Xbox wants more female protagonists in its games
We’re always in need of more female protagonists in video games, but Xbox wants to take it a step further. In an interview with the IGN Unlocked podcast the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, spoke about how female protagonists – particularly Perfect Dark and its heroine Joanna Dark – offers “a lot of modern opportunities.”
Originally reported on by GamingBible, the comments from Spencer does imply that Xbox wants to increase the female presence in its portfolio. Coming from beginnings like Halo and DOOM – games where masculinity is hard to miss and the female presence either sexualised or demonized – it’s obvious that Xbox wants to switch up how they present their games to a modern audience.
Considering their acquisition of Bethesda – which boasts fabulous female game protagonists like Emily Kaldwin from the Dishonored series, Morgan Yu from Prey and Jess and Soph Blazkowicz from Wolfenstein: Youngblood – we have a feeling that Xbox is heading in the right direction. Especially since you’ve got Redfall’s Layla and Remi on the way, too.
If there’s one thing we hope that developers and publishers alike will take on board too, is that female heroes don’t need to be cis, white or heterosexual either. While it’s great that we’ll have the possibility of more ladies leading the charge in our video games, it’d be even better if they didn’t fit the heteronormative, white standard of Lara Croft from Tomb Raider or Samus from Metroid. Hell, you don’t need me to explain this to you. Ash Parrish from Kotaku says it far more succinctly than us.
Truthfully we hope that Xbox does steer into having more and more female protagonists representing something to each woman that pick up the game to play. There’s always room for more ladies, after all. We just hope they won’t be the same cookie-cutter figure we’ve come to expect with white, male protagonists.
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