Late last week, Jonathan Cooper revealed on Twitter that, in the earliest animation tests for Mass Effect, the character of Commander Shepard was a woman, and the online equivalent of confetti was thrown by fans who played, and loved, Mass Effect through a female-centric lens. FemShep, after all, is the only Shep, right?
Except that’s not the case, not really. Not now, and not ever… and maybe I’m alone in this, but both the reveal and Cooper’s follow-up that “Shepard was always planned to be both male & female” was not exhilarating, but rather depressing instead. Oh, we could have had a major franchise anchored by a female character with an amazing voice actress, the kind of franchise that could (and did!) spawn major merchandising and had mass cultural impact, but instead we were fed the dominant image of MaleShep?
Oh.
And now, in 2015, I can’t help but wonder: where might we be if Shepard had just been a woman?
Listen, I don’t mean to decry choice in character creation. I love choice in character creation and not only do I wish more games had it, but I wish there were even more options. I love being able to make a character my own, because it also helps me feel like I’m really shaping a world, and while I don’t know how others play, I adopt different play styles based on how I design my characters. This approach can make one game feel like several games, and really opens up the virtual world (and makes me feel like I got my money’s worth!).
But let’s be real: there are a lot more male protagonists than female, just as more protagonists are white or of indeterminate white-leaning racial makeup, and we’re all familiar with the reasons so often cited for these choices: more gamers are male, young white hetero cis-male gamers only want to play as white hetero cis-male dudes, everyone else is fringe, and to hell with them, basically. When we fire back that games with anchoring female characters are often poorly designed, poorly marketed, or both, the answer is almost always Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider was successful, and since Lara Croft exists and we have our one true video game heroine, that should be enough, right? She proves games with female heroines can succeed!
Except the more more realistic Lara Croft in the 2013 re-imagining pales in terms of sales compared to her monstrously proportioned earlier counterpart, and the 2013 version had its own problematic design choices for female gamers to grapple with besides. Let me say it plain: Lara Croft was never designed for female gamers. Not originally, at least. She is not us. She might be closer to us now, but that’s an issue to tackle another day.
I’ve been gaming most of my life, and I’ve spent most of that time playing as a man, seeing women put into dangerous situations for plot points and drama. I’m sick of being shoehorned into that role, and because of it, I’m playing less and less; a game has to be really good to lure me down that path. I want more. At this point, being offered a choice just feels like a band-aid meant to make loudmouths like me shut up, because hey, it’s something, right? You can be a woman, y’know, sometimes. So this reveal is far from monumental to me, except maybe to show how monumentally unwanted we are. Mostly it just cements what I’ve been told all my life: when it comes to games, women are either tools or they’re tolerated, but regardless, they’re relegated to the fringes.
FemShep was always a sideline. Reversible boxart for Mass Effect 3? Great – let’s put FemShep on the inside. Mass Effect website? BroShep. Let me show you; just yesterday, I visited the Mass Effect website and did an image search for “mass effect shepard.”
That’s not a choice. That’s not equal presentation. It never has been, and as best as I can tell, was never meant to be, because the industry is geared, in every way, toward male players of a very particular type. I have this feeling we’re supposed to be grateful for the steps that are being taken. We’re seeing more people of color featured in games. Occasionally we get lesbians and gay men who are not stereotypes, but have actual human characteristics. We might even see someone without apparent gender markers. BioWare, in fact, has made a lot of these moves, and yes, I think it’s great. But it’s not enough, just as this reveal doesn’t make me happy, as it seems to have made a lot of people. Thanks for this bone, but I’m gonna throw it back. It’s nice to know that someone, at least, envisioned Commander Shepard as a woman, but it changes nothing, and it means nothing; the industry, and the folks directing it, are making the same choices now as ten years ago (and hell, sometimes, lately, they’re even worse).
(h/t Polygon, thanks to Adam P.)
