Women are quite nice. Some of my best friends are women, or have at least met a woman before.

I generally appreciate how they are smarter and more attractive overall. I hear they can even be doctors and lawyers now. But not characters in video games.

Brink is a game that looks from all angles to be completely amazing. It's a first person shooter with fully-customisable characters, level progression, fast-paced action and an environmental message. It has a revolutionary system that allows the player to leap over or latch on to any object in the game world that you would be able to leap or latch in real life (so no more getting your elite mercenary stuck behind a coffee table).

Multiplayer, single player and co-op is persistent, meaning you can take your beloved character in and out of any mode you like at reasonable speed. Start getting excited... now.

Okay now stop. Browsing through the website of developer Splash Damage I noticed something peculiar. No girls. Pages and pages of potential characters and not a female of the species in sight. After a little hardcore journalism (internet) it seems that Splash Damage decided not to put women in because it would be too complicated and time consuming, what with the extra models, all the variations on those models, the problems of reduced hit zones, etc. Man, making games is, like, hard and stuff.

We should be thanking these guys. Because they chose to wipe out an entire gender, now the remaining men can have 400 different hairstyles. And it's not like women even PLAY games, let alone want to play as someone of the same sex. And guys wouldn't want to be a girl, because that wouldn't be nearly as manly as standing around with hundreds of other men, trying on different outfits.

Welcome to Brink, where you can be absolutely anything you want to be, unless you want to be a lady.

But it would be unfair to pick on Brink for this. Totally correct, but unfair. After a quick and nerdy count, I discovered I have around 130 games. Of these, roughly 12 have female leads, not including games where you make a character from scratch (the ones with a man on the cover) or RPGs (where girls are good at magic and horrible at fighting, because magic is the cooking of the fantasy world).

If a game has an ensemble cast, there will always be a weird imbalance. Borderlands has four characters but only one female. Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 also have four characters, and also only have one girl each. Gritty serial killer hunt Heavy Rain has another one-in-four ratio, with the added bonus of the woman being completely superfluous (except for the main character and at least one murderer to try and have sex with). The trick is to add a girl so your cast is diverse, but don't add too many or you might scare people off. Because only socially-backward man-children buy video games.

I feel offended on behalf of approximately 50% of the population, and embarrassed on behalf of the other 50%. For every no-nonsense bounty hunter, foot-gunned witch, mother wolf, mute test subject and plucky young journalist, there are a hundred men holding guns and flexing their necks.

Someone usually mumbles about Tomb Raider at this point. Surely there's something very wrong if Lara Croft is still a good example of anything?