Gaming’s uneven progress toward diverse female figures

As the audience for video games has become increasingly diverse over the past two decades, developers have worked intentionally to better represent a spectrum of women who don’t conform to 20th-century sexual stereotypes. Yet not everyone is on board.

The intergalactic bounty hunter in the sci-fi video game Metroid was outfitted with a sleek helmet, red and orange armor and a deadly arm cannon. But it’s what was underneath that was emblematic of the late 1980s.

If a player defeated the game in less than an hour, the character Samus Aran would flash until that armored suit was suddenly gone, replaced by a blond woman in a pink bikini.

The industry’s hypersexualization of women continued through the 1990s with characters such as Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider archaeologist with short shorts, prominent breasts and an often bare midriff, and Morrigan Aensland, the batlike succubus of the Darkstalkers series.

As the audience for video games has become increasingly diverse over the past two decades, developers have worked intentionally to better represent a spectrum of women who don’t conform to 20th-century sexual stereotypes, either in what they do — some characters are resistance fighters and photojournalists — or how they look.

Yet not everyone is on board.

Online influencers such as Jeremy Hambly, whose YouTube channel has nearly 1.8 million subscribers, have attracted audiences with reactionary videos about social issues. He is known for divisive commentary on video game culture, posting daily videos with titles such as “Woke Video Game MASSIVELY FLOPS” and “Internet Fixes Ugly Female Video Game Character & Leftists Explode With Rage!”

One usermade list on the Steam storefront criticizes games for what it calls “overtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging” and having “multiple female heroes who are front-line combatants.” It’s called Woke Content Detector.

Platforms like Twitch and the social site X can similarly act as echo chambers where disaffected players make derogatory remarks about modern female characters, arguing that video games are defeminizing women. They yearn for an era when curvaceous bodies and minimal clothing were common.

In 2022, some people were irritated by the natural hairs on the cheeks of Aloy, a character from the Horizon games that take place in a 31st-century postapocalyptic United States. After the next Fable game was announced last year, complaints swiftly rolled in that its female hero was an example of the “uglification” of women and that the game looked like a “woke disaster.”

During this summer’s annual cycle of video game announcements, Twitch and YouTube chats were filled with disparaging messages at the sight of a Black woman onscreen or a female soldier toting heavy artillery.

The online fervor has led to the harassment of developers and others who work to undo negative female representation, including a small narrative consultancy company that helps with sensitivity readings and other projects. It is a vestige of Gamergate, an online harassment campaign that started in 2014 and targeted women across the industry.

Those same critics try to elevate games that they believe actively reject leftist values, coalescing this year around Stellar Blade, which stars a scantily clad female hero.

At first they cheered the game, whose main character, Eve, was designed with accentuated breasts and legs and could wear an array of revealing costumes. When developers, in what they called an internal creative decision, added a small piece of lace that modified the low-cut bodice of one of Eve’s outfits, those same players were driven into a frenzy, leading to a petition against what they labeled censorship.

Soraya Murray, an associate professor of film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that arguments about how video games depicted female characters were not new but have been amplified by social media.

“Those with vitriol against how games have been forced to reconcile with the more sophisticated expectations of players have a platform for grievances and angst that games aren’t exclusively about them anymore,” she said in an email.

Attempts to undermine the move toward more considerate diversity in game development derive from the same argument that comes up whenever an LGBTQ+ character or a Black protagonist appears in games where “historical accuracy” is considered sacrosanct.

There were flurries of racist comments online when Black characters were cast in The Rings of Power — Amazon Prime’s Lord of the Rings series — and when Ubisoft revealed that one of the main characters in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which is set in Japan, is an African samurai. Star Wars: The Last Jedi received similar complaints about its diverse cast.

Despite the backlash to this broader representation of society, the industry has made considerable headway.

In the early 2000s, Alyx Vance, a resistance fighter in Half-Life 2, was part of the pivot away from overly sexualized portrayals. Jade from Beyond Good & Evil was a journalist and heroine whose story was naturally grounded in the world of that game. A decade later, the episodic adventure Life Is Strange featured a number of queer characters. Zarya, of the hero shooter Overwatch 2, is a Russian bodybuilder and beefy tank character.

“At its best, the industry has offered compelling and well-written female characters” that “feel more real and reflect the world around us,” Murray said, pointing to Aveline de Grandpré in Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation and Ellie, the teenage protagonist from The Last of Us.

Four years after Metroid was published, introducing the character model now known as Zero Suit Samus, Capcom released the arcade version of Street Fighter II.

When the arcade machines in coin-operated laundromats and sports bars were left unplayed, they would switch into a demo mode that allowed onlookers to view a sampling of the game’s mechanics and roster of fighters.

One of the demos showcased Guile, an Air Force pilot with a wicked blond high-top and chiseled biceps, and Chun-Li, an expert martial artist who began working for Interpol after her father was murdered. In the courtyard of the Ayutthaya ruins in Thailand, Chun-Li’s lightning leg kick put an absolute hurt on the military man.

Because Chun-Li was the first woman included in the Street Fighter franchise, decisions about her physical portrayal were important. She was depicted with thick thighs that were viewed by many as a sign of prowess, but also sexualized through fan art.

Yoshiki Okamoto, who led Capcom Japan’s arcade development at the time, told Polygon in 2014 that he had “wanted to make the power gauge for Chun-Li shorter than for the other characters because women are not as strong.” He was talked out of the idea.

Murray said the video game industry was fertile ground for academics to study the nuance of female representation in the digital space. “It hasn’t been a neat arrow of progress moving from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ representations across time,” she said.

When Lara Croft made her debut in 1996, Murray said, she was an unflappable and capable adventurer with the unrealistic proportions of a Barbie doll.

Her character model would undergo slight changes with each new game, but she was transformed completely for 2013’s Tomb Raider. The franchise reboot focused on deeper storytelling, introduced a more inexperienced explorer and swapped her shorts for jeans.