RM Games MC Gender Breakdown

[watermark]

In what sex do you prefer thread in this forum, @LightningLord2 suggested someone go tally up the gender breakdown for current RM games. So that's what I did. Well not for ALL games, but I think this sample is representative. What I did was go down the first 50 games in the Completed Games sub-forum and noted the gender of the main character.

Some Tag Explanations:
NEITHER: a non-human with no gender designation. e.g. the Robot in Robocoder.
CHOICE: select from two or team of characters of both genders. e.g. RTP - pick from team of heroes. The Vendor - pick boy/girl at start.
PLAYER: no avatar available or human avatar gender is not designated (equals player's). e.g. Fishing Sim where there is no specific character avatar.

Update: As a comparison, I also tallied up the winners from the 2014 & 2015 IGMC. I don't think the judges did this on purpose, but it's interesting to note there is a more even distribution.

Do realize this is NOT a strictly scientific study. The MC, or the main character, is purely educated guessed by me after I read your game description. Of course there might be mistakes. So correct me if I’m wrong. You can check the details here:

Spoiler: Breakdown Details

 

[Pierman Walter]

Fascinating. The gender distribution is more even than I thought. It might be more accurate to tally up everyone if a game has a large party. For example, in Chrono Trigger, Chrono is less of a driving force in the story than Marle, especially since he might die forever.

 

[Kes]

The breakdown doesn't surprise me, but I think @Pierman Walter has a valid point. In a significant number of games the 'lead figure' for want of a better term, isn't necessarily the strongest/most interesting/most crucial. It can be a lot more evenly spread. Having said that, given the range and gender of characters in most games, the split is unlikely to change dramatically.

 

[watermark]

@Pierman Walter
@Kes You guys are right. Several games on the list, for example Faith in Angels, actually seems like the story is driven by a whole party of characters including both men and women. So really these games should probably be placed in a "Group" category if both genders share the story equally. Of course to really know either the author would have to tell us or someone will have to play the game. So this is really only a cursory breakdown.

But in the case of Chrono Trigger, I do think the Chrono is the main protagonist because he's who the player identifies with. Same with FF7, Cloud is the protagonist even though there's a huge cast of characters because essentially the story revolves around Cloud.

 

[Kes]

Even as 'a cursory breakdown' it is still illuminating.

 

[Alexander Amnell]

@watermark I don't necessarily agree with that. Just using your example in FF7 if I identified with any of the main characters it was Barrett, not Cloud. The story only revolves around Cloud in as far as his ties to Jenova go, Barrett drives the story just as much when he groups the initial cast together to blow up power plants and ****, Tifa when she draws Cloud from the brink of insanity and Aeris is at the end of the day the one who saves everyone so if you had to pick a singular protagonist/antagonist for ff7 I'd have to posit Aeris/Sephiroth as the ones who actually drive the narrative forward the most.

Which makes me wonder what the point of all this is? As you've pointed out to really know how many protagonists exist you have to actually play the game, if you are just going by the first/most visible character than at best this is a breakdown of the genders of coverart characters...which I guess conveys about the same range of information. Still, I'd be curious to see a similar sampling of the professed genders of the developers who made these games, just to see if perhaps there is a correlation between what they see themselves as and the types of characters they choose to put front and center in their own works. Just perusing the first twenty unfortunately I see that 3/5 don't disclose that information, so a reliable sample size appears unattainable with so many unknowns. Though what I find interesting is among those that do 3/4 ) claim the opposing gender to their coverart characters, meaning that many of the female mcs in this list were written by men and vice versa, which honestly surprises me though again unfortunately there are to many unknowns there to actually sample as a side by side comparison.

Edit: Unfortunately the pattern didn't stick but I decided to check the other 30 anyway, because for some reason found it interesting. No fancy charts but comparing the genders of cover art characters to the gender of the lead developer has resulted in:

male: 21 (42%)
with male character 13
with female character 8
Female 3 (6%)
with male character 1
with female character 2
Not saying: 26 (52%)

It sort of shows the typical trend as more males wrote male characters (unfortunately female sample size is just tiny, I wish more people had specified) however the margin is actually a lot less (61% of males wrote male leads to 39% female) than I would have thought. Still...with 52% unknown this sample doesn't really help correlate much of anything except that men are more comfortable representing women than I'd at first thought here. On another note with such a scewed playing field where only 6% of the developers openly admit to being female the fact that only 24% of the games have female cover/mcs is a lot less...imbalanced than it at first appears.

 

[Ms Littlefish]

Yeah, without playing the games it's difficult to know who is actually the playable character or if multiple characters are playable. I also agree that many non-playable or characters entering the party later in the game have a profound impact on the game. I think it is definitely appreciated to see a diversity of roles in that #1 spot, though. But, a lot of games revolve around the group of people rather than having a singular "main" character so I'm usually happy to just see diversity in the party or world building. The so-called "main character" is often the first character. That's at least the way I've viewed a number of RPGs with a lot of important playable characters. Some games do have a strong leading role with supports, while others highlight the whole party as a force against the events.

 

[watermark]

@Alexander Amnell Cool of you to double check the authors too. I think we also need to note the difference between just using a female avatar and actually writing a female character. In action or platformers where characterization is minimal, anybody can put in either a male or female protagonist, because it's just graphics. The hard part comes when you write a RPG with lots of dialogue and deeper characters: It's just harder for a guy to write a girl and vice versa. Of course it can be done, just look at Harry Potter. But for most of us it's more difficult to write the other gender without resorting to cookie cutter fill ins. For a guy, you either have to have a good wife/girlfriend to consult (or maybe a really good female buddy) or you're quite in touch with your feminine side.

Since I'm a guy, if I did an RPG, it would be easier for me to write a male protagonist. And you can see our games so far have either a male or ensemble protag. Still, for our next major game (Valkyrie Blue), I am using a female protagonist for the first time. It'll be totally out of my comfort zone. Wonder how that'll turn out.

 

[Pierman Walter]

Although it would be easy for me to write a female protagonist, my latest protagonist is male, since I want players to experience some specifically male things, which are surprisingly rare, considering most RPGs have male protagonists. Even the new Final Fantasy, which is specifically about the group dynamics of dude friends, doesn't go into the weirder and more interesting aspects of being male, such as what inevitably happens when thirty guys guys have to sleep on the floor: passive-aggressive joking-pretend-murderous posturing over space while the people who don't care yell at them to shut up, giant wrestling matches that trample over everyone still lying on the floor, who pretend to be asleep out of jealousy-inducing spite, and a giant snoring dogpile after everyone stops caring. I also want to explore some more serious themes, such as how to talk to people when you are super huge and terrifying and everyone assumes you want to murder or kidnap them because of the way you look, and the player getting blisters from button-mashing in order to force yourself to enter a girly candy shop.

Although I understand the purpose of a blank slate protagonist, from a story standpoint, I believe that every aspect of a character should reflect their personality and have some effect on the game. If the protagonist says nothing and does nothing that requires a specific gender, such as getting married and giving birth to twins, then you might as well make two sprite sets for people to choose.

 

[JosephSeraph]

I tend to do female protagonists 90% of the time, and I think there's plenty of other devs who seemingly always fluctuate to female protagonists for some reason... But then again, I'm the kind of guy who will ALWAYS play the genki girl on any fighting game, play the three-girls-party on any final fantasy and absolutELY LOVE FINAL FANTASY X-2 so

 

[Fernyfer775]

My previous game had a male protagonist but a female antagonist. The leaders of the world were mostly female as well. I personally love to portrait females in my games as the strong and powerful type, not the typical "lady in despair" type you see in a lot of rpgs.

My current project, Eternal Twilight, has a 5 party members in total, with the main character being a female. The main character and one of the other female characters are the huge damage dealing powerhouses in the party, whereas the 2 male characters are the tank/healer support characters. I know I'm not original in this sense, but I wanted to flip the switch a little and do something a little different than what I'm used to seeing in so many rpgs that I've played. #Girlpower

 

[BloodletterQ]

Well for my primary project, the story revolves around a male character who in the first part does help a princess reclaim her country and I feel like she's more of the main character for that chapter rather than the leading protagonist whose using her for his own ends.