> > I liked just a bit Trail of Anguish better then Perils of Akumos but only because you dont see that many girl adventure heroines...
>
> Strange that there aren't more...it wasn't any tougher writing a game with a female lead (easier, in fact).

Probably there are a number of reasons. Games like Pac-Man and Q-Bert, with no real "character" at all, perhaps default to male in part because English uses masculine as gender-neutral in addition to referring to the male gender. Something gender-neutral is usually called male by default.

Second possible reason, and most likely, is raw consumerism. To be sure, there is a market for heroines in all forms of entertainment, but in general, male heroes sell better. James Bond, Indiana Jones, Conan, Superman, Batman, Spiderman, the Men In Black, Harry Potter, and so on. There are far fewer heroines, and most are not as popular. I'm probably having a brain cramp and forgetting an obvious one, but Lara Croft is the current most popular mainstream fictional heroine I can think of off-hand. This imbalance is reflected in the popularity of actors that portray fictional characters we seek. Dozens of male actors can open a movie to large grosses by their names alone, but this cannot be said of more than maybe five or six actresses, and of those only Julia Roberts and Drew Barrymore are truly reliable financial bets. Why is this? I dunno.

Third reason? Makers of movies and video games are more male than female -- again, particularly in the case of games -- and if you get deep enough into the character, writing for the opposite sex is generally harder. OAT doesn't really get involved in circumstances where the gender gap is all that wide. That can probably said for most games, really. Except for a very few, games don't typically have the kind of depth of character development where gender differences become an issue. Still, even so, I know it's easier for *me* to write male characters.* I'd like to think I've learned a lot in recent years about understanding how to interact with women, but I'm not so confident I understand womanhood well enough to do a suitably perfect job *writing* female characters, at least in situations where the gender gap is significant. So maybe, given that more writers of movies and video games are male than female, this has something to do with it.

(*Which is not to say that this encourages me to do so. I'm always up for storytelling challenges. I started a novel earlier this year -- before I got distracted with Murkon's Refuge again -- which has no true "main" character but which has far more female characters than male, including a plot thread that almost exclusively concerns women. That project is on the backburner now, but the story is always churning about in my head.)