Corrections and clarifications appended. A follow-up story explores the feedback to this one.

If there was a single moment that best illustrated my frustration with male-dominated video-game journalism, it happened on December 23 while I listened to the Giant Bomb podcast discuss the best games of 2013.

While voting for “Biggest Surprise Game of 2013,” Brad Shoemaker and Jeff Gerstmann have the following exchange about 2013’s Tomb Raider — a reboot of the popular series featuring gaming icon Lara Croft:

Shoemaker: “I don’t know that I’m feeling Tomb Raider on this. Gerstmann: “[I]t’s just, what is this quick-time event bullshit? To me, out of the gate, this game seemed lame.”

The rest of the Giant Bomb staff offer up a few weak sentences of protest, but Gerstmann says with finality. “It probably doesn’t need to be here.” And the discussion moved on. (See a clarification at the end of this article.)

The original Lara Croft.

I found this exchange exasperating. I was surprised by Tomb Raider. Lara Croft started her gaming career in 1996 as a ridiculously large-breasted sex symbol, a trend that largely continued for the next eight sequels as Croft’s main character traits were a butt, breasts, and figure meticulously sculpted to appeal to the male gaze. However, the 2013 reboot, written largely by Rhianna Pratchett, changed everything.

I would point to 2013’s Lara Croft as one of the most empowered, well-written, kick-ass women in all of video-game history. 2013 Lara Croft is a teenage girl who grows into a leader and singlehandedly saves her team after their boat crashes on an island. She was still gorgeous, but so much more real and relatable.

2013 Lara Croft stands up to save her female friend Samantha when others are willing to let her die. 2013 Lara Croft’s voice trembles as she’s forced to kill to save her life. When 2013’s Lara Croft dies, the game pulls no punches because she’s a woman. You see her brutally stabbed, shot, and impaled.

Lara Croft in her 2013 incarnation.

2013 Tomb Raider isn’t just a very good game, it’s a historically important one. It’s a game that shows the vastly improved product possible when including women in the process of writing women. It’s a game that shows games are flat out better when female characters are people and not sex objects.

And I know from 28 years of watching the industry that no one will pay serious attention to 2013 Tomb Raider as a game-of-the-year (GOTY) contender, no matter the site or publication. In an industry where men fund the games, develop the games, publish the games, and—most importantly here—review the games, observations like these simply go unheard.

Giant Bomb’s cast

No video-game site represents boys-only gaming more than Giant Bomb. The popular site, started by former Gamespot staffers, largely eschews reviews, previews, and industry news. Instead, it is an unabashed celebration of the fun of gaming. The small, all-male crew of Giant Bomb plays what it wants, covers what it wants, frequently shoots unedited video of game playing sessions, and offers unabashed opinions straight from its editors.

Podcast logo.

The journalists of Giant Bomb are immensely likable industry veterans, who are worth listening to and who have well-informed opinions. Former Gamespot editorial director Gerstmann started Giant Bomb in protest against commercial advertisers attempting to influence the score of 2007’s Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, a stand that gave him immense credibility as a game journalist.

But their consciousness on why games like 2013 Tomb Raider are important remains extremely low, as you might expect from a crowd of men sitting around discussing the games they love.

As head of development at Giant Spacekat (GSK), it’s perfectly understandable why Giant Bomb has an all-male cast. I run what is, to my knowledge, the only full-time gamedev studio with all female employees. When I look to hire people, I look at people I know in the industry whose work I respect and with whom I click. More often than not, it is other women.

But the all-female staff of GSK is an extreme anomaly in the industry. Giant Bomb is, more or less, the norm. In the games press, you get a preponderance of a single opinion: white, male, and straight. There a few outliers here and there.

Giant Bomb is hardly the only industry site or publication to have an all-male crew. IGN’s consistently excellent Podcast Beyond suffers the same severe lack of diversity. Hosts Greg Miller, Brian Altano, Andrew Goldfarb, and Colin Moriarty are the current fixtures on the show. I love Podcast Beyond; some of my best friends are Podcast Beyond listeners who I’ve met and bonded with. Podcast Beyond offers some of the most interesting and entertaining video-game analysis in the industry.

But, as far as I recall and the archives show, it has never had a female host in its six years on the “air,” although women have frequently appeared as guests. That’s six years of conversation and video-game analysis—including six game-of-the-year discussions—without a consistent female voice. As much as I like their work, this is a serious deficit.

Xbox centrist Podcast Unlocked features journalists Ryan McCaffery, Marty Sliva, and Mitch Dyer with an increasingly frequent appearance by Naomi Kyle. (Kyle votes on GOTY at IGN, however.) The third main IGN podcast, Nintendo Voice Chat, has had one female host out of seven in the show’s history: Audrey Drake. Sadly, Drake left IGN in July. (See a correction at the end of this article.)

I’m not afraid of no Ghosts

The discussion of Call of Duty: Ghosts excellently illustrates what happens when women are not represented in the editorial process. COD is one of the most successful video-game franchises, and as such, is generally worthy of consideration in game-of-the-year discussions.

When it was revealed that the Ghosts release would finally allow players to pick a female character, this was an important change — not just because more and more women are active gamers, but because women are finally allowed to fight on the front lines in the American military and therefore qualify for higher ranks of leadership.

A team of four men at IGN gave their analysis of the new feature. “Is your squad going to be all female soldiers?” joked Miller.

“Duh!” exclaimed Damon Hatfield, host of the dating advice podcast Knocking Boots.

“I think a lot of guys are gonna be fooling people!” joked Bobby Amos. I suppose the joke is that fooling men into thinking you’re a woman is the main impetus for wanting to play as a female character.

A later Podcast Unlocked panel, “How Stabbing Women in Call of Duty Makes us Feel,” examined the issue with more insight, despite the sensationalist title. The four-person video conversation does feature a woman on the panel, former Adidas model and IGN on-camera personality Naomi Kyle. Kyle frequently appears in videos such as Cheap, Cool Crazy, where she displays a deep love of gamer culture, frequently acting in skits in which she cosplays.

“I think for me, stabbing women shouldn’t be jarring,” said Kyle. “It shouldn’t be a gendered issue in the first place. It shouldn’t be, is, ‘Is this a guy or a girl?’ We should all be equal.”

“It’s not about equality, it’s not about equal rights,” says Destin Legarie. He continues, “It’s about how stabbing women makes me feel.” This is a sentiment largely echoed by McCaffery and Sliva, even as they consider the matter with genuine interest and compassion.

Might it be that Kyle’s life had given her a perspective that the other members of Podcast Unlocked lacked? While every male editor on the panel had reservations about the inclusion of women in the violent series, Kyle was the lone voice strongly in favor of it. Unfortunately, even as the most prominent woman employed at IGN, Kyle is not an editor, and generally does not evaluate or write about games in her work.

Later in the segment, Sliva says, “I assume Anita Sarkeesian does a video about this at some point. I’d love to know what she thinks.” Sarkeesian, host of the controversial Feminist Frequency, examines video-game tropes and how they affect women. However, other video-game sites besides IGN do have people on staff willing to examine these gendered issues, such as Gamespot’s Carolyn Petit.

She dares to criticize

Petit endured what was undoubtedly the most horrific moment in 2013 for women in the video-game industry, enduring the largest barrage of attacks I’ve ever seen against a games journalist, for her review of Grand Theft Auto V.