{"id":4951,"date":"2011-05-16T09:00:41","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T08:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=4951"},"modified":"2011-05-16T09:00:41","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T08:00:41","slug":"gamer-diary-rpg-advertising-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2011\/05\/16\/gamer-diary-rpg-advertising-women\/","title":{"rendered":"[Gamer Diary] RPG Advertising: Where Did All The Women Go?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s a guest post! Rai <\/strong>got in touch with us on Twitter<\/strong><\/a> to see if they could do anything about our lack of posts on gaming (apart from Markgraf’s brow-furrowing loving critiques<\/a> of Assassin’s Creed<\/strong><\/a>, natch). “Welcome aboard!” we said. Here’s the first of what’ll hopefully be a series of entries in BadRep’s Gamer Diary.<\/em><\/p>\n

March saw the eagerly anticipated release of Dragon Age II<\/strong>; the follow-up to Dragon Age: Origins<\/strong> and Awakening<\/strong> (along with all the extra DLC that became available during the interim period). Dragon Age<\/strong>, for those of you unfamiliar with the games, is a fantasy RPG in which you guide your character through quests and the main plotline, battling all manner of nasty creatures and unscrupulous types along the way. You gather a team made up of mages, warriors and rogues who may be human, elf or dwarf, and they help you defeat the forces of evil.<\/p>\n

One of the key features of games like this is that you can build your own character: you pick the gender, the hair style, the facial features, the class (e.g. a mage), and in some instances you can even pick the voice. I, for example, have a male warrior elf with ginger hair in Origins<\/strong> and in Dragon Age II <\/strong>my character Zakarianna Hawke is a female, white-haired rogue with a facial tattoo (you can see a visual of her below left). The possibilities aren\u2019t quite endless, but they\u2019re still fairly comprehensive.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/a>Other popular games that boast this feature include the Mass Effect<\/strong> series and the Fable<\/strong> series, both of which I thoroughly enjoy. I was, however, quite late to the Mass Effect<\/strong> party for one very key reason: I thought you had<\/strong> to be male. That is to say, the advertising and marketing for Mass Effect <\/strong>gave me no inkling that there was any other option than to be the character that features in the trailers and the stills.<\/p>\n

Normally this doesn\u2019t bother me (pretty much all the games I have ever played have a male protagonist) but I read an unfortunate article that suggested Commander Shepard \u2013 Mass Effect<\/strong>\u2019s protagonist \u2013 was a bit of a womaniser. So I wrote it off.<\/p>\n

I then, much later, got a little overexcited by all the sales after Christmas in which I saw Mass Effect 1<\/strong> and 2<\/strong> for a little over a tenner. I asked my brother what he thought of them and ended up buying the games \u2013 turns out, you can play as a female character! Plus all the womanising depends entirely on the decisions made in-game by the person directing the character (again, my take on Commander Shepard, Drakhoa Shepard, is just below left further down). <\/p>\n

This little surprise, combined with Dragon Age II<\/strong>\u2019s recent advertising prior to its release, made me wonder why games that allow you to play as male or female are only ever marketed using the preset male appearance. For illustration purposes I have collected a few trailers courtesy of YouTube:<\/p>\n