It's a strange thing to say about a game that features a gigantic purple dildo as a weapon, showcases prostitution, and allows the player to amend female characters' bust-size, but I'll just go ahead and say it -- Saints Row: The Third actually deserves kudos for the way it portrays women.

Girl+power?

On the face of it, this game is a puerile, adolescent male fantasy, crammed with silly jokes and saucy imagery. So how can it be a positive for women gamers? Mostly, because it's entirely blind to gender-roles, a rarity in the game world.First, you can play as a male or female and create your own character from a mind-boggling array of customisation options. It's amazing how often games won't let female players experience a game within their own gender. All outfits, makeup, and hair styles are available to both genders, so there's nothing stopping you from, say, being a girl with a beard or a fella with pigtails, lip gloss, and high heels. You can wear a sexy dress. You can wear a power suit. You can be androgynous. No one in Steelport is going to take the slightest bit of notice. While it's true that one of the many options is a 'sex appeal meter' which increases or decreases the size of your curves, it works for men, too, increasing or decreasing the size of their package. This game is, at least, consistent in how it treats the sexes.

Emma Boyes



Has touched on the issues of gender equality in other games, like her recent piece on sexism in LA Noire.

In this world, there are lots of strong female characters. In fact, the world of Saint's Row is, sadly, probably more fiercely equal than the world of real life. You, the boss of the Third Street Saints, can be a woman. There's your homie Shaundie, a tough gangster girl who can easily pull her weight alongside your male team members. She's a little highly strung and constantly seems to be pissed off, but she's certainly no silly little girl. (The closest the game has to a bimbo is Josh Birk – the narcissistic actor who plays vampire hunter turned vampire in the Nyte Blayde TV show). There are the DeWynter twins, who run prostitution and human trafficking in the city, showing that women can be just as ruthless and evil as men. There's Kinzie Kensington, a former FBI agent and serious computer geek, who takes care of all your hacking and nerd needs. Kinzie lives in an area of town known as Salander, a nod to the hacker heroine of Stieg Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It would have been easy enough to have one or two token women, but instead the developers of Saints Row The Third

Loading

Damsels+in+distress+they+aint.

Sure, Saints Row The Third is no pious angel of video games. There are many things that will likely offend many people, not least of which is 'the penetrator' – a cross between a giant baseball bat and a purple dildo. But the silliness isn't just sex related. One of your missions involves having to drive without taking your foot off the accelerator because there's an angry tiger in your backseat. At one point, you are turned into a toilet. You kind of feel like you're playing Naked Gun. It's hard to take anything seriously. There's nothing ever really titillating or sexist about the game – it's just that everything is very, very dumb.It's true that women are also sex workers and sexual objects – in some of your cribs, you'll see scantily clad dancers lap dancing for men. But men don't have it any better – in the red light district you can also see clubs where men work and in one mission you descend into a BDSM club with rooms filled with he-whores in gimp suits to rescue a man who has been forced to work there. It's a bit off the wall, but rescuing a pimp from a life as a human pony beats rescuing another kidnapped princess from the castle.But the best thing about the way women are depicted in Saints Row is the fact that it never seems to occur to anyone to treat them any differently. Women and men both spawn as endless cannon fodder, and no one stops and says that they can't shoot a woman, it just wouldn't be right. When the Saints clash against a female senator who is strongly against gang culture, and doesn't seem to grasp that the guys she's supporting are just as bad, no one blames her poor judgement on her gender. No one is surprised to see that a senior member of a military group is a woman or challenges her authority.I was surprised to be so impressed by the depiction of women in this game when I was sure from playing other sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto IV and LA Noire that the exact opposite would be the case. It seems an extremely unlikely advocate for girl power, but girl power it is.The first Saints Row game went head to head with Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, and we all know who came out on top of that fight. For the third game, the producers decided on a complete reboot -- making everything ridiculously over the top, focusing on fun, and likely looking at how they could appeal to a wider audience. Even casual gamers should have no problem completing the game – not only is there a difficulty meter, but you can spend cash that is paid periodically into your bank account on abilities to help you along.It could have gone even further and done even more to appeal to a female audience – perhaps letting you customise your crib, having a music playlist that boasts more than a handful of songs by female artists, perhaps a romantic interest or two and side missions where you can get to know the members of your entourage a little better. There are a couple of slip-ups, too. For example, in a wrestling cut scene, my female character is constantly referred to by the commentator as a 'he'. But, hey, nothing's perfect.Whether the whole gangster genre where you play as a crime lord wrestling to take control of a city, fighting other gangs, stealing cars, and spend a lot of time shooting people is something that women would find appealing is another argument entirely. Saints Row The Third is a step in the right direction and Volition deserves to be applauded.