You can't have a female character in games'

'You can't have a female character in games'
"We had some [publishers] that said, 'Well, we don't want to publish it because that's not going to succeed.

"We had some [publishers] that said, 'Well, we don't want to publish it because that's not going to succeed. You can't have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that." - Jean-Max Morris, creative director on upcoming Capcom adventure game Remember Me , discusses the problemsthat come with having a female protagonist in your game.

The plan was always to have a female protagonist from the beginning, says the Dontnod Entertainment director, and the team never even considered that using Nilin as the main player character would cause problem from a marketing perspective.

But by the time Dontnod began showing the game to publishers and receiving rejections based on the fact that the main character is a woman, it was too late to alter the game to have a male protagonist instead.

"We wanted to be able to tease on Nilin's private life, and that means for instance, at one point, we wanted a scene where she was kissing a guy," Morris noted. "We had people tell us, 'You can't make a dude like the player kiss another dude in the game, that's going to feel awkward.'"

Morris adds that "there's no way the medium's going to mature" with attitudes like these, both from publishers and players. "There's a level of immersion that you need to be at, but it's not like your sexual orientation is being questioned by playing a game," he said. "I don't know, that's extremely weird to me."