GamesKait Diaz is a success as the protagonist in Gears 5, but the process of getting her there went back years and involved cultural change for the game’s developer
Zöe Curnoe, a senior producer at video game developer The Coalition, lets out a long sigh. We’ve just reminded her about a tweet from Cliff Bleszinski, the former lead designer on the Gears of War franchise, which she has worked on for several years. Gears 5, the latest title in the Gears of War series, has a female protagonist for the first time.
“Not gonna lie,” wrote Bleszinski. “Seeing a woman on the cover of a Gears game makes me happy. I was told for decades ‘games with female leads don’t sell.’” When it was announced that Corporal Kait Diaz – previously a side character – would replace Marcus Fenix as the face of the studio’s incredibly successful – and incredibly macho – franchise, some industry watchers saw it as a bold move. But Curnoe is tired of thinking about female leads as a risky proposition. “It’d be great if we could stop talking about it to some degree,” she says, “and having a woman lead just becomes normal.”
The theory of the female lead as commercial suicide is largely down to a spreadsheet. In 2005, when Bleszinski and Rod Fergusson were etching the first outlines of an apocalyptic sci-fi universe, decisions about what to make were driven by marketers who’d “have some sort of master spreadsheet where they could type in a bunch of parameters and forecast what they’d think your game would do,” Fergusson remembers. “Video games are long investments. You’re spending millions of dollars over three, sometimes seven years – but you don’t have a crystal ball telling you what’s going to be right for the industry seven years from now […] There’s going to be stuff they do that’s risky, so there are other things that are easier to de-risk, which is ‘well, I’ll just have a white male as my lead character.’ We’ve moved away from that.”
It’s true, the 90s’ Lara Croft – with her hot pants and seductively clipped consonants – may be one of our most famous female gaming icons, but she achieved this while somewhat conforming to the objectifying tastes of the era’s lad culture. In recent years, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and the rebooted Tomb Raider, have all proven that action games can achieve commercial and critical success with nuanced women leading the story. Yet data crunched by Feminist Frequency reveals that only 7% of games featured at E3 conferences since 2015 have had female leads – over three times as many have male central heroes.
Heated resistance to high-profile franchises putting women in pole position hasn’t helped. “#NotMyBattlefield” started trending on Twitter after female soldiers were introduced to Battlefield V; a soot-flecked, dual-gun wielding woman bursting from the cover art. Most complaints were couched in concerns over “historical accuracy” (despite famous female world war-era soldiers such as Lyudmila Pavlichenko and Wanda Gertz). Maker’s EA Dice had to point out, “The Battlefield sandbox has always been about playing the way you want. Like attempting to fit three players on a galloping horse, with flamethrowers. With BFV, you also get the chance to play as who you want. This is #everyonesbattlefield.”
Realism and escapist action dance a constant tango in video games, and Dice’s defenders accused indignant fans of using history as a crutch for bigotry. The response to Kait from core Gears fans, however, has been positive. “[Fans aren’t] calling out that she’s a female protagonist, they’re calling out that they are wrapped up in her story,” says franchise narrative lead Bonnie Jean Mah. “We’ve invested in Kait wholeheartedly … and just to see the reaction from our players is very rewarding and shows it was the right choice.”
The community’s acceptance of Kait (compared to the Battlefield V controversy or historical gripes with Total War: Rome 2’s female generals) was partly due to how The Coalition exploited the game’s sci-fi setting. “Gears as a franchise is a Star Trekkian utopia in some ways on top of an apocalypse,” says Ferguson. “We don’t have homophobia, racism or sexism. They’re fighting for their lives in a genocidal war. We don’t need the humans fighting among themselves over petty things. And so it was important to Cliff and I back in 2005 that we had a diverse cast, at least ethnically, and then as we got into Gears 3 we were able to bring gender more into the forefront.”
Then there is Gears’ strong narrative spine, which allowed the team to smoothly bend the series in this direction. It turns out, the team carefully planned Kait’s ascension over a number of years, ensuring that her evolution into a central hero felt natural. Mysteries over her lineage surfaces in 2016’s Gears of War 4, and this compelling narrative, fleshed out by tie-in novels written by Karen Traviss and Jason Hough, paved an unassailable route.
Kait’s popularity can also be ascribed to her strength of personality. Of course the term “strong female character” is amorphous and often reductive, easily used to describe a titillating twentysomething who can roundhouse kick in stilettos. For Mah, however, “a strong character is someone who’s authentic, who’s real, who has that range of emotions, who can be vulnerable, who can show bravery and personal strength. By having Kait out there demonstrating to us what a believable character looks like, to us it naturally moves the bar.” Acutely aware of the “save the princess” trope, the team worked hard to write Kait’s story so while her fellow soldiers could support her, JD and others never had to save her.
But perhaps the key element in the establishment of Kait as an authentic lead was structural. The Coalition believes the only way to write well-rounded female characters is to have women on the development team. Current statistics suggest that women make up just 20% of game development staff worldwide. But Fergusson suggests a studio should match its audience. “In the industry now, our player base is 50/50 male and female,” he says. “So you can better represent the content you want to create for your players if your studio culture represents that.”
Curnoe agrees: “This is probably the most inclusive culture I’ve ever been a part of, and I’ve been in the industry for 15 years … When you see it every day among your leaders, it trickles down and tends to spread out among the people that you work with.” The Coalition’s leadership endorsed Gears 5’s creative direction from the beginning of the project, while the studio introduced resources to connect women across different teams, and invited the wider development community to a panel in January that Curnoe says was “made up mostly of women and non-binary people talking about diverse characters in games, and how to create that representation”.
Fergusson says these aren’t just ways to tick a box, but important steps along a path towards parity. He describes studio culture as being two-sided: the aspiration of what leadership wishes it to be, and what it actually is, based on who works there. “You have to be aware that [culture change is] not just top-down, it’s also bottom-up … It’s slow, because the industry is behind the curve in a lot of ways. In terms of [non-male] engineers and designers, there’s just not as many as you’d like there to be. But it’s a good aspirational goal to have your studio look like your players.”
A studio that reflects its player base will also be in a better position to create characters that mean something to those fans. When that starts happening more regularly, perhaps development teams won’t ever again have to explain themselves when elevating a female character to lead an action shooter franchise.
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