I recently wrote on the merits, and lack thereof, of The Einstein Prophecy, an airport novel of the most predictable kind. Among my many criticisms of the book was that the character of Simone, first introduced as a brilliant Egyptian archaeologist, was all too quickly sidelined as primarily the love interest of the walking stereotype that is Lucas, the book’s protagonist. The Einstein Prophecy is, regrettably, not alone in failing to give page space to potentially compelling female characters, nor indeed is it alone in often relegating women to secondary roles. We have a rather chronic problem in our collective storytelling: female characters are too often presented in two dimensions, by single characteristics, or have their story arcs truncated as they are eclipsed by male characters. The lack of strong (which is to say well written and multifaceted) female characters in our storytelling is certainly not universal (we have discussed plenty of wonderful exceptions here), and it is certainly not confined to the written word.

We have a rather chronic problem in our collective storytelling: female characters are too often presented in two dimensions, by single characteristics, or have their story arcs truncated as they are eclipsed by male characters.

I say the problem is in our storytelling, because in cinema, on television, and in video games we find similar, if not far worse deficiencies in the writing of female characters. As ably argued by the critics at Feminist Frequency, video games are a medium that is regretfully still a bastion for many of the worst examples of the portrayals of women. This is unfortunate, not least because just as science fiction should be the most inclusive genre by virtue of its endless horizons of possibility, video games, a medium limited by only our imagination (and computing power), should not be constrained by the crass habits of the past. That said, there are positive examples of strong female characters in video games. Alyx Vance from Half Life 2 is an often cited example. They can be good examples for other writers no less than Marie-Laure in All the Light We Cannot See for example can be a far greater example of personal resilience than any heroic warrior.

For all the medium’s disappointing examples of the portrayal of women, there is one type of video game that continues to provide interesting and insightful examples of the portrayal of gender. Though many games put players into the shoes of a named specific character (the adventurous Lara Croft for example), others leave the selection of the game’s protagonist in the player’s hands. In such games the player might be given the ability to name the protagonist, to choose their skills, their personality, and sometimes their gender. The selection of a male or female protagonist might have a significant impact on the narrative, however, sometimes it may change nothing at all.

My first memory of such an experience was in my youth with Ultima VII, a role-playing game released in 1992. The decision of gender had very little impact in game, changing a few lines of dialogue and the pixel depiction of the hero, but the protagonist was an empty shell of a character (the player’s in game avatar was literally called ‘Avatar’ by other in-game characters). If the player chose a female protagonist the result wasn’t a good or strong female character, because there wasn’t a well written character to begin with. Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls and Fallout series of games are contemporary heirs to this tradition. They provide the player with a large degree of freedom to shape their protagonist, including gender, ethnicity, and physical appearance. This freedom is admirable for its inclusivity, yet as with the earlier Ultima VII the results seldom provide inspirational characters because the writing behind the characters is weak (especially in comparison with the worlds created or inherited for both series). All this reinforces the admittedly obvious point that weakly written characters remain weak regardless of what they look like.

these choices are made within the template of a highly competent and successful military officer.

Where Bethesda has built its reputation as a company that builds enticing worlds despite often weak characters (not always though, Fallout 4’s Nick Valentine comes to mind as a clear exception); Bioware has done the opposite. Bioware’s games, the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series being perhaps the most successful examples, are filled with intriguing characters occupying thin slithers of potentially interesting worlds. The Mass Effect trilogy follows Commander Shepard, the first human to be inducted into an elite galactic special forces unit, as Shepard confronts a threat to all life in the galaxy of the course of three games. There is much in Shepard’s personality that is up to the player, whether they will be kind or harsh, ruthless or compromising, loyal or fickle; but these choices are made within the template of a highly competent and successful military officer. Shepherd is a veteran of a brutal interstellar war; struggling with the knowledge that all humanity is being judged on her or his actions alone; and burdened with the knowledge of an impending galactic genocide, knowledge that, like Cassandra, no one will heed.

The two faces of Shephard as designed by Bioware

Shepard’s interactions with other characters plays out not as lines of dialogue on the screen, but in spoken conversations, guided by the player but fully voiced. That voice, Shepard’s voice, will be “male” or “female” depending on the player’s initial choice but the lines of dialogue won’t change. How Shepard interactions with the world, and how the world responds to Shepard, has no relation to what gender Shepard is (within the gender binary presented to the player at the outset), or how she or he looks. Save for the romantic sub-plots, where the sexuality of some potential partners is fixed, gender is almost irrelevant to Mass Effect.

Statistics collected by Bioware show that the vast majority of players chose to have Shepard be male, following the lead of Bioware itself which portrayed Shepard as male on the cover of the game’s boxes, and in most advertising. In my opinion, and the opinions of a surprisingly vocal corner of the internet, such players missed out because while the male Shepard was still a good character, he was also a familiar character. The male Shepard is a little bit of Captain Kirk, of Han Solo, of Malcolm Reynolds, and of Peter Quill. The female Shepard (regretfully frequently referred to as FemShep on the internet) is a novel character to find as a lead; she is Princess Leia as the protagonist of Star Wars, Gamora as the hero of Guardians of the Galaxy, and Zoe Washburne as the captain of Serenity. The voice actress, Jennifer Hale, deserves a lot of credit for bring Shepard to life as an interstellar action hero, but it’s more than that. In Mass Effect the universe doesn’t notice Shepard is a woman, and she behaves as if she expects nothing less. She is a woman in a male dominated world, but she, and the world, doesn’t seem to know, and certainly doesn’t care. Shepard fights like a hero, talks like a woman on a mission, and moves like the military officer she is.

she is Princess Leia as the protagonist of Star Wars, Gamora as the hero of Guardians of the Galaxy, and Zoe Washburne as the captain of Serenity.

Image by Mathew Grigsby

Shepard’s movements tell an important part of this story, because while Bioware deserves credit for allowing players to follow the protagonist they want, their broader portrayal of women is at times problematic. When Shepard walks the halls of her starship she does so with the confident stride of a captain, and when she talk to her crew members the camera remains firmly focused her face. Other female characters are not so lucky: one is given pink armour; some (Miranda Lawson in particular) are subjected to the ‘male gaze’; and even hardened battle veterans seem to walk as if they are on a catwalk. How could Bioware have designed such a strong female character as Shepard, and yet fallen down everywhere else? They didn’t. Mass Effect was not designed with a female protagonist in mind, Shepard’s dialogue was not written from a female character, and the graphic representation of Shepard that appears on our screens was made using motion capture footage of a male actor. As Eurogamer argued several years ago, the depiction of women throughout Mass Effect suggest that had Bioware set out to design a female Shepard, I would not today be praising her as a strong female character. Shepard is a strong female character not because Bioware designed her that way, but explicitly because they didn’t design her to be female at all; they made a character and then let the character’s gender be chosen. This act separated Shepard from public and market expectations of what a female character in a video game is, how a female character should behave, walk, and look. By removing the decision on Shepard’s gender from the designers, Shepard was freed from the unconscious bias that limits so many female characters to being female before they are people.

The lesson I draw from the many hours I spent guiding Shepard on her adventures saving the galaxy is that perhaps the trick of writing good female characters is simply that sometimes the writer needs to get out of the way. There is of course nothing wrong with setting out to write a strong female character, it is an admirable endeavour at which plenty of writers have been successful. Our storytelling needs more strong characters who happen to be women. But focusing on the gender of a character as you breath life into them can be a trap. Instead what the experience of games like Mass Effect suggests is that if you want to write strong female characters, write strong characters, then make them female.

- S