In the early 80s, the arcade game Pac-Man was twice as popular as oxygen. People couldn't get enough of the haunted yellow disc with the runaway pill addiction and soon clamoured for a sequel. Namco, the Japanese creator, was working on a followup called Super Pac-Man, but this was taking too long for US distributor Midway's liking. So it bought an unofficial modification of the original game, changed the graphics a bit and released it as Ms. Pac-Man: possibly the first female lead character in a video game.

I say "possibly" because no one knows what gender the shooty-bang thing you controlled in Space Invaders was because it didn't have stubble or knockers to define itself by. But then nor did Ms Pac-Man, whose name was confusing: at the time the prefix "Ms" was a clear nod to feminist independence, whereas the surname "Pac-Man" – not "Pac-Woman" – screamed of subjugation to the patriarchy. This intense paradox often caused gender studies students who encountered the Ms. Pac-Man cabinet to suffer such cognitive dissonance they fell to the ground, fitting and flapping like panicking fish. Arcade owners had to shove sticks with rags tied round them into their mouths to stop them chewing their own tongues off and distracting people from their game of Q-Bert.

"Pac-Man was the first commercial video game to involve large numbers of women as players – it expanded our customer base and made Pac-Man a hit," claimed a Midway spokesman at the time. "Now we're producing this new game Ms. Pac-Man as our way of thanking all those lady arcaders who have played and enjoyed Pac-Man."

Thanks, men! But was the game itself a compliment? Pac-Man himself had no visible gender-specific features, presumably because his penis and testicles had been chafed away by years of sliding around on the floor of the maze – which explains why he was constantly necking painkillers. Yet Ms. Pac-Man had to wear lipstick, a beauty mark, and a great big girly bow on her head. Despite being a limbless yellow disc, we were expected to find her "sexy". Some men will screw anything.

As well as being superior to the original game, this "female-friendly" incarnation actually had a story. Between levels, a series of simple animations turned Ms Pac-Man into a rom-com. In "Act 1", her and Pac-Man meet. In "Act 2", they take turns chasing each other. Finally, in "Act 3", a stork flies across the screen and drops a baby Pac-Person in front of them. You can find this patronising or charming or both, but the startling thing is this: 30 years on, the depiction of Ms. Pac-Man in those basic cut scenes is actually more progressive than the depiction of the vast majority of female game characters today.

Last month the creators of the game Hitman drew widespread criticism for a grisly promotional trailer that showed the main (male) character slaughtering a group of S&M killer nuns. Since this was merely the logical conclusion of a deeply boring trend for rubberised female assassins that's been going on since the 1990s, some gamers were surprised by the outcry, and became indignant and defensive, as though someone had just walked in and caught them masturbating to the same goat porn they'd been innocently enjoying for decades, and judging them and making them feel bad.

When they're not 7ft-tall high-heeled dominatrix killers, women in games tend to be saucy background-dressing or yelping damsels in distress. A rare exception is Lara Croft, the female star of Tomb Raider, who – in Pac-Man terms – is Ms. Indiana Jones. But whoops. Last week the forthcoming big-budget Tomb Raider reboot made headlines after its executive producer apparently told the gaming site Kotaku that players would feel an urge to "protect" Lara after she faces a series of ghastly trials including an encounter in which she kills a would-be rapist. The subsequent outcry necessitated a speedy clarification from the developers about precisely what kind of game they're making.

The irony about the Tomb Raider fiasco is that when you actually look at what's been revealed of the new game thus far, the creators' intention is clearly to transform Lara Croft from a heavily armed big-titted wank-fantasy into a grittier and more plausible heroine. It's an "origin" story in which an inexperienced 21-year-old Lara crashlands on a remote island and has to fight the elements as well as the baddies in order to survive. Whether it's essentially I Spit on Your Grave in pixels remains to be seen, but the "new" Lara looks less stereotypical than 99% of female game characters.

But then, some people cling to those stereotypes as if their goolies depend on it. Last week, a female culture critic trying to raise funds on the Kickstarter website for a series of short films exploring the stereotypical treatment of women in games was subjected to a bewildering level of harassment from a peculiarly angry slice of the gaming community. As well as trying to have her Kickstarter account frozen or banned, they subjected her to a barrage of abuse that must have felt like running face-first into a muckspreader.

"Fucking hypocrite slut," quipped one gallant observer. "I hope you get cancer," chortled another. To be fair, it's probably not the notion that games misrepresent the sexes that enrages them. They probably shout this sort of abuse at anything female.

I say "shout". I mean "type". And not in person. Whenever there's an actual woman in the room, they stare intensely at their shoes, internally composing their next devastating online riposte to uppity vaginakind. "WHY MUST THEY TORMENT AND BEWITCH ME SO?", they think, in tearstained capitals. Just as rubberised assassins represent a tiny proportion of women, these idiotic pebbledicks represent a tiny proportion of men. The trouble for the games industry is that on some level it believes it has to pander to these monumental bellwastes. It doesn't, and it'll only gain widespread acceptance when it learns to ignore them. In 30 years, it's scarcely improved on Ms. Pac-Man. Time to push forward.

• The standfirst on this article was amended on 17 June. The original standfirst didn't reflect the article. This has been corrected