Have you noticed that "every" video game protagonist is a handsome light-skinned man with a strong jawline, short brown hair, and a short beard? eg. Alan Wake, Gordon Freeman, and Connor. "Pop culture critics" cite this as an example how games are serving a homogenous adolescent male power fantasy.

But I have a different theory. For those of you who don't know, there is a subreddit dedicated to female fantasies called "/r/ladyboners". It's a reddit community dedicated solely to pictures of men that women find attractive. So what do the top posts of all time in /r/ladyboners look like?

Have a look for yourself: http://www.reddit.com/r/LadyBoners/top/

Notice that first page of top posts is 99% lightly-bearded, brown-haired, muscular, handsome light-skinned men? But more specifically, have a look at the top 3 posts:

Hugh Laurie vs. Gordon Freeman

Ralph Fiennes vs. Alan Wake

Random Cop vs. Assassin's Creed

That cannot be coincidence.

You see, whenever a game features an attractive female protagonist, "pop culture critics" will say that they exist to fulfill a man's "femme fetale" fantasy. "Female heroes are there to titillate the male gamer," they will say.

By the very same logic, the reason that male protagonists appear the way they do is as a Female fantasy. "These male protagonists exist only to excite the female gamer since they are clearly designed to be the most sexy and attractive men possible." It's not surprising that game characters, models for game characters, and cosplay are frequent and popular posts.

Of course, I don't actually think that male characters are exclusively designed to sexually excite straight women and gay men. What I have established here is that the level of criticism used when attacking video games is poor at best and contradictory and useless at worst.

TL;DR – Gender Criticism of games is hopelessly one-sided as evidenced by the correspondence between game heroes and the content of the female-fantasy subreddit, /r/ladyboners.