I did an earlier blog on the lack of female avatars in online shooter games (Link is here) and one of the excuses commonly used by Developers for the lack of females is that they need separate animations and character builds. While the faces and voices in many online games are customizable, often the same body is used for all characters of that class or team to make for ease of programming. This is done in many games including SOCOM, Resistance 2 co-op, and will apparently be the format used for MAG.
So... here's 2 pictures of soldiers. Guess the gender. Both could be male, both could be female, one could be male, one could be female. I'll post the actual pictures on Sunday, but for now, just take a guess... what are the genders of soldiers A and B?
I think my main point is that it's difficult to tell a female soldier from a male when both are dressed in full kit. In fact, shooter games are one of the few genres where it's quite easy to hide gender due to the equipment they generally carry.
Here is a picture of one of the soldier designs for the S.V.E.R. PMC in MAG... to the right is the same figure with my avatar's face added (not added well... but I'm sure that most developers... though maybe not all... have the ability to do a better photoshopping job than I did!).
My point is that it takes very little to give female gamers a better sense of immersion in shooter games - all we really need is a female face to let us better identify with our character. We don't need giant boobs, tiny waists or other unrealistic male fantasy version of a female soldier. In my previous blog, Ashley Davis made a comment that I think may very well be true... developers aren't designing female avatars for women - they are designing them for men. Possibly it's time they had a look at what women want.
5 easy ways to make male/female avatars in shooter games:
1. Use sleeves. This tends to cover the "hairy arm" musculature that men have. While women also often have hairy muscular arms... well, we really don't want to go there. Hands aren't really as big an issue as devs seem to think.
2. No need to change the bottoms. It's not like the male avatars have packages anyway. I guess this is realistic... in battle I rather think that it would shrivel up and hide if bullets were actually flying and any guy walking around the battlefield with a giant boner is just going to look rather silly. The waist gear usually hides the waist, and well, an ass is an ass.
3. Use chest gear or armour... this easily covers the lack of boobs. While boobs are nice, they're not entirely necessary in creating a sense of immersion for women in a war based game.
4. Use hats. If you don't want to bother with hair, give the female soldier a feminine but short haircut and use helmets and high necklines to further blur gender lines.
5. Add an option for a female face. Surely a good avatar designer can design a soldier character that can look masculine, but still look somewhat feminine with a female face added.
Playing a video game is about immersion. I'm not a male and have a hard time scratching my non-existent balls, leaving the toilet seat up or doing competitive farting. I'm not asking for much, I'm just asking that devs quit making lame excuses for lack of talent and quit thinking that they have to offer a men's version of a female soldier.
Regarding animations... just watch the first few moments of this video...
Did you immediately recognize the bouncing boobs and sashay of the female soldier?? Did she run that much differently from the guys? Again, we're talking immersion here and to be honest, most females in a military role are not overtly feminine - they're simply soldiers.
So, I'll be interested to see how many of you get the "Guess the Gender" portion of this blog! Give it your best guess!
... and this blog will provide me with future ammunition as a link source when whining about lack of female avatars in future shooter games... because every once in awhile whining works... and being a wife of many years, I'm good at whining! :)
UPDATE: For those that didn't click the links in Parsley's comment... here's the correct genders! (oh, and kudo's to Parsley for actually managing to track down the right pictures!! Parsley is either an image search genius... or has way too much time and should be playing games instead!!) :)
Now this is something I support. There is no reason to ignore women in genres that are considered mostly for men like FPShooters and other war related games.
Agree with VW -- they're both female. Also agreed on how easy it would be for female avatars to be included for most of these games. The development difficulty is just a red herring, they're simply not paying any attention to making the games more fun and accessible to folks outside of the traditional demographic.
And not only is the TF2 picture funny because it's the BLU team in opposition to the all-male RED team, but with the exception of the Spy, there aren't any drastic wardrobe changes.
B) is 100% female, something about the stance just gives it away for me.
A) I'm gonna say male because the forehead compared to the M9 helmet seems to be wide and tight with the helmet, where as on most female solders the M9 helmet appears to be rather large and out of proportion with their head, good ol production efficiency of one size fits all!
I think we're moving that way, at least. I tried playing the Pinnacle Station DLc for Mass Effect last night (bad idea), and it reminded me of something. I'm fairly certain that I would have hated that game if I were forced to play as the male. I'm not kidding about that at all: playing as a female Sheperd made the game far more enjoyable for me, as, for some reason, it felt like it added a lot to the experience, perhaps because of VA Jennifer Hale, and perhaps because it just felt different to be playing as a real female for once.
I really hope more games give us this option in the future, and that they actually do it right. I suppose simple modeling in multiplayer is as good a place to start as any.
Kauza, I agree. I just started the game up for the first time, and when given the choice, I went with the female option. Maybe it's the overload from the gritty, muscular dudes you're forced to play in other games...I just felt that I wanted a change.
Did the same thing with Saints Row 2. Thought it would be amusing/cool to play as a female thug. And oddly, as my wife pointed out, I modeled my character as her...without meaning to do so.
Wait; now that I think about it, I did the same with my Mass Effect character.
I can understand why they wouldnt put female characters in certain games like.. lets say Operation Flashpoint / Armed Assault or the previous Call of Duty games mainly because they were all shooting for some sort of military / historical accuracy.
But for games like TF2, or any multiplayer based game that doesn't shoot for a form of realism they should have the option for both genders, gamers play a game to be an avatar.. I still don't understand why developers cheap out the experience and make it one sided. I can understand it from a singleplayer perspective based on the games original story and character build, but for multiplayer it should be total open game.
Hell games like Quake 2,3(live), UT3, HL2DM, Rainbow Six Vegas etc they all had female avatars to choose from, and mass effect with its nice implementation of giving the choice through the singleplayer experience. Developers need to be more open in terms of a 'choice' of avatar in the multiplayer world especially.. thats where its all open, and really where players want to have an avatar that fits them and how they want to be seen by others.
My main Fallout 3 character is a female, but most people who see her don't notice because I have her wearing Winterized T-51b armor all the time (I chose a female to use the Black Widow perk on the guy who wants you to blow up Megaton). I think most western RPGs do a good job of including female characters that aren't overly sexualized or weak. Japanese games do the worst job at this, in my opinion. All you need to do is look at basically any fighting game or JRPG and see how all the female characters are physically caricatures.
On the subject of the pictures, I'm going to guess A is a guy and B is a chick. No reason.
On another note, Halo 3 doesn't even bother with changing models between male and female avatars. All you have to do is change the voice from male to female in multiplayer.
I'll go A is female and B is...yeah male. Final answer.
I really don't know why women aren't getting their dues in shooters. Yeah the majority are male but I have noticed quite a few women playing as well. And that's not to mention all the women who play without a mic and keep their gender hidden. Sooner or later it will change.
And the "boner in the battlefield" really made me laught for some reason.
Interesting to see all the answers so far! (actually I'll post the update with the reveal sometime tomorrow).
@Jack... rally, it's so sad to see men that don't know history. When men are in short supply, women have often served on the front lines. There are fierce African women warriors in history, in WWII there were female snipers, tank drivers and infantry soldiers, and currently there are females serving in the Israeli, Canadian and other military services that do see front line action.
... and Juggernaut... yeah, I have to admit that when I had a female avatar in R6 Vegas, I'd sometimes shoot em in the junk just because it was kinda funny! :)
Well for TF2, that game is built on balance, and most likely, the TF2 community would call for some sort of Balance issues for the men and women.
Before everyone realizes that this game takes place in the Psudo-50's, where men get blown up and Women sit there and laugh at you and ridicule you when you lose, even those she did bat shit but ridicule you the whole way though.
Not to take any credit away from the women that fight, I think they are strong brave soldiers but they are a minority. This is my opinion. I feel men should be the ones fighting in a war. War is nasty and horrible. Not a place for women and children. Men create the wars, men should fight them.
@Jack... fair enough regarding your feelings on the matter... just pointing out that historically women have served on the front lines (and continue to do so today). Yes, they were/are definitely a minority... but regardless of reality, we're talking games here.
I won't get into the other issues as I addressed them in the previous blog that I linked, but essentially by appealing to a broader gamer base, devs can increase profits. This blog is simply to say that I think most women would be pleased with a token ability to play as a female character and that the design needn't be overtly female and take up a lot of developer time or resources.
I dunno, they both look like road signs to me. Final Answer.
Seriously though, it's really hard to tell. I'm going to go with Soldier A being male, and soldier B being female.
That being said, soldier A kinda looks more like an action figure/doll/statuette than a real person. From that picture at least. I'm pretty sure that B is a female, but I can't really tell if A is also or not. I'm gonna say that A is a male, only because I kind of expect one to be for comparative sake. I wouldn't be surprised if that one was female also though.(but I would be surprised to find out that A isn't a figureine).
For the record, I didn't guess correctly. Point taken. But don't you think there'd be a backlash if developers didn't do female characters properly, and just made them "male" bodies with female faces? If something's worth doing, it's worth doing properly, as they say.
... and glad the point was taken... yeah, only a few people got it right! (Wasteland Traveler, Arkhon and Palidi)
Good question too! Honestly, I don't think there would be a backlash. The heads of guys are pretty interchangeable and as I said, it's not too difficult to make a fairly androgynous body (as the MAG S.V.E.R. character shows). In many games the character models aren't that outstanding and frankly in online games you rarely notice the other person's character details when playing FPS games. It's more to give a sense of identification with their character for women (something that statistically is more important to females than to males). Fat Princess did it very simply by including a female face, one female hair option (the pig tails) and a hairless face.
@Jimbo... I actually would probably already own SOCOM if they had female avatars like what they did in SOCOM:FTB for the PSP - I loved that game!
For everyone that didn't click the links in Parsley's comment, I'll update the blog.
While it would be difficult to insert women soldiers in say a WW2 multiplayer game (though there's hardly an excuse if it takes place in Russia since so many Russian soldiers and fighter aces were Women.) I find it hard to believe there would be this creative limitation in say a futuristic shooter with Space Marines.
In Tribes 2 when in Light or medium Armor you could visibly see the gender differences but in say Heavy "Juggernaut" armor you had no visual way to tell. Now you would think the developers would get lazy and just make all heavy armors male but instead you could still tell it was female because the character even when you can't visually tell they're female you can still hear it. A small detail like that goes a long damn way. Which is why I'm absolutely surprised when a game like Section 8 which is set in the year bajillion-bacon where you can barely tell the person is human under all that armor that they all gave them guttural male voices.
@WastelandTraveler
I agree with you on this though I'd say it would be the most difficult with TF2 from a technical standpoint. The biggest being audio since each class refer to one another would now need nearly triple the lines they have (not all of course). One for the female gender and additional lines for gender specific statements. EG- Spy referring to Heavy: "Oh fat man, please!" that would need to become 3 new statements. That may not seem too bad but there's something like several thousand lines of dialog which would now be over double that. Though there's still the chance that the Pyro is a woman...
I actually did guess correctly, but got here too late to prove it, shucks.
Anyhow, you know I'm all for female avatar choices in any game I play. I guess in FPS it doesn't matter so much in play style since I can't see myself anyway, but despite not being one of those "OMG I'm a gurrrl and I play games" types it gets annoying that everyone is just assumed to be a guy until proven otherwise.
Guys imagine if everytime you played someone was calling you chick or ma'am. It starts off amusing, but eventually you just can't roll your eyes any further back in your head. Then if you correct them they get all uppity or think you're doing it for attention. Just give me a female avatar so they at least have a hint that I don't want to be called 'dude' every 2 minutes.
Hey, I didn't mean to rain on your parade. Sorry. As I spend more time on Dtoid, I realise a lot of commenters don't read the other comments, never mind the blog posts themselves sometimes. (And I wouldn't have done it if Soldier B hadn't appeared on page one of my Google image search. ;P)
I haven't played Fat Princess, but judging by your description the character models have a LEGO minifig-style approach to gender differentiation. I can see it working for cartoony games like that, but I still think more realistic games demand a more realistic approach. I concede that compromises to the variety of both male and female avatars and the adoption of a one-size-fits-all androgynous base model wouldn't necessarily result in a backlash, but I still think it's something developers should have to do properly. I feel that you're campaigning to have the glass ceiling raised rather than break through it. That's not quite the right metaphor, but I hope you get my meaning.
In games where you get a choice of picking a gender or creating a character, I almost always make a female one because it's so uncommon to see female main characters in games (at least, ones with clothes on). I've always thought the choice should be there in virtually every game. I know some games are based around a specific character and that character's story, but there's so many games where it doesn't even matter....they could have easily made the gender go either way and maybe just record some extra dialogue or whatever. The whole "it costs too much" thing is such a sad excuse considering how so many developers blow their budgets on the dumbest things.
@Zodiac - I carry what might as well be a purse. My netbook case is the size and shape of most purses and I keep many non-computer things in there like fingernail clippers, scissors, and a toothbrush. But don't tell anyone.
As a girl of FPS I suppport this 100% it is not difficult whatsoever to inclue the females. We do not need Watermelon sized boobs just some feminine features will do. :D
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Warning: 47 year old female gamer.
I'm just here to play the game - No, I'm not gaming because my husband forced me to. No, I won't talk dirty to you (you can call the 1-900 number and pay for it like everyone else). No, I'm not fat or ugly. No I don't belong in the kitchen cooking... I'm a lousy cook. No I don't play Nintendogs and don't own a DS, Wii or that Paris Hilton cell phone game. No, I'm not going to make room for you on my buddy list cause you really, really, really want a grrl gamer on your list ( though a certified cheque might change my mind). No, I really am a girl. Just because I have a low voice and sometimes swear does not make me a guy.... and saying "prove it" it not smart unless you really, really want a discussion on menstrual cramps! :)
Destructoid is an independently-run publication forged by our love of video games and the gaming community's need of accountable enthusiast press living the dream since March 16, 2006
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Both soldiers are dinosaurs.
When do I get my prize?
a is a girl b is a guy
They're both girls.
Now this is something I support. There is no reason to ignore women in genres that are considered mostly for men like FPShooters and other war related games.
Have you ever tried Conflict Global Storm?
I'm going with C - both are action figures!
If that's wrong...A is a female, and B is a male.
Agree with VW -- they're both female. Also agreed on how easy it would be for female avatars to be included for most of these games. The development difficulty is just a red herring, they're simply not paying any attention to making the games more fun and accessible to folks outside of the traditional demographic.
Both are women.
And not only is the TF2 picture funny because it's the BLU team in opposition to the all-male RED team, but with the exception of the Spy, there aren't any drastic wardrobe changes.
B) is 100% female, something about the stance just gives it away for me.
A) I'm gonna say male because the forehead compared to the M9 helmet seems to be wide and tight with the helmet, where as on most female solders the M9 helmet appears to be rather large and out of proportion with their head, good ol production efficiency of one size fits all!
I think we're moving that way, at least. I tried playing the Pinnacle Station DLc for Mass Effect last night (bad idea), and it reminded me of something. I'm fairly certain that I would have hated that game if I were forced to play as the male. I'm not kidding about that at all: playing as a female Sheperd made the game far more enjoyable for me, as, for some reason, it felt like it added a lot to the experience, perhaps because of VA Jennifer Hale, and perhaps because it just felt different to be playing as a real female for once.
I really hope more games give us this option in the future, and that they actually do it right. I suppose simple modeling in multiplayer is as good a place to start as any.
Kauza, I agree. I just started the game up for the first time, and when given the choice, I went with the female option. Maybe it's the overload from the gritty, muscular dudes you're forced to play in other games...I just felt that I wanted a change.
Did the same thing with Saints Row 2. Thought it would be amusing/cool to play as a female thug. And oddly, as my wife pointed out, I modeled my character as her...without meaning to do so.
Wait; now that I think about it, I did the same with my Mass Effect character.
Huh.
@Zombie: Ha! I played with a female on Saints Row 2 as well! Totally forgot about that.
I say both female.
I can understand why they wouldnt put female characters in certain games like.. lets say Operation Flashpoint / Armed Assault or the previous Call of Duty games mainly because they were all shooting for some sort of military / historical accuracy.
But for games like TF2, or any multiplayer based game that doesn't shoot for a form of realism they should have the option for both genders, gamers play a game to be an avatar.. I still don't understand why developers cheap out the experience and make it one sided. I can understand it from a singleplayer perspective based on the games original story and character build, but for multiplayer it should be total open game.
Hell games like Quake 2,3(live), UT3, HL2DM, Rainbow Six Vegas etc they all had female avatars to choose from, and mass effect with its nice implementation of giving the choice through the singleplayer experience. Developers need to be more open in terms of a 'choice' of avatar in the multiplayer world especially.. thats where its all open, and really where players want to have an avatar that fits them and how they want to be seen by others.
My main Fallout 3 character is a female, but most people who see her don't notice because I have her wearing Winterized T-51b armor all the time (I chose a female to use the Black Widow perk on the guy who wants you to blow up Megaton). I think most western RPGs do a good job of including female characters that aren't overly sexualized or weak. Japanese games do the worst job at this, in my opinion. All you need to do is look at basically any fighting game or JRPG and see how all the female characters are physically caricatures.
On the subject of the pictures, I'm going to guess A is a guy and B is a chick. No reason.
On another note, Halo 3 doesn't even bother with changing models between male and female avatars. All you have to do is change the voice from male to female in multiplayer.
Doesn't matter, I'd stick it in both.
I was just wondering the other day why there weren't any female characters in TF2.
I'll go A is female and B is...yeah male. Final answer.
I really don't know why women aren't getting their dues in shooters. Yeah the majority are male but I have noticed quite a few women playing as well. And that's not to mention all the women who play without a mic and keep their gender hidden. Sooner or later it will change.
And the "boner in the battlefield" really made me laught for some reason.
Trick question, they're hermaphrodites.
yeah...I think a female team fortress character called Heavy would be a bad idea.
Also, both are male.
Soldiers that are on the front lines, under fire, shooting at enemies are men. This is why we don't see little girl faces in war games.
Interesting to see all the answers so far! (actually I'll post the update with the reveal sometime tomorrow).
@Jack... rally, it's so sad to see men that don't know history. When men are in short supply, women have often served on the front lines. There are fierce African women warriors in history, in WWII there were female snipers, tank drivers and infantry soldiers, and currently there are females serving in the Israeli, Canadian and other military services that do see front line action.
... and Juggernaut... yeah, I have to admit that when I had a female avatar in R6 Vegas, I'd sometimes shoot em in the junk just because it was kinda funny! :)
Well for TF2, that game is built on balance, and most likely, the TF2 community would call for some sort of Balance issues for the men and women.
Before everyone realizes that this game takes place in the Psudo-50's, where men get blown up and Women sit there and laugh at you and ridicule you when you lose, even those she did bat shit but ridicule you the whole way though.
FUCK YOU ANNOUNCER LADY. GET OFF MY BACK DAMNIT.
AND I NEED A DISPENSER HERE.
@Elsa
Not to take any credit away from the women that fight, I think they are strong brave soldiers but they are a minority. This is my opinion. I feel men should be the ones fighting in a war. War is nasty and horrible. Not a place for women and children. Men create the wars, men should fight them.
@Jack... fair enough regarding your feelings on the matter... just pointing out that historically women have served on the front lines (and continue to do so today). Yes, they were/are definitely a minority... but regardless of reality, we're talking games here.
I won't get into the other issues as I addressed them in the previous blog that I linked, but essentially by appealing to a broader gamer base, devs can increase profits. This blog is simply to say that I think most women would be pleased with a token ability to play as a female character and that the design needn't be overtly female and take up a lot of developer time or resources.
I dunno, they both look like road signs to me. Final Answer.
Seriously though, it's really hard to tell. I'm going to go with Soldier A being male, and soldier B being female.
That being said, soldier A kinda looks more like an action figure/doll/statuette than a real person. From that picture at least. I'm pretty sure that B is a female, but I can't really tell if A is also or not. I'm gonna say that A is a male, only because I kind of expect one to be for comparative sake. I wouldn't be surprised if that one was female also though.(but I would be surprised to find out that A isn't a figureine).
Also: *mentions MGO*
Awesome post. Now go buy SOCOM!!
I see what you did there. There's no way I was going to wait till Sunday!
For the record, I didn't guess correctly. Point taken. But don't you think there'd be a backlash if developers didn't do female characters properly, and just made them "male" bodies with female faces? If something's worth doing, it's worth doing properly, as they say.
Left - Guy
Right - Girl
LOL! Parsley, you're a dink!
... and glad the point was taken... yeah, only a few people got it right! (Wasteland Traveler, Arkhon and Palidi)
Good question too! Honestly, I don't think there would be a backlash. The heads of guys are pretty interchangeable and as I said, it's not too difficult to make a fairly androgynous body (as the MAG S.V.E.R. character shows). In many games the character models aren't that outstanding and frankly in online games you rarely notice the other person's character details when playing FPS games. It's more to give a sense of identification with their character for women (something that statistically is more important to females than to males). Fat Princess did it very simply by including a female face, one female hair option (the pig tails) and a hairless face.
@Jimbo... I actually would probably already own SOCOM if they had female avatars like what they did in SOCOM:FTB for the PSP - I loved that game!
For everyone that didn't click the links in Parsley's comment, I'll update the blog.
I'm going to guess both are female!
While it would be difficult to insert women soldiers in say a WW2 multiplayer game (though there's hardly an excuse if it takes place in Russia since so many Russian soldiers and fighter aces were Women.) I find it hard to believe there would be this creative limitation in say a futuristic shooter with Space Marines.
In Tribes 2 when in Light or medium Armor you could visibly see the gender differences but in say Heavy "Juggernaut" armor you had no visual way to tell. Now you would think the developers would get lazy and just make all heavy armors male but instead you could still tell it was female because the character even when you can't visually tell they're female you can still hear it. A small detail like that goes a long damn way. Which is why I'm absolutely surprised when a game like Section 8 which is set in the year bajillion-bacon where you can barely tell the person is human under all that armor that they all gave them guttural male voices.
@WastelandTraveler
I agree with you on this though I'd say it would be the most difficult with TF2 from a technical standpoint. The biggest being audio since each class refer to one another would now need nearly triple the lines they have (not all of course). One for the female gender and additional lines for gender specific statements. EG- Spy referring to Heavy: "Oh fat man, please!" that would need to become 3 new statements. That may not seem too bad but there's something like several thousand lines of dialog which would now be over double that. Though there's still the chance that the Pyro is a woman...
http://xs139.xs.to/xs139/09205/she_pyro105.png
http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/pyro_front.jpg
Also on Turbine you can find the women's restroom is labeled with the Pyro's silhouette.
I actually did guess correctly, but got here too late to prove it, shucks.
Anyhow, you know I'm all for female avatar choices in any game I play. I guess in FPS it doesn't matter so much in play style since I can't see myself anyway, but despite not being one of those "OMG I'm a gurrrl and I play games" types it gets annoying that everyone is just assumed to be a guy until proven otherwise.
Guys imagine if everytime you played someone was calling you chick or ma'am. It starts off amusing, but eventually you just can't roll your eyes any further back in your head. Then if you correct them they get all uppity or think you're doing it for attention. Just give me a female avatar so they at least have a hint that I don't want to be called 'dude' every 2 minutes.
@ Yehat, the Pyro does have a purse in her locker. Not that guys can't have purses... they just shouldn't, sorry guys.
Hey, I didn't mean to rain on your parade. Sorry. As I spend more time on Dtoid, I realise a lot of commenters don't read the other comments, never mind the blog posts themselves sometimes. (And I wouldn't have done it if Soldier B hadn't appeared on page one of my Google image search. ;P)
I haven't played Fat Princess, but judging by your description the character models have a LEGO minifig-style approach to gender differentiation. I can see it working for cartoony games like that, but I still think more realistic games demand a more realistic approach. I concede that compromises to the variety of both male and female avatars and the adoption of a one-size-fits-all androgynous base model wouldn't necessarily result in a backlash, but I still think it's something developers should have to do properly. I feel that you're campaigning to have the glass ceiling raised rather than break through it. That's not quite the right metaphor, but I hope you get my meaning.
In games where you get a choice of picking a gender or creating a character, I almost always make a female one because it's so uncommon to see female main characters in games (at least, ones with clothes on). I've always thought the choice should be there in virtually every game. I know some games are based around a specific character and that character's story, but there's so many games where it doesn't even matter....they could have easily made the gender go either way and maybe just record some extra dialogue or whatever. The whole "it costs too much" thing is such a sad excuse considering how so many developers blow their budgets on the dumbest things.
@Zodiac - I carry what might as well be a purse. My netbook case is the size and shape of most purses and I keep many non-computer things in there like fingernail clippers, scissors, and a toothbrush. But don't tell anyone.
As a girl of FPS I suppport this 100% it is not difficult whatsoever to inclue the females. We do not need Watermelon sized boobs just some feminine features will do. :D