I just noticed that this might be one of the rare shooters with a female protagonist: the cat has a calico pattern, and those are almost always female (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_cat).
It's not that rare, is it? Off-hand, and very mainstream; Perfect Dark, Mirrors Edge, Dishonored (don't remember if it's the first or second one), Metroid and more are all kind of "shooters" with female protagonist, although maybe Mirror's Edge is more just "first-person" than "shooter" to be 100% accurate.
Not to mention the large selection of "RPG + FPS" where you can be either man or woman.
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Seems the author also realize the thing with the pattern and likely gender of the cat:
> After all, I do need to give the protagonist his fair share. [image] (Yes, I know it's a female, but call it convention rooted in dialect.)
If you tally all the FPS releases in a given year, a supermajority are going to have male protagonists.
Choosing one specific example when I also made more recent ones, isn't such a big dunk you think it is.
> If you tally all the FPS releases in a given year, a supermajority are going to have male protagonists.
Sure, I agree, I'm not saying it's more popular, just that I don't think it's that rare, but I guess ultimately I'm a bit nitpicky (sorry) and we're just disagreeing with the specific definition of "rare".
Mirror's Edge has a female protagonist, but it's not an FPS (First Person Shooter). It's a parkour simulator which technically lets you shoot a gun in limited sections of the game, but the protagonist is a pacifist and you get a bonus for decommisioning guns rather than firing them.
If the thread would like some hard data:
- 19,526 games on Steam tagged "female protagonist" https://store.steampowered.com/search/?tags=7208&ndl=1
- 13,578 games on Steam tagged "FPS" https://store.steampowered.com/search/?tags=1663&ndl=1
- 727 games on Steam tagged both "female protagonist" and "FPS" https://store.steampowered.com/search/?tags=7208%2C1663&ndl=...
So it looks like the two categorisations, for the most part, don't intersect.
Notable counterexamples would include Rise of the Triad, Ion Fury, No One Lives Forever, Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Far Cry 6, but definitely rare. You'd be clutching at straws to describe Portal or Alien: Isolation as FPS (they're a puzzle game and survival horror game respectively), likewise the Resident Evil / Clock Tower / Fatal Frame / etc. games with the novelty option of switching to first-person view, they're naturally third-person perspective. Left 4 Dead has one female character out of four you can play. You might count that one DLC for Bioshock: Infinite where Elizabeth gets a shot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E1lh-pb6Is). You might count the few FPS RPGs that there are with customisable characters (so yes Fallout, but not Mass Effect as it's third-person). But female protagonists are massively more prevalent in survival horror, metroidvania, third-person shooters (Tomb Raider, Monster Hunter, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc) and other genres besides FPS.
You probably didn't play many FPS recently: from the top of my mind, CS2, Battlefield {1, V, 6}, CoD {BO3, Vanguard, MWIII}, Control, the Borderlands, Far Cry {5, 6}, CP2077, Fallout {3, NV, 4}, Destiny, Prey, Valorant, Rainbow 6, Apex, Overwatch, all have female player characters.
And if CS2/CoD/BF/Valorant/Destiny/Apex have female players, that's more or less 90% of the current market.
I took a glance at the the most played FPS list from Steam[0], but I was too lazy to scroll far enough to find one without a playable female character.
Edit: I completed forgot Chell from Portal, too!
https://unrealarchive.org/wikis/the-liandri-archives/Prisone...
https://unreal.fandom.com/wiki/Prisoner_849
> The character of Prisoner 849 is commonly speculated to be Gina, as her model (Female 1) and skin are the first character to appear in alphabetical order; this is even reinforced by UnCreature giving the female player a bio while the male player bio just reads "See Female Player". However, the character of Prisoner 849 is completely up to the player's choice, hence the use of neutral nouns in this article.
No, this isn't a Perfect Dark game
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1592280/Selaco/
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1693280/Supplice/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1378290/The_Citadel/
[3] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3371240/Beyond_Citadel/
[4] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2443360/Zortch/
[5] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3807500/Zortch_2/
[6] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1051690/Nightmare_Reaper/
[7] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1785940/COVEN/
[8] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1406780/Viscerafest/
[9] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1072150/Hedon_Bloodrite/
"boomer shooter" + "female protagonist": 106 matches.
So a bit less than 1/10 of the games tagged with "boomer shooter". With your caveats above about being able to choose a gender, or a single brief segment where you're a lady in a game where you're mostly a dude. Is that a lot? I dunno, doesn't feel like a lot to me. Probably feels like a lot to the people who inevitably show up in the Steam discussions of any successful game that makes you be a lady for most of its length and complain about it being "woke", even one game with a female protagonist seems to be too many for them.
So, a videogame?
Hollywood's depiction of action movies in general is unrealistic. Stereotypical Good Guy gets in a fist fight with a Random Thug, and after trading blows for a while the Good Guy knocks out Random Thug and carries on with the rest of the movie without a problem. No bruising, no eye swelling shut, no broken ribs restricting movement or breathing, no loose teeth, no broken fingers, no sore wrists from mis-angled punches.