Strong Women in games

The Gamer Overthinker recently did a video about Metrod: Other M, which apparantly has been getting people all hot and bothered about Samus Arran. As someone who only knows this character from the Smash Bros series, most of it went over my head but it did get me thinking about some of the points he raised and had me returning to the age old question of... are there any really great female characters in games?

Yes. Of course there are. Just not as many as I'd like.

If you want strong female characters, you just have to go to the RPG's. Mass Effect 2 has Jack, Miranda, Liara, Tali and Shepherd herself if you chose to play as a girl.

Vampire Bloodlines has Teresse and Jenette and VV (although how much you consider her to be a strong female character depends on how you feel on the whole Sex As A Liberating Weapon thing).

The Witcher has Triss and Shani - who are both really great, strong, empathetic characters.

Dragon Age has too many to count.

The thing is, RPG's main strength is in charcter and story so it's not surprising that they should have many great female characters. When you look at other games, though, things are much less favourable.


Let's look at First Person Shooters. The game equivelant of a Hollywood Action film.

I've just had a quick look through my Steam Library and this is what I found:

Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena has an excelent female villain. The fact that she was played by Admiral Cain probably helped though.

There's Alyx Vance in the Half Life 2 saga.... I never really saw her as a character, though. She professes her love for Gordan in one of the games and it just comes across as silly. This is maninly because Gordon never says anything which was still one of Valve's stupider ideas when making Half Life 2. The thing is, she does do a fair amount of stuff - getting you through barriers etc. but I really struggle to say she has a *character*.

There's an old way of telling if a character is good or not: Describe three of a characters attributes without mentioning anything physical about the character. I struggle to do this with Alyx. Really badly.

I have the same problem with Zoey and Rochelle in Left 4 Dead 1 and 2. They're both better characters than Alyx but the time spent on characterisation is understandably low. They get as much as the men, though, which is at least even handed.

And finally, we have Unreal 2's Aida. Aida was one of gaming's great characters anyway. I feel a bit ashamed about this, actually, but I was mentally compiling a list of great female characters before writing this article and I completely forgot about Aida. Stupid me. Granted, the game is nine years old but Deus Ex is older than that and I've memorised almost every frame of that...

So, from my steam library of 106 games, I've managed to find 16 good, strong female characters. And that includes the RPG's in there.

That's pretty damn terrible.