, 2015).
Temporarily turning from gamer review and preference toward developers’ understanding and logic, I began to understand why games with female protagonists are so lackluster. According to Geoffrey Zatkin, it’s all about money and gamers’ product reception: “In terms of pure sales numbers, in the first three months of availability, games with only a male hero sold around 25 percent better than games with an optional female hero. Games with exclusively male heroes sold around 75 percent better than games with only female heroes” (Zatkin qtd. in Chambers, 2012). With incredibly low sales numbers and critically negative reviews of female-led games, developers viewed a larger picture where games with playable female protagonists just weren’t making the cut.
As I compiled data from various sectors of the gaming community including developers, gamers, publishers, and even the games themselves, I began to notice a distinct rhetorical framework propelled by three primary forces: Gamers, Developers, and Financial Risk — the gaming trifecta. These three forces work to bar women not only from quantitative protagonist representation but from the gaming community as a whole. In order to fully understand how the three forces within my theory of the gaming trifecta use rhetorical context to create meaning, it is important to identify how they rely on each other to reaffirm or revise their systems of understanding.