I’ve written a lot of articles talking about how unfair it is that the majority of video game characters are men, but despite the studies I cite and the examples I give, there are many who are still unconvinced. So perhaps it has to come from someone who isn’t me. How about a 12 year old girl?
This is the story of Maddie Messer, a 12 year old who likes dogs, science, and video games. She’s still young and hasn’t really gotten into the AAA releases yet, mostly keeping to mobile games like Temple Run .
But Maddie has a problem: the main character of Temple Run is a guy. At 12 years old, she would much rather be playing as a girl. “It’s not fair,” Maddie said. “Because if I’m being forced to play as a boy, like, why?” This is particularly interesting as 60 percent of Temple Run ’s users are female.
So Maddie, at her young age, decided to dig around and see if she could find other games that would let her play as a girl. She downloaded the 50 most popular infinite runner games and counted up how many offered female characters and how much extra they cost. 98% of the games offered male characters and only 46% percent offered female characters. Not only that, but 90% offered their male characters for free but only 15% offered their female characters for free. The average cost of playing as a female character was $7.53, while the average cost of the apps themselves was $0.26, meaning that the right to play as a female character cost about 29 times more than the apps themselves!
“I was hoping there would be more girls. But there just weren’t,” Maddie says. “And I was kind of bummed, like, come on!”
Maddie wrote about her experience in a report called “I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?”
She points out other strange ways that infinite runners handle male and female characters. Survival Run with Bear Grylls lets you play a Santa but not a woman. Angry Gran Run , which is all about an angry grandma, has a large number of male characters, more than female characters, even though the game is about a grandmother. Disney charges a ludicrous $29.97 to play as the only female character in its Temple Run Oz game.
Maddie summed up her feelings quite nicely by saying: “These biases affect young girls like me. The lack of girl characters implies that girls are not equal to boys and they don’t deserve characters that look like them. I am a girl; I prefer being a girl in these games. I do not want to pay to be a girl.”
She even goes on to say that, aside from the fact that unequally representing women and girls in games, and going so far as to charge for female characters, isn’t simply unethical, it’s also a horrible business practice. “If girls stop playing these games, then they also would stop making in-app purchases and stop watching the ads. If our character choices tell us these games aren’t for us, eventually we’ll put them down.”
The creators of Temple Run have taken notice, and in a report by NPR .
“It was embarrassing. It was embarrassing to read that,” says creator Natalia Luckyanova. “For all of our good intentions, and for all of my good intentions, it’s true that you start out with this male character. …The white male is always the default, and anything else, it’s like, you have to work for it.” They have since decided to make a free female character be available to play from the start. In addition, Disney will no longer be charging almost thirty dollars for its female character in Temple Run Oz , and another infinite runner developer will be making a new free female character named Maddie. Maddie is a fantastic example of how research, writing, and expressing one’s point of view on issues like this can bring real change to the world of gaming.
So there you have it, words straight from 12 year old’s mouth. I don’t particularly think she has been molded by any political agenda. I don’t think she is part of some SJW conspiracy. I think she just wants to see more characters like herself in games. Really, what’s wrong with that?