This is my first post here and let me make it clear at the start I don't want to start any fights or get drawn into heated debates or anything like that.
I play Minecraft fairly often and I always noticed there were never many female skins to choose from, so I did some research on every skin pack released for the 360 that I could find. (Meaning I loaded up my 360 Minecraft and repeatedly counted through all my skin packs over and over) Feel free to make polite corrections if I missed anything, got something wrong, so on and so forth.
Skin Pack 1: 6 female skins compared to 39 male skins.
Skin Pack 2: 7 female skins to 38 male skins.
Skin Pack 3: 7 female skins to 39 male skins.
Skin Pack 4: 11 female skins to 26 male skins. In these skin packs I also made note of the non-gender specific skins, mostly the animal ones, red and blue spartan, and so on. There were 8 non-gender specific skins in this pack.
Skin Pack 5: 9 female skins to 36 male skins.
Default Skin Pack: 0 female skins to 9 male skins.
Summer of Arcade Skin Pack: 3 female skins to 12 male skins.
Halloween Charity Pack: 6 female skins to 49 male skins.
Festive Skin Pack: 2 female skins to 17 male skins with 5 non-gender specific skins included.
Birthday Skin Pack: 0 female skins with 22 male skins and 1 non-gender specific.
Battle & Beast: 12 female skins to 15 male skins with 16 non-gender specific skins.
Don't get me wrong, I love Minecraft and really do appreciate all the hard work they do with the updates and the skin packs and everything. I'm just saying as one of many girls who love to game, seeing a little more variety would be nice. Opinions, thoughts, statements, observations are all welcome, but I ask that you please keep it civil. This is nothing to fight over. I don't expect the developers to start making more female skins and I certainly won't demand it. Mostly I'm just wondering if I'm the only one who thinks so and even if I am that's fine. It won't upset me =)
After some thought maybe it might be better to have this topic instead since I'm looking for opinions.
The Ratio Is A Bit One Sided, But As Kingtut Mentioned More Dudes Play Then Dudettes, However, I Do Agree With You Kage That There Not Many. Hopefully One Day Theres Alot Of Girl GameRs ,So They Add More So They Can Play More...Keep Blocking Miss Lady!
It's good to know I'm not the only one at least so thank you for that.
You guys also make some good points with the whole more popular male characters thing and girl gamer ratio which I can understand. Honestly I have no idea how many girls actually play Minecraft and that's part of the reason I posted here.
My friend's little girl would certainly agree with you. She wouldn't play Minecraft initially because the skins in the default skin pack all made her look like a man. I'm also reasonably sure that the responses to this will generally be split by actual gender; that is, the guys won't see an issue and the girl's will. Recently, this topic came up on another thread and it even resulted in arguments that the existing skins were all not gender specific (which is, IMO, a complete load of bull). Since gender specific skins do exist at all as well as truly non-gender specific skins, I'm for making them 33.333% each regardless of the actual population breakdown of players. Alternatively, the percentage of truly non-gender specific skins could be higher; but the gender specific skins should always remain balanced with each other. Since skins can be somewhat a personal expression by the player, the girls should have the ability to select from an equal number of gender specific skins as the guys. Any player, afterall, can only use one skin at a time so the ratio of guys vs. girls who play really shouldn't come into play.
I only counted the skins which could distinctly be identified as female since some of the generic ones like soldiers do look a little confusing to me. Well, unless they had their shirt off or something like that as some of the warriors did. But even the ones that weren't a specific male character from a game or had the word Man at the end of the name like Spider Man or Iron Golem Man and so on seemed to lean more towards the male Minecraft design of things.
I know guys probably won't see much of an issue with it but I admit when I game I like for there to be an option to play as my actual gender. It sounds a bit silly and I won't refuse to play a game because of it or anything, but sometimes I just like to play as a girl.
It sounds a bit silly and I won't refuse to play a game because of it or anything, but sometimes I just like to play as a girl.
It doesn't sound silly to me at all. As I said, my friend's little girl felt/feels exactly the same way. I always felt she was perfectly justified in not wanting to play the game dressed up in a skin that she perceived made her look like a man (complete with 5-o'clock shadow and chest hair visible at the collar). I agree completely with your assessment of the default skin pack. There are only male skins in that pack.
I'm just going to throw this out there. In short, MC is meant to be as genderless as possible, a wise move, given the firestorms possible with genders and variations on the net these days.
I can't really consider Minecraft genderless when they do make it a point to add "Man" in several skin names. But as mentioned before in this thread that probably is just a marketing thing and supposed to be geared more towards what they perceive as their xbox audience. It doesn't affect how much I like the game or anything, it would just be nice to see a little more variety/balance.
Some of them I can understand why they might be only male like the Enderman Man and some of the mobs. But others seem like they could easily have a female counterpart. It would be nice to have as many choices when it came to female skins is what I'm really trying to get at. The choice more-so than design.
I would love it! I was super stoked when I saw the Flower Girl skin today with skin pack 5 and my best friend got the Cat Eared Girl skin. Those two girl skins were the only cute ones we have ever really liked. I wish they made more female skins especially with long hair.
Also not to mention most are locked! We need some long haired cute female skins who aren't all locked.
It is true MC is more a guy game but hey, don't leave us girl gamers out I'm sure there are plenty more then some may know but knowing some girls they may not want anyone to know in real life they play or whatever.
I love Minecraft and I don't really care if people I know or don't know do know I play it. My friend on the other hand kinda cares, only her other friend knows. But ya, I love it and it's kind of sad not seeing a little more females skins that are decent looking.
I am proud to be a gamer, I don't really care what people say about games. I like it and that's all that's too it, I have my hobbies and free time and they have theirs. I also am not demanding female skins, I just wish they had more...again long (even medium haired) cute looking, unlocked female skins.
So how would an Enderwoman look different from an Enderman?
What sex is a creeper in a suit?
That's kind of what I meant when I talked about genders and mobs. An Enderwoman would probably look a tad silly. Creeper in a suit doesn't have a confirmed gender to my knowledge,
And indeed Emerald99, we can keep wishing and playing Minecraft as much as we want. =)
In my family there are 3 female minecrafters (wife, mother-in-law, daughter and 3 male (myself and 2 sons), so I have heard some complaints about the lack of female skins. My wife bought two skin packs just to get more of a selection for the three of them.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Always remember the early bird catches the worm....
However the flipside of that is the early worm gets clobbered!
[url=http://samlancashire.com/quiz/creeper][/url
I'm another one who would like to see more female skins. I don't care if Minecraft is meant to be genderless, I like girly things I also bought skin packs just for the girly ones.
Y'know, no matter what skin I use in Minecraft, it isn't going to look like me.
I have fingers.
I am not built of rectangles.
I am analog.
The best artist in the world could make a skin based on all-around photographs of me, and it still wouldn't look like me.
So I don't particularly care if the default skin (or any other skin) looks like any aspect of my RL appearance, because whether it matches me for skin color or sex (by the way, given that I've been mistaken for the opposite sex IRL, how exactly am I supposed to define this in a Minecraft skin?) or anything else, because no matter what, it's still not going to look like me. If it did, we wouldn't be playing Minecraft. (and if I looked like any Minecraft toon, I'd have a lot bigger problems than what the skins were ... kind of like how, if a Band-Aid's shade of "flesh" really matches your hide, you need the paramedics, not a Band-Aid)
I also decided to look at a representative skin pack's listed contents to see if the OP was correct. Since she said the Birthday Skin Pack had 0 female skins and only 1 non-specific skin, I chose that one. I categorized them into several groups: Male-specific based on attributes (Steve's apparent 5-o'clock shadow), male-specific based on the word "man" in the name, generic, and female.
They broke down like this:
Male (all variants on the default character):
Party Steve
Party Herobrine
Steve Creeper Boxhead
Creeper Steve Boxhead
Nominally male (i.e., male by name only):
Party Pig Man
Party Cow Man
Party Squid Man
Party Enderman
Top Hat Sheep Man
Mooshroom Man
Birthday Present Man
Slime Man
Birthday Cake Man
Blaze Man
EnderDragon Man
Generic:
Party Creeper
Cake Zombie
Party Pig Zombie
Party Skeleton
Party Snow Golem
Party Iron Golem
Farmer Villager
Female:
Wolf with Collar
--------
The wolves can have puppies, so that makes them female. (there are all-female species of lizards and salamanders; I assume the biology is something similar) Most if not all of the "nominally male" category could have been named "squid person", etc., with no changes; I suspect "man" was used here in its generic sense, especially given that there may be translation issues involved. Were it not for the word "man", then the pig, cow, sheep, and mooshroom "men" would be female -- pigs and sheep are for the same reason that wolves are, and cows and mooshrooms also give milk. (By the way, "Cow Man" is a bit confusing, since cows are by definition female, and the ones in Minecraft definitely are as shown by their milk and breeding potential, so how can one be a "man" in the sense of male? At least, shouldn't that be "Bull Man"?)
And some of the rest ... "Birthday Present Man" could just as well be called "Birthday Present Woman" or "Birthday Present Alien" ... the thing is made of a stack of birthday present boxes. "Slime Man" could be "Slime Woman" or "Slime Non-gendered-being" because he/she/it/whatever is just a stack of slimes.
So I'm really not sure how she got 22 male skins for that pack. Wrapped presents? Snow golems? Creepers? Skeletons? Seriously, skeletons? They're just bones!
I don't care if my toon looks like a prettyprettyprincess or an untextured block or Herobrine. I'm not looking at it. I accept that some people do care, but then we have to look at it numerically. The basic purpose of skins is to make it possible to visually differentiate between players in a multi-player game, so everyone doesn't look exactly the same. Let's say for the sake of argument that about 80% of the people playing multi-player games are male. So, on a server with 50 players, there would be a need for 40 distinct skins for the male players and only 10 for the female players, if everyone wants to have a unique skin. Even assuming that female players wouldn't use any skin with "man" in its name like the Enderman, there are still plenty of options.
And if we do make decisions based on names, like said Enderman, what about, say, "Vampire Girl"? Can nobody over the age of 16 use that one? And what if they're not vampires IRL? The difference between male and female is a lot smaller than the difference between human and creeper (even if creepers existed) so why would someone, male or female, use a creeper skin but not a human skin that looks like the opposite sex? They feel more like a mindless explosive monster than another human being?
Getting all philosophical here, I suspect this comes from the modern substitution of television for books. When you read a book, you are the viewpoint character. In a Sherlock Holmes story, you're experiencing it from (usually) Watson's point of view. You are Watson. Watching TV, you're looking at everything from the outside. Even in a dramatization of, say, Copper Beeches, you're observing what goes on from a third-party perspective. You're not Watson; you're an outside observer watching Watson watching Holmes. So what he looks like matters a lot more than it does in text. I grew up reading books (my parents weren't much into TV) so I have "been" Tom Swift and Nancy Drew, Jack Holloway and Zelde M'Tana, and thousands of other people, most of whom looked very little like me. I had some major socialization issues (long story) which is probably why I never learned the lesson that someone has to be exactly like what I see in the mirror to matter. Yes, the whole idea of "identity politics" baffles me; why should someone who looks like me be better suited to represent me than someone who thinks like me? Due, again, to the emphasis on textual over visual fiction, I developed a focus on the internal rather than the external. And, frankly, I think that more people need to try to look at things from that point of view. (yeah, of course I think my way of doing things is right; if I didn't, I'd do them differently!) We place too much emphasis on appearances. The external overwhelms the internal.
With that in mind, yes, I do believe that there should be more female skins. Myself, I only use gender-neutral ones (like and EnderDragon and Tamed Wolf skins), as I don't like any of the female skins. Yes, most skins seem to be from various games, but why can't 4J try to get some protagonists from games with women? Even side characters would be better than none..
A good example of them trying to get more female skins would be them putting in a Cortana skin (from Halo, for those who don't know).
Y'know, no matter what skin I use in Minecraft, it isn't going to look like me.
I have fingers.
I am not built of rectangles.
I am analog.
The best artist in the world could make a skin based on all-around photographs of me, and it still wouldn't look like me.
So I don't particularly care if the default skin (or any other skin) looks like any aspect of my RL appearance, because whether it matches me for skin color or sex (by the way, given that I've been mistaken for the opposite sex IRL, how exactly am I supposed to define this in a Minecraft skin?) or anything else, because no matter what, it's still not going to look like me. If it did, we wouldn't be playing Minecraft. (and if I looked like any Minecraft toon, I'd have a lot bigger problems than what the skins were ... kind of like how, if a Band-Aid's shade of "flesh" really matches your hide, you need the paramedics, not a Band-Aid)
I also decided to look at a representative skin pack's listed contents to see if the OP was correct. Since she said the Birthday Skin Pack had 0 female skins and only 1 non-specific skin, I chose that one. I categorized them into several groups: Male-specific based on attributes (Steve's apparent 5-o'clock shadow), male-specific based on the word "man" in the name, generic, and female.
They broke down like this:
Male (all variants on the default character):
Party Steve
Party Herobrine
Steve Creeper Boxhead
Creeper Steve Boxhead
Nominally male (i.e., male by name only):
Party Pig Man
Party Cow Man
Party Squid Man
Party Enderman
Top Hat Sheep Man
Mooshroom Man
Birthday Present Man
Slime Man
Birthday Cake Man
Blaze Man
EnderDragon Man
Generic:
Party Creeper
Cake Zombie
Party Pig Zombie
Party Skeleton
Party Snow Golem
Party Iron Golem
Farmer Villager
Female:
Wolf with Collar
--------
The wolves can have puppies, so that makes them female. (there are all-female species of lizards and salamanders; I assume the biology is something similar) Most if not all of the "nominally male" category could have been named "squid person", etc., with no changes; I suspect "man" was used here in its generic sense, especially given that there may be translation issues involved. Were it not for the word "man", then the pig, cow, sheep, and mooshroom "men" would be female -- pigs and sheep are for the same reason that wolves are, and cows and mooshrooms also give milk. (By the way, "Cow Man" is a bit confusing, since cows are by definition female, and the ones in Minecraft definitely are as shown by their milk and breeding potential, so how can one be a "man" in the sense of male? At least, shouldn't that be "Bull Man"?)
And some of the rest ... "Birthday Present Man" could just as well be called "Birthday Present Woman" or "Birthday Present Alien" ... the thing is made of a stack of birthday present boxes. "Slime Man" could be "Slime Woman" or "Slime Non-gendered-being" because he/she/it/whatever is just a stack of slimes.
So I'm really not sure how she got 22 male skins for that pack. Wrapped presents? Snow golems? Creepers? Skeletons? Seriously, skeletons? They're just bones!
I don't care if my toon looks like a prettyprettyprincess or an untextured block or Herobrine. I'm not looking at it. I accept that some people do care, but then we have to look at it numerically. The basic purpose of skins is to make it possible to visually differentiate between players in a multi-player game, so everyone doesn't look exactly the same. Let's say for the sake of argument that about 80% of the people playing multi-player games are male. So, on a server with 50 players, there would be a need for 40 distinct skins for the male players and only 10 for the female players, if everyone wants to have a unique skin. Even assuming that female players wouldn't use any skin with "man" in its name like the Enderman, there are still plenty of options.
And if we do make decisions based on names, like said Enderman, what about, say, "Vampire Girl"? Can nobody over the age of 16 use that one? And what if they're not vampires IRL? The difference between male and female is a lot smaller than the difference between human and creeper (even if creepers existed) so why would someone, male or female, use a creeper skin but not a human skin that looks like the opposite sex? They feel more like a mindless explosive monster than another human being?
Getting all philosophical here, I suspect this comes from the modern substitution of television for books. When you read a book, you are the viewpoint character. In a Sherlock Holmes story, you're experiencing it from (usually) Watson's point of view. You are Watson. Watching TV, you're looking at everything from the outside. Even in a dramatization of, say, Copper Beeches, you're observing what goes on from a third-party perspective. You're not Watson; you're an outside observer watching Watson watching Holmes. So what he looks like matters a lot more than it does in text. I grew up reading books (my parents weren't much into TV) so I have "been" Tom Swift and Nancy Drew, Jack Holloway and Zelde M'Tana, and thousands of other people, most of whom looked very little like me. I had some major socialization issues (long story) which is probably why I never learned the lesson that someone has to be exactly like what I see in the mirror to matter. Yes, the whole idea of "identity politics" baffles me; why should someone who looks like me be better suited to represent me than someone who thinks like me? Due, again, to the emphasis on textual over visual fiction, I developed a focus on the internal rather than the external. And, frankly, I think that more people need to try to look at things from that point of view. (yeah, of course I think my way of doing things is right; if I didn't, I'd do them differently!) We place too much emphasis on appearances. The external overwhelms the internal.
I play Minecraft.
I knit.
I fix cars.
I cook.
I build computers.
I sew.
Am I male or female?
Does it matter?
I just have to say, in reference to your observations about the animals, that when Minecraft was originally created, the animals were designed to have qualities from both genders of whatever animal the were. Notch wanted it to be gender-neutral. That said, the wolf skin can't really be considered female, nor can the cow skin be considered male in anything other than name.
I play Minecraft fairly often and I always noticed there were never many female skins to choose from, so I did some research on every skin pack released for the 360 that I could find. (Meaning I loaded up my 360 Minecraft and repeatedly counted through all my skin packs over and over) Feel free to make polite corrections if I missed anything, got something wrong, so on and so forth.
Skin Pack 1: 6 female skins compared to 39 male skins.
Skin Pack 2: 7 female skins to 38 male skins.
Skin Pack 3: 7 female skins to 39 male skins.
Skin Pack 4: 11 female skins to 26 male skins. In these skin packs I also made note of the non-gender specific skins, mostly the animal ones, red and blue spartan, and so on. There were 8 non-gender specific skins in this pack.
Skin Pack 5: 9 female skins to 36 male skins.
Default Skin Pack: 0 female skins to 9 male skins.
Summer of Arcade Skin Pack: 3 female skins to 12 male skins.
Halloween Charity Pack: 6 female skins to 49 male skins.
Festive Skin Pack: 2 female skins to 17 male skins with 5 non-gender specific skins included.
Birthday Skin Pack: 0 female skins with 22 male skins and 1 non-gender specific.
Battle & Beast: 12 female skins to 15 male skins with 16 non-gender specific skins.
Don't get me wrong, I love Minecraft and really do appreciate all the hard work they do with the updates and the skin packs and everything. I'm just saying as one of many girls who love to game, seeing a little more variety would be nice. Opinions, thoughts, statements, observations are all welcome, but I ask that you please keep it civil. This is nothing to fight over. I don't expect the developers to start making more female skins and I certainly won't demand it. Mostly I'm just wondering if I'm the only one who thinks so and even if I am that's fine. It won't upset me =)
After some thought maybe it might be better to have this topic instead since I'm looking for opinions.
Any are appreciated =)
Relaxed Survival Community Realm (NO KIDS)
But thanks for letting me know what you think =)
You guys also make some good points with the whole more popular male characters thing and girl gamer ratio which I can understand. Honestly I have no idea how many girls actually play Minecraft and that's part of the reason I posted here.
I know guys probably won't see much of an issue with it but I admit when I game I like for there to be an option to play as my actual gender. It sounds a bit silly and I won't refuse to play a game because of it or anything, but sometimes I just like to play as a girl.
It doesn't sound silly to me at all. As I said, my friend's little girl felt/feels exactly the same way. I always felt she was perfectly justified in not wanting to play the game dressed up in a skin that she perceived made her look like a man (complete with 5-o'clock shadow and chest hair visible at the collar). I agree completely with your assessment of the default skin pack. There are only male skins in that pack.
Admittedly when I posted this I was worried I might incite some kind of Minecraft sexist flame war or something.
Some of them I can understand why they might be only male like the Enderman Man and some of the mobs. But others seem like they could easily have a female counterpart. It would be nice to have as many choices when it came to female skins is what I'm really trying to get at. The choice more-so than design.
And thank you both for your replies and opinions.
Also not to mention most are locked! We need some long haired cute female skins who aren't all locked.
It is true MC is more a guy game but hey, don't leave us girl gamers out I'm sure there are plenty more then some may know but knowing some girls they may not want anyone to know in real life they play or whatever.
I myself am proud to be a girl gamer and a lover of Minecraft. It's awesome to hear from girls who feel the same. ^^
I am proud to be a gamer, I don't really care what people say about games. I like it and that's all that's too it, I have my hobbies and free time and they have theirs. I also am not demanding female skins, I just wish they had more...again long (even medium haired) cute looking, unlocked female skins.
girl can wish right?
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Retired StaffWhat sex is a creeper in a suit?
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
That's kind of what I meant when I talked about genders and mobs. An Enderwoman would probably look a tad silly. Creeper in a suit doesn't have a confirmed gender to my knowledge,
And indeed Emerald99, we can keep wishing and playing Minecraft as much as we want. =)
However the flipside of that is the early worm gets clobbered!
[url=http://samlancashire.com/quiz/creeper]
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Retired StaffI have fingers.
I am not built of rectangles.
I am analog.
The best artist in the world could make a skin based on all-around photographs of me, and it still wouldn't look like me.
So I don't particularly care if the default skin (or any other skin) looks like any aspect of my RL appearance, because whether it matches me for skin color or sex (by the way, given that I've been mistaken for the opposite sex IRL, how exactly am I supposed to define this in a Minecraft skin?) or anything else, because no matter what, it's still not going to look like me. If it did, we wouldn't be playing Minecraft. (and if I looked like any Minecraft toon, I'd have a lot bigger problems than what the skins were ... kind of like how, if a Band-Aid's shade of "flesh" really matches your hide, you need the paramedics, not a Band-Aid)
I also decided to look at a representative skin pack's listed contents to see if the OP was correct. Since she said the Birthday Skin Pack had 0 female skins and only 1 non-specific skin, I chose that one. I categorized them into several groups: Male-specific based on attributes (Steve's apparent 5-o'clock shadow), male-specific based on the word "man" in the name, generic, and female.
They broke down like this:
Male (all variants on the default character):
Party Steve
Party Herobrine
Steve Creeper Boxhead
Creeper Steve Boxhead
Nominally male (i.e., male by name only):
Party Pig Man
Party Cow Man
Party Squid Man
Party Enderman
Top Hat Sheep Man
Mooshroom Man
Birthday Present Man
Slime Man
Birthday Cake Man
Blaze Man
EnderDragon Man
Generic:
Party Creeper
Cake Zombie
Party Pig Zombie
Party Skeleton
Party Snow Golem
Party Iron Golem
Farmer Villager
Female:
Wolf with Collar
--------
The wolves can have puppies, so that makes them female. (there are all-female species of lizards and salamanders; I assume the biology is something similar) Most if not all of the "nominally male" category could have been named "squid person", etc., with no changes; I suspect "man" was used here in its generic sense, especially given that there may be translation issues involved. Were it not for the word "man", then the pig, cow, sheep, and mooshroom "men" would be female -- pigs and sheep are for the same reason that wolves are, and cows and mooshrooms also give milk. (By the way, "Cow Man" is a bit confusing, since cows are by definition female, and the ones in Minecraft definitely are as shown by their milk and breeding potential, so how can one be a "man" in the sense of male? At least, shouldn't that be "Bull Man"?)
And some of the rest ... "Birthday Present Man" could just as well be called "Birthday Present Woman" or "Birthday Present Alien" ... the thing is made of a stack of birthday present boxes. "Slime Man" could be "Slime Woman" or "Slime Non-gendered-being" because he/she/it/whatever is just a stack of slimes.
So I'm really not sure how she got 22 male skins for that pack. Wrapped presents? Snow golems? Creepers? Skeletons? Seriously, skeletons? They're just bones!
I don't care if my toon looks like a prettyprettyprincess or an untextured block or Herobrine. I'm not looking at it. I accept that some people do care, but then we have to look at it numerically. The basic purpose of skins is to make it possible to visually differentiate between players in a multi-player game, so everyone doesn't look exactly the same. Let's say for the sake of argument that about 80% of the people playing multi-player games are male. So, on a server with 50 players, there would be a need for 40 distinct skins for the male players and only 10 for the female players, if everyone wants to have a unique skin. Even assuming that female players wouldn't use any skin with "man" in its name like the Enderman, there are still plenty of options.
And if we do make decisions based on names, like said Enderman, what about, say, "Vampire Girl"? Can nobody over the age of 16 use that one? And what if they're not vampires IRL? The difference between male and female is a lot smaller than the difference between human and creeper (even if creepers existed) so why would someone, male or female, use a creeper skin but not a human skin that looks like the opposite sex? They feel more like a mindless explosive monster than another human being?
Getting all philosophical here, I suspect this comes from the modern substitution of television for books. When you read a book, you are the viewpoint character. In a Sherlock Holmes story, you're experiencing it from (usually) Watson's point of view. You are Watson. Watching TV, you're looking at everything from the outside. Even in a dramatization of, say, Copper Beeches, you're observing what goes on from a third-party perspective. You're not Watson; you're an outside observer watching Watson watching Holmes. So what he looks like matters a lot more than it does in text. I grew up reading books (my parents weren't much into TV) so I have "been" Tom Swift and Nancy Drew, Jack Holloway and Zelde M'Tana, and thousands of other people, most of whom looked very little like me. I had some major socialization issues (long story) which is probably why I never learned the lesson that someone has to be exactly like what I see in the mirror to matter. Yes, the whole idea of "identity politics" baffles me; why should someone who looks like me be better suited to represent me than someone who thinks like me? Due, again, to the emphasis on textual over visual fiction, I developed a focus on the internal rather than the external. And, frankly, I think that more people need to try to look at things from that point of view. (yeah, of course I think my way of doing things is right; if I didn't, I'd do them differently!) We place too much emphasis on appearances. The external overwhelms the internal.
I play Minecraft.
I knit.
I fix cars.
I cook.
I build computers.
I sew.
Am I male or female?
Does it matter?
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
http://www.theesa.co.../gameplayer.asp
With that in mind, yes, I do believe that there should be more female skins. Myself, I only use gender-neutral ones (like and EnderDragon and Tamed Wolf skins), as I don't like any of the female skins. Yes, most skins seem to be from various games, but why can't 4J try to get some protagonists from games with women? Even side characters would be better than none..
A good example of them trying to get more female skins would be them putting in a Cortana skin (from Halo, for those who don't know).
I just have to say, in reference to your observations about the animals, that when Minecraft was originally created, the animals were designed to have qualities from both genders of whatever animal the were. Notch wanted it to be gender-neutral. That said, the wolf skin can't really be considered female, nor can the cow skin be considered male in anything other than name.