Soon after Tom Abernathy, a narrative designer from Microsoft, said women are the “new core” of the games industry, the lead writer for Dragon Age III has supported the idea that developers and publishers should be doing more to combat sexism. David Gaider is due to give a talk called “Sex in Video Games” at GDC today, but before that he spoke to Rock, Paper, Shotgun about sexism in the industry and the way things will change.
Gaider says that he calls this idea that games with female protagonists won't sell “accepted industry wisdom”, i.e. something that you're not allowed to question… until somebody goes and proves it wrong. Here's a definition from the horse's mouth:
“The things that the industry decides are treated as incontrovertibly true until someone else comes along and proves them definitively wrong in a way that we cannot ignore. Then, of course, everyone jumps on it.”
His example is of EverQuest, the temporarily unrivalled success of which led to the “accepted industry wisdom” that no other MMO would ever manage to get more than the 800,000 subscribers it boasted at its highest point, which was obviously proved wrong when World of Warcraft appeared on the scene.
It's easy to see how this applies to the issue of sexism in the games industry. Remember how the creative director on Remember Me said that some publishers turned down the opportunity to publish the game because protagonist Nilin is a woman? Those publishers were following the “accepted industry wisdom” that female protagonists don't sell, a “wisdom” that the game will probably go on to disprove (along with the recent chart-topping Tomb Raider).
I guess the only question is: how many successful games with female protagonists will we need before the naysayers are convinced?