Why women in games cannot simply exist

There is a familiar kind of discussion that appears whenever a new female character becomes the centre of attention in games.

It might start with a trailer, a screenshot, a comparison image, or a complaint about how a woman looks. Very quickly, the conversation stops being only about the game and becomes something much older and more revealing. People argue about whether she is pretty enough, realistic enough, too sexual, not sexual enough, too plain, too stylised, too masculine, too perfect, too ugly, too whatever the internet has decided to turn into a category that day. The details change, but the pattern stays the same. Women are being measured against a standard that is never just about character design. It is about what kind of woman is considered acceptable in the first place.

That is why these debates feel so charged. They are not really about one face, one body, or one outfit. They are about a much wider set of expectations that women are asked to carry everywhere, not just in games. A woman is supposed to be appealing, but not vain. Strong, but not intimidating. Sexual, but not too sexual. Smart, but not arrogant. Visible, but not difficult. She is expected to be legible to other people, and still somehow effortless. The standard shifts depending on who is looking, which means women are often being judged against a moving target they did not invent and cannot fully satisfy.

When a character like Aloy becomes a target of criticism, that wider tension is hard to ignore. She is not built as a conventional fantasy object, and that alone seems to unsettle some people more than any flaw in the actual design. The reaction says a lot about the assumption sitting underneath the complaint. For some audiences, a woman in a game is still expected to perform visual comfort before she performs narrative function. She is supposed to reassure the player before she can challenge him. If she does not fit a familiar ideal, the response is often framed as a problem with the character, when the discomfort is really with the collapse of a long standing visual script.

Lara Croft is a useful example because her history shows how stubborn that script can be. Early Lara was designed with a very clear idea of spectacle in mind, and the conversation around her body became inseparable from the character herself. Over time the design shifted, but the old reading did not disappear. Even when Lara became more grounded, more capable, more complex, she still carried the burden of being judged as a visual symbol first and a character second. That is what patriarchal standards do. They linger. They turn a design choice into a referendum on what women are for.

Widowmaker works in a different way, but she sits inside the same system. Her design is often discussed as something created for the male gaze, and that is not a wild reading. It is obviously a character built with allure very deliberately in mind. But the point is not simply that she is attractive. The point is that her attractiveness is part of her function. That can be perfectly valid inside a character universe, because games are allowed to use style, fantasy, exaggeration, and appeal as tools. The problem begins when that same logic gets treated as the only legitimate way to design a woman, or when every female character is forced to justify herself against it.

A recent discussion around Laufey in God of War touched exactly that nerve. Once the argument becomes about whether a woman is “appealing enough,” the conversation is no longer really about storytelling. It is about entitlement. It is about the assumption that female characters exist to serve a particular visual appetite, and that the appetite should be the first thing the design answers. That assumption is not unique to gaming. It is simply easier to see in gaming because the character is right there on the screen, waiting to be interpreted.

The truth is that women in games often become pressure points for real world ideas about femininity. They are expected to satisfy several demands at once, and those demands are not always compatible. A character can be designed for realism and still be criticised for not fitting someone’s preferred fantasy. She can be designed for fantasy and still be criticised for being shallow. She can be designed for strength and still be criticised for not being soft enough. Whatever direction the character takes, there is often someone ready to say she has failed at one of the jobs assigned to her.

That is where the conversation becomes bigger than games. Because this is not only about whether players want beautiful characters or practical ones, or whether studios should lean more into realism or stylisation. It is about why women are so often treated as if their value must be compressed into a narrow set of readable traits. In wider culture, women are not allowed to just be. They are curated, evaluated, corrected, commented on, and discussed as though their appearance is public property. Games reflect that because games are made inside the same culture.

So when people argue about whether a female character is “too ugly,” what they are really exposing is not a neutral aesthetic preference. They are exposing how deeply the idea has settled that women are supposed to be seen and judged before they are understood. That is why the backlash can feel so personal, even when it is aimed at a fictional character. The character becomes a stand in for a much larger complaint about women becoming harder to flatten into a single pleasing image.

There is also another layer here that often gets overlooked. A woman who is beautiful in a conventional way can still be criticised for being empty. A woman who is practical can be criticised for being unfeminine. A woman who is sexual can be criticised for being cheap. A woman who is ordinary can be criticised for not being interesting enough. It is not simply that women are asked to be attractive. It is that they are asked to be attractive in the correct way, at the correct level, and for the correct audience, while also being everything else at the same time. That is not a design brief. It is a trap.

This is why the debate can feel as though there is no winning it. In some ways, there may not be, at least not within the current logic. If a character leans into beauty, some people see pandering. If she leans away from it, some people see rejection. If she is sensual, she is accused of being built for the male gaze. If she is practical, she is accused of lacking femininity. If she is older, tougher, broader, or more visibly ordinary, the criticism often becomes even more revealing because it is no longer hiding behind taste. It becomes a statement about what women are allowed to look like and still be considered worthy of attention.

The uncomfortable but useful conclusion is that these games conversations are mirrors. They show us how much of our thinking about women is still shaped by old rules about desirability, usefulness, and acceptability. That is why the discussion around female characters keeps finding its way back to the same place. The question is rarely really about the character alone. It is about the patriarchal standards that trained us to look at women in the first place.

A good female character, then, is not one who simply fits a visual ideal. It is one who feels whole inside the world she belongs to. Her design, her role, her presence, and her story should work together. Sometimes that will mean she is beautiful. Sometimes not. Sometimes she will be stylised, practical, glamorous, strange, difficult, or plain. The point is not to make women in games answer the same impossible demand every time. The point is to let them be characters rather than tests.

That may be why this argument never really dies. It is not just a gaming debate at all. It is a culture debate, and until the culture changes how it sees women, every new character will arrive carrying more than her own story.