They're definitely rare. Mirror's Edge is almost 20 years old. Reaching back that far for an example just reinforces how rare it is.
If you tally all the FPS releases in a given year, a supermajority are going to have male protagonists.
They're definitely rare. Mirror's Edge is almost 20 years old. Reaching back that far for an example just reinforces how rare it is.
If you tally all the FPS releases in a given year, a supermajority are going to have male protagonists.
???
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.
> They're definitely rare. Mirror's Edge is almost 20 years old
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.
[0] https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=1663
> Reaching back that far for an example just reinforces how rare it is.
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".