The issue is that videogames are (drumroll...) sexist. Yes, we are all surprised. I mean, I actually am - in spite of my already existing knowledge that, in this culture, women don't count, it seems like I'm always getting blindsided by just how much they don't count.
So Assassin's Creed II, right? My roommate plays through it, I watch most of the game. Good fun if you wanna climb all over parts of Renaissance Italy and stab people in the face/throat/groin/back in rather brutal ways. Pretty scenery. Fun gameplay. Characterization and plot are shit.
So, ignoring the present day framing story (which we don't care about and which doesn't really add anything to the game except for occasional incoherent ramblings about conspiracy theories - of course, the main antagonists of the game are the Templars - which build slowly up to a big reveal over the course of the game, which is - spoilers! - that aliens did it! which was obvious a third of the way through the game), let's examine the game's treatment of women. And yes, I know that women's role in society was rather constrained in Renaissance Italy, but the gamemakers' commitment to historical accuracy doesn't really extend beyond what can easily be shoehorned into their Assassins-versus-Templars conspiratorial rhetoric. It does not, for instance, prevent your in-game pal Leonardo da Vinci from making anachronistic and therefore at the time literally unthinkable speculations about the existence of gravity - fine, whatever, he's a super genius, still not how that works, but whatever - or from subscribing to the idea that people thought the Earth was flat pre-Columbus, which they really, really didn't.
But okay I'm getting off topic: yes, patriarchal society at that time in that place, but that does not excuse anything, as we shall see.
So aside from random female passers-by, the only women in this game who matter at all are:
1) your mother, who has no role in the story other than to introduce you to da Vinci, and then promptly gets all of the words beaten and possibly raped out of her and is therefore totally mute for the rest of the game, and also you have to protect her in an escort mission;
2) your sister, who has no role in the story other than to ask you to beat up a cheaty boyfriend and then is nothing but a glorified menu screen for the rest of the game, and also you have to protect her in an escort mission;
2b) other women who want you to beat up a cheaty husband, for money, because that is how you solve problems apparently;
3) two of the only three women who manage to get anywhere above woman-you-have-to-protect-and/or-fuck rung on the ladder of female characters, who actually teach you useful infiltration techniques and whatnot, and who both run brothels, because apparently the way to be both female and not-someone-to-rescue in this game is to literally be a prostitute;
4) an apparently competent and, naturally, sexually attractive thief who gets shot in the leg with an arrow the precise instant she attempts something dangerous, and whom you have to rescue and escort to safety, after which you have to physically carry her. Note that, when you are carrying her, there is no danger, you've already reached safety, and there is no point at all to this exercise, other than having you physically carry a sexually attractive woman who could have been not-a-sexist-object-lesson in another game. Also then the rest of your encounters with her are just flirty banter which is so painfully bad;
5) okay this one pisses me off. Sometimes in this game you'll come across some optional events where there's this thief who's all, hey, I'm fast, bet you can't beat my time on this parkour course I've mapped out for you, and then you're like, fuck you buddy I am a self-insert cardboard-cutout quote-unquote "badass" and therefore it is intolerable that anyone could be better at a thing than me, and then you run over some buildings and it's fun and you get some money at the end. Good times. So then you arrive at this particular race and instead of the usual thief guy it's a woman giving you a mission. This piqued my interest because, other than this, the only random-NPCs-who-give-you-missions who aren't men are women who have decided that you almost killing their husband is the best way to fix their marital problems. So, cool, a woman who can run around quickly and competently! Except, no, there's no indication that she's done this course (it's a horse race this time) - the time you're trying to beat is that of a guy who was trying to impress her. She's unimpressed and tells him that any random passer-by could beat his time, that random passer-by is you, she tells you to go race, and you say, "What's in it for me?" Which is, if I recall, a question you ask of no other mission-assigner, you just do the mission and then you get money. And her response? "Private riding lessons," nudge nudge, wink wink, and oh my GOD could you have picked a more painfully bad euphemism. So you do the race. And then she fucks you. Pushes you down into the hay and straddles you and the screen fades to black.
WHY.
Because, apparently, women exist in this game either to be protected or to be fucked by you the male douchebag protagonist.
6) yeah we're not done yet. Caterina Sforza. Go read that wikipedia article. Ask yourself, how could you conceivably have Caterina "Il Tigre" Sforza, Caterina "I'm going to ride through riots while seven months pregnant in order to occupy a fortress" Sforza, Caterina "Good for you you've taken my children hostage I can just fucking make more" Sforza, in your game, as a major character, and still not have any non-sexist portrayals of women. That's a damn good question, and they didn't completely spay her because that would have been pretty much impossible.
But they sure as hell tried. Your first encounter with her is brief and she is played entirely for sex. Your major encounter with her, much later in the game, is when her children are taken hostage and she lets fly with an (admittedly excellent) string of profanities culminating in the legendary and possibly ahistorical, "so what? Look right here, I've got the instrument to make more" exchange. Which is solid, until she turns away from the enemies and tearfully begs you to go rescue her children, which you do. Then you become unconscious because plot happens and she nurses you back to health and that's all we see of Caterina Sforza. Still, though, you can't completely dilute her, right? Some of it still comes through, right? Well, of course, which I guess is why the game decides to label her, in its educational historical database, as a "lunatic warrior woman", just in case you might be getting any crazy ideas that maybe there's more to gender relations than "men protect women". Also? All of the above is just DLC, meaning that if we count only the core game, we don't even have sammich!Sforza to populate our extremely short list of female characters.
So the moral is clear! If you are a woman, you're allowed to be a mother, or a sister, or a wife, or a fuckable, or a damsel-in-distress. You want to be a fighter? Well okay, if you want to be called a lunatic. You want to be a thief? Fuck you, here's an arrow through your leg to remind you of your place.
I mean, okay, there's a couple of female characters in the present day framing story, one of whom has no personality whatsoever beyond "hacker chick", and the other of whom actually punches people into unconsciousness!...and is only really characterized at all as "designated love interest for present-day main character in upcoming sequels". Well okay, so there's no depth of characterization whatsoever in this game, but "all our characters are flat!" isn't really much of a defense.
Oh also there's the woman very early in the game, whom you romance, using quick-time events. Forgot about her.
Yeah, so, that.
Was going to also talk about similar issues with Persona 4, but this is probably enough for the night. Short version: Persona 4 honestly tries to deal with issues of non-heterosexuality, and even non-cisgenderism, and is a fantastic game that I love a great deal - all of which makes its failures that much more frustrating.
On a positive note, however! Portal and Portal II are both really, really excellent games, and refreshingly Not Sexist. They're not trying to make any sort of feminist statement, it's just that all two characters in the first game, and half of the characters in the second game, are female (or at least female-ish AI), including, of course, the protagonist, and after the entire history of videogames worth of either exclusively or default male protagonists (except for Samus; if you bring up Lara Croft as a counter-example I will track you down and ram Susan B. Anthony silver dollars down your throat until you jangle sufficiently while I am throttling you), it is really, really nice to see an exclusively female protagonist.
Now if we could just get non-silent female protagonists, we'd be making progress (and ditto that thing with the silver dollars if you bring up Metroid: Other M).
Final note: I got my roommate to go through a quick scan of his 150- to 200-game library. There were six games that he could think of that had 1) clear protagonists who were 2) non-silent and 3) female. Half of those we dismissed as being way too fanservicey *cough* Bayonetta *cough*, which leaves us with a nice one-in-fifty ratio there. Even leaving out games that don't have clear talky protagonists, that don't look good.
Final note: I got my roommate to go through a quick scan of his 150- to 200-game library. There were six games that he could think of that had 1) clear protagonists who were 2) non-silent and 3) female. Half of those we dismissed as being way too fanservicey *cough* Bayonetta *cough*, which leaves us with a nice one-in-fifty ratio there. Even leaving out games that don't have clear talky protagonists, that don't look good.
