>—Please tell us any interesting episodes related to Miriam’s

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>—Please tell us any interesting episodes related to Miriam’s conception, and the choice to use a female protagonist.

>Igarashi: In our early planning documents, the protagonist was male, but since the titles I’ve made have sold well in America, before we started the Kickstarter, we had many discussions about what would fit the needs of the American market, and what the prevailing social climate was like there now. Americans really love tough female characters. It’s also a country where a lot of questions and problems about gender are currently being advanced, and there’s many people who believe “there’s been nothing but male heroes in video games; please make games with both genders.”

>I think having a female hero is more motivating to male gamers, and I think women would like to control a female avatar, too. Including both genders as protagonists would have been way too much work for us to handle, so we decided on making the hero a woman. But our staff is a little worried now about whether they should really include all the gross, heinous ideas they came up with when the hero was still supposed to be male. (laughs)

>Also, in those early drafts when the hero was male, we were thinking to add a rival character who would butt heads and get into heated clashes with the hero, due to differences in the way they saw things. Now that we’ve changed to a female protagonist, and that enemy rival is male, the mood of those scenes will have to change too.

Please explain to me how social justice warriors have no effect on gaming.