I am a gamer and my wife is decidedly not. Nonetheless she makes an effort to play a few games with me. Lately though it seems as though game developers are going out of their way to keep her from finding any appeal in their products.

     Our favorites are games that support local multi-player in cooperative mode. The most notable of these in recent days has been Gears of War. Gears has a simple split screen coop view and a solid system of gameplay. She and I played through the entire single-player game on coop mode and enjoyed it despite the fact that she couldn't choose a female avatar to represent her. Instead she played as Dom the hulking ultra-male soldier. This is far from an exception in video games.

      Rainbow Six : No female avatars for utterly no reason. Additionally the coop story mode inexplicably has no briefings or voice-overs.

     Raw Vs. Smackdown 2007 : A game that comes within a rat's whisker of being a great game for couples. You can make incredibly detailed character models of either sex and customize everything from their move sets to the motion of their walk (Really I wish I could post a movie of the Gay Negrodamus wrestler's entrance... it still cracks us both up). She and I really got into the game initially as I was playing through the Season mode and she would help me along in coop mode or fight against me when I got tired of the AI's fighting style.

    The game's humorous (often unintentionally) setting helped keep her interested too. Unfortunately this game's developer really doesn't want girls to play. Why do I say that? Well they actually added code to prevent you from using female character models in Season mode and about 80% of the game's standalone modes as well. Want to have your wife fight someone in a cage match? Tough shit, they have disallowed it. The part that kills me is that they very obviously did this on purpose! What for? To ensure gamers and their wives/girlfriends can't do things together? To decrease sales and online play? Why?? WTF???

    These games would seem to be custom made for women. My wife loved the character generator with it's amazing array of choices and options but then is not allowed to use her creations? Plain retarded.

     We also play a lot of the Samurai Warriors franchise of games. She likes the system and hordes of baddies to kill. the games even have a few female characters to choose from! Good step. Then the most recent iteration comes out with the option to create your own character again! "Great!", I think to myself as I buy it. "She can play with her own avatar! That will be fun." Of course the character generator has roughly 3 female models with about 0 options for customization. Not bad but still pretty lame considering that and earlier iteration of the series had a more full featured system. No one reuses code anymore? 

     Crackdown: No female avatars, no local co-op. Back in the store 2 days after I bought it. Great game, poor attempt to appeal to couples.

     Most of the time the inclusion of female options in these games comes at little to no cost to the developer. In other cases the community of modders would be all too happy to do the damn characters models for the developers for free  yet most game devs simply don't put forth the minimal effort it would take to vastly broaden their game's appeal. 

     In Smackdown's case the developer actually expended additional time and effort to keep women from playing. What's the deal guys? Are you that frightened of girls or do you just hate those gamers who actually have wives or girlfriends? Figure it out and get some counseling.