Saints Row The Third: Great Game, But Good Example of How Developers Still Fail Female Gamers

 

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world fashion

If you're unfamiliar with the Saints Row videogame franchise, you may have dismissed it as yet another game full of gangs and guns. That's exactly the first impression I had, but the demo of the game's powerful character customization tools (my Achilles heel) was enough to catch my eye and give the game a second look. Given the fantastic variety possible (and, unlike Grand Theft Auto, the ability to play as a female or even transgendered character) I wasn't surprised to hear even my fashionista friends gushing over it. For me, it's become the game to play when Skyrim gets a bit too stressful. It's a ridiculously fun exercise in complete, sandbox gaming chaos, and also a virtual fashion lover's delight. Hell, you even earn experience for shopping and changing your appearance-- how could I have anything bad to say about a game like that?

But as much as I love Saints Row:The Third and its customization tools, I can't help but notice that it's still failing female gamers like me in a painfully common way:

 

I like to think I'm pretty pro at styling avatars these days, but Saints Row threw more feature customization sliders at me than I could handle. Dozens of sliders for even the most seemingly minute details, and I usually prefer too many sliders than too few. I know you expect me to say "the boobs are all too big" now, or "the women are all too thin and perfect", but Saints Row gives you complete control over almost every aspect of your avatar. Yes, I chose to make that slim and sexy avatar (I'll turn in my feminist card first thing tomorrow morning.)

No, in this case my issue has nothing to do with the usual bimbo bodytype forced on female avatars in so many games, because the Saints Row developers know women love this game just as much as men do. They've definitely tried to keep itaccessible to those elusive "girl gamers".

And that's the problem:

It's clear enough that developers know women play and enjoy Saints Row, but this awareness means that they often fall prey to the same things that the rest of the gaming industry does when faced with a female audience: It sometimes feels like they've asked themselves explicitly "What do girls like?", and the answers they come up with are (more often than not) "Magical and/or sexy".

This became painfully obvious when I tried to tattoo my fabulous femme fatale character, and found that the majority of options were either stereotypically macho ink... or fairies and waterlilies, with very few designs in between.

Well, no big deal, those tattoos will be covered by clothes anyway, right? But that takes me to my next point:

When it comes to clothing, I still couldn't dress my retro bombshell gang boss exactly as I'd hoped. The question "What do girls wear?" has left a similarly cavernous divide in your character's potential wardrobe, between sexy things and everything else. (And where "everything else" usually means clothing modeled specifically for the male avatar that fits a female about as well as you'd expect.) I haven't been able to make any outfits I'm truly happy with yet because there is so little middle ground between Tomboy and Diva, and the same problem carries over to the character animations. When a choice is given, it's between actions that would be at home either at a frat house or a strip club, with no steps in between. With Saints Row, it was easier to style a vehicle to match my personality than it was to style my character.

It's frustrating to me because there is so much in this game that seems tailor-made for gamers like myself (things that the vast majority of games still don't value as much as they should) that I feel like I should be grateful. Even if I'm not wearing the OMG PERFECT OUTFIT YOU GUYS, it's still an incredibly fun and flexible game (watch the machinima montage above if you're in doubt.) That said, the shortcomings of Saints Row are issues that the gaming industry as a whole needs to deal with. You can't condense the tastes of all male gamers into three words or less, so what makes female gamers any different? 

Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

 

Comments

[shockwave yareach]

See if you can get a fox stole in there :)

[Nebulosus Severine]

Re: Fox stole - Nebulosus Severine likes this.

[Zaphod]

I've been reading a lot about how developers are "failing" female gamers, and … without meaning to offend, I'd like to offer a suggestion that's usually thrown around in open source projects when someone points out a problem:

"Why don't you go ahead and fix it?"

There are lots of female developers out there. My compsci class was almost half female (although this is in Soviet Canuckistan - maybe female coders are more prevalent up here). One would assume that female developers would know what female gamers want?

And if that's the case, then "Why don't they go ahead and fix it?" … sure, it costs a metric crapload of money to produce a game these days - but that's big-scale stuff. Why aren't there more indie games *by* female developers that target female gamers? If they're good (eg: lots of sales), they'll get picked up by a big publisher and get a bigger voice.

Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, I don't see it as the responsibility of male game developers to make games that appeal to both sexes - in the same way that I don't see it as the responsibility of an artist to draw something that everyone likes. Make the game that you want to make, with the characters that you want in it. If someone else doesn't like it, they're free to make their own.

The majority of tools to build games are now free. So if you're a techincally adept female gamer (or a male gamer for that matter) & you dislike what you see, then do something about it & create something interesting. If you aren't a coder, pick up a book and learn. Or form a group on meetup.com, or a sourceforge or github project, and *recruit* technically-capable people.

Make it happen.

[Adam]

This isn't exactly right for one main reason: it's just as hard in this game to make a male avatar look like you as it is with a female one. The thinnest body type is still (upsettingly) far more muscly than me and the heads too square-jawed no matter what you do.

Even if you try and make it look as normal as possible you'll end up with a small headed, thin bodied man with a neck the size of a giant redwood.

Oh... and the clothes are all either suits or 'gansta' hoodies. There's no middle ground. Long story short: it's nothing to do with gender.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I haven't played Saint's Row. But many games miss the "golden mean" of allowing you to be feminine without being blantant eye candy.

The gender of the designer is irrelevant. There are plenty of male designers out there who have an eye for that fairly extensive territory bbetween "stripper" and "one of the guys".

Conversely, being a female designer doesn't give you magical genetic insight into what your audience wants and needs. You still have to do your homework and understand your whole player base, not just the ones who share your sense of style and taste.

I think Iris is spot on.

[melponeme_k]

As of right now, I think Eve Online hit the gold with their avatar creation. It allows female gamers to create an avatar in any style they want from plain to gorgeous and all shades in between.

The rest of the popular games are stuck in sexist fantasy land. And developers of any sex must cater to the whole market because if they don't they cut their profitability by 50%. There are a lot of women gaming out there and spending their extra money on games. Its long past the time to ignore all of us.

SWTOR has a lot to offer female gamers and I'm happy about that. The one little misstep was due to cutting back costs on movement capture. They seemed to use generic movements on both female and male avatars. But the movements almost always wind up looking more masculine. Women generally don't step into personal space of others or wave their arms in another person's face. It looks awkward at times. But generally that is just a small problem in an otherwise good game.

[Someone]

OMG!!!

Can you please send me the information to create this face?

[email protected]