Where Are All the Female Characters In Video Games?

I’m a self-proclaimed female video game geek.  I’ve played just about every type of video game at one time or another and have witnessed the evolution of games, the devices we play them on, and the entire industry as a whole.  With this evolution, I have seen a massive rise in the numbers of female gamers. So, why are video games still being made without any playable female characters?

The most recent example of this is Crackdown 2.  My boyfriend and I played the first Crackdown together for hours, it had great graphics, physics, and missions.  But I was really annoyed that there were no female characters for me to play.  Admittedly, the male skins with their tattoos and piercings were pretty awesome, but why couldn’t I have a chick that looked just as cool?  What’s so hard about creating 2, or even 3, different female avatars?  I thought this would’ve been solved in Crackdown 2.  Nope, all we get are excuses. 

“In Crackdown, the amount of memory that it was going to take for it to do all the actual animation, the texture sets and the models for the females — we would’ve needed to massively reduce other sections of the game,” explained Ruffian Games’ creative director Billy Thomson. “So rather than do two separate models, we cut it back and gave the player as much customization as we could on the male character and that allowed us to use that extra memory to do other things in the game.”

If the issue is memory, then how do games like Borderlands and Gears of War 3 manage to fit at least one female character into the game?  I played hours of Borderlands using a female character in co-op and didn’t feel the game “suffered” in content or graphics because of it.  Poor excuse if you ask me.  Unless, of course, they were rendering these female skins with the never ending “boob jiggle” you see in a lot of games and anime movies.  You know, the boobs that literally NEVER stop moving, even when the character is sitting completely still!  Breasts that look like balloons that would be unrealistic for ANY female to have, we have all seen those.  If I had something like that in real life, I think it would be hard to do anything, especially fighting, shooting, or running.  Those, thankfully, are being phased out for a more realistic look.

Now, this doesn’t mean I expect to have a female character or avatar in every single video game.  I can understand why some games like Call of Duty do not include females.  Some games try to be historically accurate, and women were not allowed to do certain things, like participate in active battle, during certain periods in history.  I just finished playing Alan Wake and he was a great character to play.  And I think the developers are going to mix it up and allow me to play a female, his wife, in the sequel.  I would like to also give a thumbs up to some companies who create video games that involve a female lead character, like Wet.  Rubi Malone had attitude, skill, and was hot.  Hot and deadly.  It’s also nice to see them dress female avatars appropriately like Rubi was.  If you was going out to murder tons of people, jump from car to car on the freeway, and flip on bars and walls, would you dress in a halter top, skirt, and high heels? Thank god Rubi wasn’t either.

So, what do you think?  Should we expect to find more female characters, skins, and avatars in video games?  Especially for games like Crackdown, Gears of War, or other co-op/multiplayer games?