From barely identifiable to overtly sexual: the woman's journey in gaming

That wasn't always the case, though. With a couple of exceptions, back in the eighties, female video game characters were not plastered all over covers.

The first ladies were usually little more than trophies to be claimed by males that rescued them. Mario's Princess Toadstool Peach stayed locked up in the dusty confines of Bowser's Castle. The Legend of Zelda's royal highness may have had her name in the title, but, besides a couple of more paragraphs in the instruction manual's back story dedicated to her, not much separated her from Peach.

Even the first female video game characters who were actually playable avatars had barely anything distinctly feminine about them. Ms. Pac-Man's in-game depiction is barely different from that of her husband, except for a tiny red pixel representing a bowtie she wore on top of her head (incidentally, I'm not sure a bald person would ever wear a bowtie on their head, but that's the subject of another column).

Nintendo burst on the female playable icon scene with a very surprising protagonist. Samus Aran, a bounty hunter hidden in the shell of her futuristic space suit, suggested no hint of being a woman at all, either in the promotional art accompanying the video game Metroid, or her in-game pixelatious form. In fact, it was only after finishing Metroid that fans first realized the truth about Samus as she removed her suit to reveal a full head of hair and bikini (or as close to that as 8 bits of graphical processing power can convey).

As the decade moved on, female game characters began to get another kind of token role, that of the lone busty, attitude-driven fighter character selectable among a roster of male counterparts in fighting games like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat.

It was not really until 1996 that women got another shot in the arm. Lara Croft, wearing skimpy short shorts and a tight tank top clearly meant to show off her pair of strongest "weapons," strode onto the adventure scene in the first Tomb Raider game.

An archaeologist and adventurer, the lithe and acrobatic Lara Croft could fight off villains, wildlife and hazardous natural environments just as well as any of her male counterparts.

Though Croft has a long and rather rich background history, particularly for an action game character, she is often used as a poster child for what is wrong with female video game characters today, namely that they are designed largely as idealized depictions of what a woman should be according to teenage, basement-dwelling gamer fan boy fantasies.

And one can't argue that, well, it works. Several copycat designs of the British noblewoman have sprung up all over video games in recent years. Even the once quasi-androgynous Samus Aran is now prone to lose her armour in-game during some of her most recent adventures, revealing a much sleeker and sexier figure than she used to.

On the other hand, characters like Jade, the protagonist of the criminally undersold Beyond Good and Evil, get the shaft. Whereas she was certainly depicted as a beautiful woman, Jade was not, unlike the majority of her counterparts, disproportionately so, and the intrepid photojournalist's weapons were her camera and bo staff, rather than a twin pair of Uzis.

So where do we go from here? Well, the demographics of gamers are changing. It's certainly not the exclusive boys' club it used to be, which is one reason why I think we'll start to see slightly more realistic depictions of women in video games. Is Lara Croft going to go away? I very much doubt it. But hey, after about five years of neglect, Jade's creators are giving her another chance. And even Princess Peach, two decades after first being kidnapped, finally got to star in her own game in 2006, for once being the heroine who had to rescue Mario.

Then again, her in-game powers consisted of physically manifesting her joy, gloom, rage and calm into magical spells, and she ran around volcanoes, arctic landscapes and deep forests in high heels and a long skirt. Ah well, maybe in one more decade…