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Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

The Last of Us Insists on Including Both Its Main Characters in Cover Art (See, Because One of Them is Female)

by Susana Polo | 2:28 pm, December 13th, 2012


I believe there’s a misconception that if you put a girl or a woman on the cover, the game will sell less. I know I’ve been in discussions where we’ve been asked to push Ellie to the back and everyone at Naughty Dog just flat-out refused. — Neil Druckmann, scriptwriter on The Last of Us, a new game by Naughty Dog, Inc.

It’s no secret that the idea that “games with female protagonists sell poorly” is a self fulfilling prophecy (just like the idea that “action movies with female leads don’t succeed). While, ideally, either no company would be pressured to hide the female characters in their story for sales, or all companies would resist such suggestions, we can still highlight folks who commit to pushing back against the dominant trend.

The article in which this quote appears can be found here, and it’s full of a lot of musing by Druckmann and Ashley Johnson, the voice actress behind fourteen year old-Ellie on the state of female characters in video games.

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  • http://twitter.com/Super_Widget Joanna

    I really like Ellie. She’s such a breath of fresh air, and not even as a female character just as a character on her own. It’s rare to have a realistic down-to-earth kid in a video game outside the fantasy genre.

  • http://twitter.com/ChannelDiza Chanel Diaz

    I saw the trailer for this a while back. I’m liking the setting, so far.

  • Anonymous

    Pittsburgh!!! Pittsburgh, pittsburgh, pittsburgh.

  • http://twitter.com/ChannelDiza Chanel Diaz

    That’s Pittsburgh? Despite the apocalypse, it’s looking pretty good. ;)

  • Life Lessons

    Awesome. :)

  • Betty Windsor

    I love this. I’m a big Naughty Dog fan, and Elena from Uncharted was a great breath of fresh air as well. I’m def buying The Last of Us. Oh! And you guys should look into “Beyond Two Souls” as well by the creators of Heavy Rain, which mainly features a female protagonist.

  • http://twitter.com/kayforaday Kay Livingston

    Didn’t know about this game, buying it now.

  • http://twitter.com/ChannelDiza Chanel Diaz

    I really loved how Uncharted 3 didn’t seem to have as much Patriarchal Bias of its Female Characters as much as other games. By that I mean the Female Villain seemed to be treated as Equally Bad as the Male Villain rather than Worse.

  • http://www.facebook.com/zeonchar Amanda M. Ramsey

    And yet, the cover art still has her in that same pose of “looking backwards so butt can show” that we’e seen on a bazillion movie posters.

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