Women are about to storm yet another all-male bastion. With the Pentagon's decision to end the ban on women in combat, the video game industry must face the fact that combat is longer a male preserve.

In fact, it hasn't been for years, as women fly Apache helicopters into combat and accompany patrols in Afghanistan. But you couldn't tell by the many popular military-themed games, where the soldier-character that the player controls is almost always male. "In the video and computer games that feature soldiers or military-style combat, such as Halo, Call of Duty, SOCOM, and Battlefield, the majority of the characters people can choose to play are male characters, and often white male characters," says CarrieLynn Reinhard, an assistant professor at Dominican University, and author of the Playing with Research blog. "This tendency has largely been due to two reasons: the audience for such games here in America is typically male, and many of these games are trying to reflect historical military campaigns and styles, which until today have also been male dominated."

It's not that women are never portrayed as warriors. Despite the lack of subtlety in how Lara Croft's most prominent attribute is displayed, at least she is eye candy that kicks butt. "You can find female characters in action games and fighting games, such as Mortal Kombat, D.O.A. and Virtual Fighter," Reinhard says. "And you will sometimes find female characters in a soldier capacity in Japanese video games, but those tend to be influenced by Japanese anime and manga, which also tend to feature women more in a combat role."





The real question  will be how video games will portray women soldiers. If all a character does is gun down terrorists or other players, then it may not matter. But if the game has a plot line and gives the player-character a personality, motives and desires, should a female soldier behave differently than a man? Should she be as ruthless and violent? Today's military presents itself as a fighting force of warriors where gender isn't as important as competence, and yet one of the beauties (and frustrations) of life is that men and women are different. It remains to be seen whether gamers will desire to see the difference.

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