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I recently revisited What Remains of Edith Finch and picked off the remaining achievements. Obviously, earning 100% completion in a walking simulator is hardly something to boast of, but it occurred to me that WRoEF has something that makes it quite unusual among video games. You see, the main player character, the eponymous Edith Finch, is...straight!
For those of you who don't play many video games, let me explain what I mean. Straight women, who compose about 45% of the population IRL, are bizarrely under-represented as playable characters in video games. Female PCs almost never have husbands or boyfriends. My hypothesis is that this is an attempt to avoid repelling players who are presumed to be unable to empathize with someone who experiences romantic attraction towards men (though this just an interpretation I pulled out of my ass and you should take it with as many grains of salt as you please). Even Edith's orientation is merely implied by the fact that she is pregnant; we know nothing about her relationship with her son's father. However, I'm comfortable labeling her as straight, since there's no evidence that she's attracted to women at all.
Just for fun, I went through my game library to identify female PCs and make my best guess as to their orientations. I only considered pre-defined characters made by the developers, so BioWare RPG protagonists don't make the cut. Here's what I came up with:
I found 12 female player characters, 4 of whom are straight. However, Abby, Micaiah, and Kerrigan are playable only for a minority of their respective games. Edith Finch is the only straight woman I could find who has a majority of a game dedicated to her. I try to play a wide variety of games, but I suppose it's possible that gaming's missing straight women could be hyper-concentrated in genres that I don't play much, like hidden-object games or dating simulators.
So in the weird world of video games, if a female character is under the player's control, it's more likely than not that she will have no interest in men. Have fun making irresponsible society-wide generalizations!
