Persona 3 Portable though is an amazingly well thought out gender change though. Playing through as the female main character alters how many of the characters interact with you and give you a unique and interesting perspective of them. And the change in how they act is within their characters and our expectations of how a teenage girl would be treated in that situation without putting down women.

However, if more games put in the time to make either gender neutral experiences, or alter the experience based on the game world’s cultural expectation of those genders, full steam a head!

I think gaming as a medium is powerful because of the VARIETY of means by which it can have a dialogue with the player. I don’t think having characters rather than avatars is a wrongheaded choice, any more than I believe the opposite to be true.

I think games would be poorer without John Marston, in the same way that they’d be poorer without Commander Shepard… in the same way that they’d be poorer without the Vault Dweller, or World of Warcraft avatars. Or Pac-Man.

It would be wonderful for games to suddenly feature a diverse selection of protagonists, but this is not our near future. I suggest that allowing players the choice of gender as the norm might be a way to create diversity in who is represented as a protagonist, who as gamers we empathize with in our gaming.

Further, a protagonist who is potentially represented by either a man or a woman interrogates our assumptions about gender, the idea itself that you can act like a man or act like a woman.

Do we really need to say, oh, a woman wouldn’t act this way in this situation, but a man would? Can’t we imagine a character who might behave a certain way, man or a woman? It seems to me that a character who acts in the exact same way regardless of its gender challenges the notion of gendered behaviour.

Of course I do not believe that men and women are exactly the same and can be palette swapped in all instances. Indeed the choice of gender in a game could range from unremarkable, to transgressive, to potentially even offensive. But that complexity seems more interesting to me than always playing a white dude.

Compare a character like John Marston to a character in Dark Souls. In Dark Souls, you can fully customize your character and internalize their decisions, but they aren’t a character. They’re a construct, an assembled avatar for your game-playing experience. In contrast, John Marston has his own values and his own decisions, because he’s essentially a character from a book or a movie, not a character made for a game.

Swapping genders, or really allowing ANY sort of choice, detracts from that model. It stops being “the developer’s character” and starts being “your character”, and while that’s great in some senses, it’s not desirable if you’re trying to “write a character”. Yes, you could write an alternate character that’s female whose actions closely mirror their male counterpart, but in some cases if you go too far it just feels like “a woman who’s acting like a man because acting like a man is considered the norm”. This is something I, myself, grappled with, because “make people act sensible” is a pretty logical conclusion but in some cases it seems like it could just be another kind of racism/sexism (“make everyone act like white men”).

I’m not saying more choice is bad, I’m just explaining the thinking behind why it doesn’t happen.

Could you have a Jane Marston? A Colette Phelps? A Nikita Bellic? That would take some major overhauling of the respective games, I think. The narrative would have to be altered or it would feel inauthentic. (Rockstar really needs a female protagonist, is what I’m saying. They’re overdue.)

I would like the opportunity, more often, to play as multiple protagonists within the narrative. I’m thinking Seiken Densetsu 3, or perhaps one of the SaGa games (you know… if they were tolerable). Or, hey! Star Ocean 2 let you play as a guy or a girl right from the start, and each character had a handful of unique story elements… How forward-thinking! More of that, please.

Assuming the hero is alway a fully abled, white, heterosexual privilege. Those who don’t understand or realize that other people should and need to be represented are usually the bearers of that privilege.