Each weekday I post a poll to the PS Nation twitter account, @PSNation. Then each Monday I compile last week’s polls into this post. Last week was all about gender in video games, specifically the gender of the player’s characters.

Bonus
I actually posted a bonus question last week on Friday. However, I’m going to start with that poll because I think it frames the rest of the polls in an interesting place. The bonus question asked what your gender was, to get a demographic baseline for the rest of the polls.

And a bonus extra #DailyPoll. Let's get some demographics for comparison for the week's polls. Are you:

— PlayStation Nation (@PSNation) May 20, 2016

Going in, I figured we had a mostly male readership, but this poll was a little eyeopening. 91% is a pretty vast majority. Our twitter polls often aren’t indicative of the larger gaming populous, so I wouldn’t extrapolate this poll to the rest of the gaming fanbase. This just represents a hyper localized section. Even though there’s no guarantee that the same exact percentages voted in the other polls this week, I think it’s safe to assume that they had mostly male responses.

Monday
Starting off with this one: does it bother you when you play a game where the character isn’t your gender? This question came about after listening to a gamer talking about how she couldn’t get into The Witcher 3 because she couldn’t relate to the character in part because of the gender (mostly due to Geralt spending a lot of time courting women). That made me curious to see if a lot of people felt that way or not.

#DailyPoll Do it bother you when you play a game where the player character isn't your gender?

— PlayStation Nation (@PSNation) May 16, 2016

Seems like most players aren’t bothered at all by the protagonist’s gender. An interesting follow-up might be to ask how much players want to relate to their protagonist. Not that being a different gender makes a character completely unrelatable, but occasionally it can hit on aspects that are. Joe offers an interesting take that foreshadowed the other polls I was planning on posting.

@PSNation depends on the game. If it's a specific character's story, like Witcher, no. If it's a blank slate, yes.

— Joseph Parastatidis (@joe_paras) May 16, 2016

Tuesday
Next up was to ask about games that have premade characters. Something like Uncharted 4‘s multiplayer was mainly what I meant, because the player character’s gender doesn’t have any impact on gameplay. Overwatch or fighting games fall into this too, but that can also come down to the character’s play style rather than their visual style.

#DailyPoll If a game gives you a choice of premade characters, do you have a preference on gender?

— PlayStation Nation (@PSNation) May 17, 2016

Half don’t really seem to care, while the other half does tend to have a preference. Of those with a preference, it’s interesting to see how how high those who said “female” are in comparison to that bonus poll. Several responses talked about how different gender characters tend to play in games, which was a little less what I was hoping to get at but valid nonetheless. Though I’m sure there are some people who voted like Stuart:

@PSNation I pick female because I like wearing pretty things. ?

— Stuart Jones (@stujones33) May 18, 2016

Wednesday
After that, the next was to ask about making a character. In a game like Fallout 4, where the player gets to pick the character’s gender and make the character from the ground up, what gender do you often make?

#DailyPoll In games where you make a character, what gender do you usually make the character?

— PlayStation Nation (@PSNation) May 18, 2016

It’s not too surprising, but the percentages here are pretty close to those who picked a side on the previous poll. Still a pretty sizable portion who like playing female characters, especially in comparison to the likely mostly male voters. That’s really one of the great things about games though, is that they let the player be anything they want.

@PSNation it depends on the type of game and the mood I am in for the first character as I usually play through games twice so I do both.

— Loonknight (@Loonknight) May 18, 2016

Thursday
One adage I’ve heard a few places in the game industry is that games with a girl on the cover don’t sell as well as those with a male on the cover. Supposedly, there’s enough belief in this that even Naughty Dog was asked to change the cover of The Last of Us, as the cover features Ellie rather prominently.

#DailyPoll ND was told to remove Ellie from the TLOU box. Does a girl on a game box make you less likely to buy it?

— PlayStation Nation (@PSNation) May 19, 2016

I’ll admit, I think I should have reworded those answers a little bit. Still, it seems like at least our twitterbase doesn’t mind having a female on the cover of the game. In fact, more people said they’d be more likely to buy it because of that than those who said they wouldn’t.

@PSNation when i got ME3 i flipped the cover femshep > shepshep

— ~~~Oldmaru~~~ (@oldmario) May 19, 2016

Friday
Last, let’s see if people think we need more female protagonists. Although there are some high profile games that do feature women, like Tomb Raider, males still seem to be the majority. So I wondered if our mostly male voters want there to be more female protagonists.

#DailyPoll Do you think we need more games with female protagonists?

— PlayStation Nation (@PSNation) May 20, 2016

Over 70% of the responses said they do want more female protagonists so it would seem that even our male dominated community would like to see at least a few more. Of course we want good games too, but those two things are not mutually exclusive.

@PSNation it would be great if the devs that aren't making compelling stories and characters could at least give you a choice on who you are

— MakaiOokami (@MakaiOokami) May 21, 2016

That’s it for this week. Join us every weekday around 10 AM Pacific Time for a new poll question.