Characters in video games

Mainstream gaming culture has almost always been selective about its characters. Before the days of the Nintendo entertainment system characters were totally ambiguous and marketed towards everyone but after the video game crash in 1983 nintendo were forced to put its games and consoles in the toy isle but because the toy isles were separated between sexes they had to choose between and in the end they marketed the system toward a male audience. This meant that often characters taking a leading role were male in order to be relatable to the game’s target audience.

Over time there has been a lot of Improvement in applying strong female characters in video games and creating a female audience especially through the advent of mobile gaming which is definitely a great thing to see. Although there is now a fairly large audience for older woman in the mobile gaming market, there are a lack of older woman in leading roles in video games. There are plenty of older men, such as wizards etc. This is most likely due to the lack of older woman engaging in video games on other platforms than facebook and mobile devices and the lack of older woman engaging in video games with any inherent story in place. It is also an oddity to see thick/ curvy woman taking a lead role in video games.

This doesn’t seem to be the same problem with males , as there are a variety of thick playable male characters in video games especially in fighting games where they’d generally be least expected due to the link between weight and speed generally attatched to this. The only 2 thick female characters that have any significant role I managed to find were Ellie from borderlands 2 and Fat princess from the game of the same name. both examples seem to be a bit of a caricature of larger peoples weight. Fortunately for any gamers that would like to play as a thick or older character in there games, character creation in games like dragon’s dogma make that a possibility.