"Horizon: Zero Dawn" is an ambitious video game. Unveiled at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, it is an adventure that pits man versus dinosaur-like machines in a distant future in which human civilization has collapsed, leaving behind a post-apocalyptic tribal society.  Except it doesn't actually pit a man versus the feral robots: The main character is a red-headed woman named Aloy. And the game's publisher, Sony Computer Entertainment, was worried about her.  "She's a female lead character," Shuhei Yoshida, Sony Computer Entertainment's head of worldwide studios, told gaming magazine Polygon in a recent interview. "That has always been the vision by the team, but we had a discussion. Is it risky to do a female character?"  Yoshida told Polygon that the female lead was one of several issues Sony sought feedback on in a focus group. "We started to show it to many more people internally, and they had questions about it. So we worked with our marketing groups to do this focus testing," he said. The response was ultimately positive, he said.  In a statement to The Washington Post, Guerrilla Games, the Sony-owned studio behind the game, backed away from Yoshida's comments. "Aloy's gender was never questioned as part of the focus test," Guerrilla Games managing director Herman Hulst said in a statement, adding that the company "was never concerned, nor ever will be, about Aloy as the lead of Horizon: Zero Dawn."  That Yoshida said a female protagonist was thought of as risky at all speaks to the current state of gender politics in the gaming industry, which has been rocked by a misogynist backlash toward some female game developers and critics in recent years.  Video games have a history of strong, albeit often sexualized, female leads, such as Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider franchise. But female heroes are still the exception, not the rule. When market research firm EEDAR reviewed the gender breakdown of video game protagonists a few years ago, the results were pretty dismal. Out of a sample of 669 new games, only 24 had exclusively female protagonists, according to a story from the now defunct Penny Arcade Report.  Games that featured male heroes sold better than those with female leads, according to EEDAR's data. But the games led exclusively by female protagonists had a significant handicap: They were given half the marketing budget as games with only male heroes.  "Horizon: Zero Dawn" is bucking that trend to a certain extent. The game premiered with a splash at gaming's biggest show, and it wasn't alone. Electronics Arts showed off an upcoming sequel to 2008's Mirror's Edge, which also features a female protagonist, and the next Tomb Raider game also made headlines.  But the show, which is largely attended by men, still had some gender-related hiccups -- including the continuing presence of attractive, sometimes scantily clad models known as "booth babes." Polygon reported that there were also large stickers decrying feminist video game culture commentator Anita Sarkeesian stuck to traffic light poles around the convention center.  Those unwelcoming signals are all the more surprising when you consider that women are actually a huge part of the gaming community: Some 44 percent of American gamers are female, according to the latest statistics from the Entertainment Software Association.  But Sony's Yoshida seems to recognize that women are an important part of his company's future. "As an industry, I think we should continue to make efforts to have more females in studios on the development side and to get different perspectives," he told Polygon.  Andrea Peterson covers technology policy for The Washington Post, with an emphasis on cybersecurity, consumer privacy, transparency, surveillance and open government.
Women are a big part of the video game audience, but female game leads are still few and far between.