COMPUTER games can seem like a testosterone filled boys club.

The gamer world means big muscles, big guns and big money. Women led titles are harder to come by and the only big thing about them are their digitally enhanced chests.

As the debate about Page 3 and lad-mags portrayal of women rages on, gaming is one medium that repeatedly ducks the spotlight.

If female characters are not scantily clad and overtly sexualised they are helpless damsels in distress imprisoned somewhere waiting to be freed by the heroic male lead.

Are consoles and games really such a male dominated pass-time? How do these two-dimensional representations of women affect the way gamers look at females?

Roxanne Palmer, 22, is a games designer and story board artist. She is among the 12 per cent minority of females in the industry.

“In the early days you just didn’t see many girl characters in games,” she says.

“There are a lot more now but the majority of characters you can control are male based.

“Women are often in the background or just objects you can’t interact with.”

Roxanne is helping to design a new game at the University of Essex’s state-of-the-art Games Hub.

This is a collaboration between the public, private and higher education sectors hoping to create computer game developers of the future.

Roxanne originally studied fashion illustration but the keen gamer leapt at the chance to pursue her passion when she heard about a course in game design.

She had to adapt her drawing and illustration style to 3-D computer graphics and now create concept art.

“I used to play on my brothers’ computer games, things like Pokemon,” she recalls.

“At our university gaming club, 50 per cent of the members were girls. Many of them would say how annoyed they were at always having to play with male characters.

“The games aimed at girls are always really pink and girlie.”

She adds: “A friend of mine wrote her dissertation on how women games characters affect guys perspective on girls. She found that as the covers of lads magazines showed more so too did the games.”

Roxanne says this is because the industry is male dominated, which also accounts for the exaggerated bodies and inflated assets of female characters.

“The developers are boys and design what they want to see,” she says.

“You see the same thing in comic books. I don’t think it puts girls off but it probably does stop them getting too involved.”

Roxanne is working on something that could counteract the stereotypes.

Her team is developing a game about a man and a woman who die and go to hell and heaven respectively. The two characters battle to save the other and in doing so, under go some complex character development.

“I feel like I want to make a girl character with depth and an interesting background,” Roxanne adds.

“In our game, she starts off as a goodie but after fighting her way through hell she becomes a little bit more bad-ass.”

Roxanne’s concept art for the game shows how the character’s look changes to reflect the changes in her character arc.

The game, called Duality, is being designed to play on a PC and they hope to sell it to a major developer.

In TV and film there is a thing called the Bechdel test. It asks if any two females characters talk to each other about something other than a man.

There is no such test in computer games and you sense most, if not all, mainstream titles would fail.

Between us, Roxanne and I struggle to name more than a handful of female gaming characters but can reel off lots of male titles.

“It’s strange how we discuss magazine covers and films,” Roxanne says.

“But, if you think about it, games, could be having even more effect on us because we play them and interact with them. They are not just passive.

“I think things really need to change and move in a more positive direction.”

Computer game heroines: the good, the bad, the offensive:

Lara Croft: The most recognisable female character in gaming history, spawning a franchise, in Tomb Raider.

While some saw her as a butt-kicking feminist icon she was, in truth, more famous for her physics-defying breasts and tiny khaki shorts.

She was hijacked by lads-mags and models, such as Nell McAndrew, had careers fetishising her look.

The game and film include a gratuitous shower scene.

In the latest game, Lara’s physical attributes were toned down and her character fleshed out by writer Rhianna Pratchett.

But the reboot still has Lara, minus inflatable boobs, as an attractive, alarmingly young and under-dressed girl at peril in a man’s world.

Princess Zelda: Despite having a popular gaming franchise named after her, Princess Zelda, is often reduced to a damsel in distress.

Lead character, Link, battles fantastical beasts in a mission to save her. At best, she floats alongside the playable hero casting spells to open doors.

One commentator called her: “a permanently, and iconically, passive female trophy.”

Princess Peach: A character in Nintendo's Mario franchise and sometime love interest.

Peach is decked in pink and is rarely a playable character, often imprisoned in the first act, with Mario and Luigi tasked with rescuing her.

Ms Pacman: With Pacman bringing gamers to arcade in hoards in the 1980s, developers wanted something to appeal to female gamers.

They took Pacman’s basic design and added ‘feminine’ indicators such as a pink bow on her head, pronounced make-up and eye-lashes.

Ms Pacman was born. The adverts for the game featured her with womanly legs, heels and a feather boa, singing in a seductive cabaret style.

Gaming by numbers:

  • There are 34.7million gamers in the UK, 55 per cent of the entire UK population.
  • 58 per cent of players in the UK are male and 42 per cent are female.
  • Only 12 per cent of game designers in Britain and 3 per cent of programmers are women.
  • In the past few years, the notion of what a game is has broadened to include mobile phones and social media, as well as those on consoles and PCs.
  • The gaming market will be worth £68 billion by 2017, an 8 per cent year on year growth.
  • Games sell more than video and music products, sales of which both fell last year.