Posted in: Games | Tagged: female protagonists, gaming

Gendercrunching: Gaming Has Fewer Female Protagonists Than 5 Years Ago

Published Thu, 20 Aug 2020 06:40:29 -0500

Verve Search Ltd has researched more than2,500 video game releases over the last five years (2016-2020) to find out how representation in terms of female protagonists has changed over time. It is not the direction one may expect. The research for Buzz Bingo shows that less than 1 in 10 games released in 2020 features a female protagonist, but this is down on 2016.

Specifically, only 9.2% of all game releases in 2020 feature a female protagonist – the lowest proportion in five years. In comparison, game protagonists in our analysis were three times more likely to be male. In no year did more than 11.4% of games feature one, while 30.6% of all games released since 2016 featured a male protagonist. The Xbox platform featured the lowest since 2016, with 7.1% featuring a female protagonist. IOS is the platform with the highest representation, half the male number at 12.7% vs 25.9%.

While sports games have the lowest proportion of out of all genres, 1.2%, while mostly focusing on male sporting games. The adventure genre has the highest proportion of female protagonists, at 22%. But all games genres, except for simulation games, have more male protagonist-led releases than female.

There has, however, been a steady increase in the proportion of games where the player has multiple gender options – rising from 32.6 to 47.6%. Here are the stats:

Year	% Female Protagonist	% Male Protagonist	% Multiple Options	% Ambiguous	% NA
2016	10.9%	29.5%	32.6%	7.2%	19.8%
2017	15.1%	27.1%	38.3%	6.5%	13%
2018	10%	32%	36.5%	3.3%	18.2%
2019	10.2%	36.3%	39.5%	7.9%	6.1%
2020	9.2%	26.5%	47.6%	8.1%	8.6%

Platform	% Female Protagonist	% Male Protagonist	% Multiple Options	% Ambiguous	% NA
Nintendo Switch	11%	29.6%	42.8%	4%	12.6%
PS4	10.3%	35%	37.7%	5.4%	11.6%
Xbox	7.1%	36.3%	39.6%	4.6%	12.4%
Microsoft	11.8%	31.6%	36.1%	7.1%	13.4%
IOS	12.7%	25.9%	37.1%	7.6%	16.8%

Out of 2,536 released titles over five years, the researchers assigned games with options of female, male , multiple options, ambiguous or NA. Female and male protagonists were only assigned when there was only the option to play as either a male or a female, not both, and defaults were ignored. Ambiguous protagonists are those that are not explicitly presented as male or female, while NA denotes a game where there is no discernible protagonist that can be assigned a gender, such as a city-building game. For titles with an ensemble cast, gender was researched for all playable characters.

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