http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/6535-Fake-Nerd-Girls

Nathan Boyes – The Crap girls go through to like games

                Now I'm not a girl so if I get anything wrong here forgive me, but it seems to me like there's a lot of crap going around for being a girl and liking games. Fake nerd girls is a recent topic that's been brought up a lot that seems to get people quite upset, a slew of hate has gone to a gamer named Anita for writing a documentary about how one sided the market is, the majority of games having males as the target audience. A friend of mine was even worried about using her mic to communicate with people during gameplay because she didn't want people to know she was a girl for what can happen afterwards.

                The state of the core gamer market is directly targeted at male audiences. If there's a girl and a guy the guy is always the one sent out to rescue the girl. We've got men in absolutely massive mechanical armour suits and we throw the females in skin tight suits. I jokingly commented about this to my teacher once, quoting a video in which a man said that the problem was not that we should cover up the females, but make the men where skimpy menswear as well. He responded by saying yes but in a market that's mostly guys do you think they are going to want to see that? That's the problem right there, the only reason the market is mostly guys is because we aim it at them, their needs to be a balance! While no, the answer might not be t put male characters in thongs, that doesn't mean there can't be games with strong female leads.

                Mirrors Edge des this. The lead character is a female character and the game is incredibly fun. Male players aren't turned off by the fact that the lead is a female and females are happy to get a chance to see a girl in the spotlight. If more games where released like mirrors edge it wouldn't make men not want to play the game if it's good, but it would balance out the amount of female and male lead characters.  You might be thinking "If males can be happy playing a game with females as the lead why can't girls?" It's not that girls can't enjoy playing as a guy, it's the over saturation of games like this. If all games featured females I'm sure guys would have the same problem. If there was a balance of female and male leads both genders would be happy to play games with both genders as the lead, there wouldn't be an issue.

                A few titles have been released that where extremely successful featuring female leads such as Metroid and the before mentioned Mirror's edge. Hopefully as the saturation of games with female leads goes up more girls will be interested in game development and a balance will be formed. With time I'm sure even guys will realize why girls have these complaints and won't go into a hate fest as soon as the topic is brought up of girls and games.