Ms. Pac-Man, perhaps? (1981, and arguably a more popular arcade game than Pac-Man over the years).
I have to ask - what edition was this? Because I seem to remember them being very careful in avoiding gender differences, at least since 2nd edition.
First edition - I started playing it in the mid-1970’s. Females had a strength penalty.
I’m male and prefer playing male characters. I tend to roleplay my characters and find it easier to get in to the mindset of a human male. I don’t have the most active imagination so I tend to imagine myself in the game environment and act as I expect I would.
Wow. TSR didn’t even *try *to get female gamers back then, huh?
It’s even better. There are a handful of game systems that try to implement a division between the sexes. Typically this is represented by women losing some strength but gaining constitution/endurance/whatever they want to call it in their system. (For the next poster I’ll leave the mocking of the fact that women are still the outsiders in this situation since they’re the ones that vary from the baseline normal.)
1st Edition AD&D didn’t even do that. It was simply that women could not be as strong as men. If too high of a score was rolled for a female character then the player had to reroll.
Since I’m posting in the thread I might as well mention that I’m a guy who given the choice between two effectively identical characters of opposite gender generally picks the female character for aesthetic reasons unless the model has gone beyond the usual ridiculous and into the absurd territory (something along the lines of the Soul Calibur games would be a good example).
Indeed. I was quite the anomaly. It was… interesting going to tournaments.
That probably would be the first female protagonist in a video game – I was thinking more about computer games, since that’s mostly what I play.
I guess I’ll be the first guy to step on the un-PC land mine and say that I always choose a male character when possible and am somewhat disappointed when the main character is a female. I play games so I can pretend to be a bad motherfucker and females just don’t fit that role in 99% of the games they are in. I find them totally unbelievable not only in action oriented video games, but also in action movies. Nearly every movie I’ve seen with a female lead as the badass asskicker would have been better with a beefy dude with a beard chomping on a stogy in the role. The only female action characters I’ve really bought into was Ripley in the Alien series and … that’s about it. And she wasn’t just badass all the time, she still seemed feminine. If I want a bad ass asskicker I’ll take a guy in any and all forms of entertainment.
Sorry, that’s just how I feel.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a man preferring to play a male character. After all, I’m a woman and I prefer to play a female character.
Although I do like to see women in heroic roles, I do find it implausible and disappointing to to see actresses/female characters in action roles who don’t even look tough. I think a female action hero should look more like Venus Williams than Milla Jovovich.
I’m male and it doesn’t matter much to me. In MMORPG’s, I create both male and female characters depending on too many factors to list. For single player story driven games, if there’s a choice I’ll often play through at least twice with one of each.
But in Guitar Hero 2, you can have my Judy Nails when you pry her from my cold dead hands.
A bit of an oversimplification. It’s simply untrue to say that all female characters suffered a Strength penalty - rather, all races and sexes other than male human had an upper limit of one sort of another, reflecting their smaller size. (In 1st Ed AD&D even half-orcs were smaller than humans. Interestingly, female half-orcs had a higher maximum than female humans although male half-orcs had a lower maximum than male humans.) Only halflings, of both sexes, suffered an outright penalty (compensated for in Dexterity).
Strength mattered mostly to fighters and their subclasses, and if you wanted to be a fighter to any reasonable level the chances were you would be human (dwarf, half-elf and half-orc were possible alternatives, but not if the campaign was likely to hit high levels). Indeed, if you wanted to play a Paladin then you had to be human; Rangers could be half-elven if they didn’t mind topping out at comparatively low level.
If you were a fighter (or subclass) and rolled 18 for Strength, you rolled percentage dice for “exceptional strength” which thus could run from 1 to 100. A female human (or male gnome…) was restricted to a maximum of 50 on this bonus score; if you rolled over 50 then you would be restricted to a maximum of 50. However, if you weren’t a fighter then you were restricted to a straight 18 no matter what.
Under any kind of honest attribute-rolling system, scores of 18 were far from common, and the dreaded Female Strength Limitation mostly penalised only those characters who were fighters, rolled an 18 strength, and then rolled over 50 on the exceptional-strength score. Assuming you had the choice of what to do with your 18, you always had the penalty-free option of assigning it to Dexterity or Constitution (if you were planning to be a fighter-type) or, indeed, any other score(if you weren’t).
True, the upper limit could bite female non-fighters of other races, where it was lower than 18, but I have to say I’ve never known too many thieves, wizards or priests with an 18 strength anyway (which ain’t to say they don’t exist). But for the most part, the discrimination only affected characters who:
[ul]
[li]had an 18 strength[/li][li]were fighters (all non-fighters were in the same boat)[/li][li]rolled 51% or higher[/li][/ul]
which, taken all in all, was a pretty small molehill to build a “Sexism!” mountain out of. Since an 18 Strength was meant to represent the top 0.5% of unaided human strength, and hence an 18/51% or higher the top 0.25% it seems hard to decry as unfair to women a system which assumed that there was no difference between the sexes up to the 99.75th percentile. Real life is considerably harsher.
And, oddly enough, pretty much every suggestion I ever heard of to redress the balance figured that all women should be compensated for the implied slight, say with a blanket +1 to Wisdom, Dexterity or Constitution. Funny, that.
My younger sister in real life looks rather like the Judy Nails character (although not as busty!), but I’ve only ever seen her play as Lars Umlaut.
I’m one of those male players who prefers female avatars. What can I say, girls are more pleasant to look at. It also brings out the protective side of me a bit more. Sexist or not, I am more bothered by seeing women getting injured than men, so I end up taking better care of my characters and get more attached to them. And I’m secure enough in my masculinity to admit I squeed a little bit back when I played WoW and my female gnome found a particularly adorable hat.
Surprisingly, I’ve never encountered the type of harassment in MMOs that others have experienced with female avatars. Perhaps it’s because I tend to avoid grouping with random people, but even when I do it is rarely commented upon. Then again, I assiduously avoid sharing personal information when playing, so perhaps that’s it.
In contrast, in tabletop RPGs I default to male characters, unless there is a particular reason to go the other way. Lackadaisical bard? Male. Psychopathic halfling assassin? Male. Sorcerous kobold? Male. Demon possessed child? Cliche though it may be, gotta go with female there.
I’m a queer gamer, so this is a bit of a weird topic for me. It comes up a lot in MMO forums, so I’ve already thrown in on it, to varying degrees of unease among straight dudes.
For me, at least, it is about the gender roles and representations when I choose my avatar’s sex. I like feeling represented by the character I’m controlling onscreen - it gets me more into the experience. I run into trouble, however, since most games’ male characters look like something out of a Clint Eastwood movie, and my ideal persona definitely does not. I get more mental mileage out of slender characters and pretty boys than most of what Western games consider the male ideal to be. So I’ll usually end up picking female avatars, partially as a statement of my own queerness (since certain characters in ‘party’ games become associated with me), and partially for my own sake, as I relate to the more feminine characteristics of on-screen characters than I would with blocky masculine ones.
The exception to this–which, happily, is getting more mileage lately–is if the game allows queer options for its male avatars. The main example is Fable II, which offers just as many options for gay relationships as for straight ones, with the bonus of certain characters reacting well if you happen to look good in the opposite gender’s clothing.
So while most boys who play as girls do so purely for very hetero, aesthetic reasons, I’m a boy who plays as girls for very queer, aesthetic reasons. 
I invariably pick females when I can, though I have never really thought about why. The less it matters, the more likely I am to pick a female. In Left 4 Dead, for example, as a survivor I invariably hope for / pick Zoey, probably the best female protagonist I have ever played for being realistic-looking and not stupidly voluptuous. I liked Silent Hill 3 (Heather Mason, protagonist), Beyond Good and Evil, Claire from Resident Evil 2, etc. It never feels weird to play as a girl. Women in fighting games are usually my favorite charaters, too, though I only ever really played old MK and Soul Calibur.
I play go online and have several usernames, one of which is a female name. It is weird to see how differently people treat you in a male-dominated area like go (though that’s not why I did it).
I’m female but I have male avatars in a few games, because a) I have short, spiky hair and that’s not usually an option for female avatars, and b) because I don’t want dresses, I want black pants and heavy boots, and, again, apparently only boy avatars wear those!
I’m not talking FPS games, more like “Pet Society” on Facebook, or Animal Crossing.
I’m male, and I think out of all my WoW, CoH, and other online characters, I have exactly one female. I can sort of understand “I want to look at a nice butt,” but I see my character as my avatar and I much prefer them to be big masculine badasses. The first time I made a female character in CoH and saw the exaggerated hip sway I got seriously embarrassed. 
I play male and female avatars in Eve Online.
I generally play female characters when there’s a choice, but I don’t think I’ve ever decided whether or not to play a game based on whether or not it is - just gotten disappointed when I felt it should be, but it wasn’t.