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Temple Run 2 creator addresses lack of default female characters in mobile games

Scarlett Fox is now playable for free

Temple Run 2 creator addresses lack of default female characters in mobile games
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| Temple Run 2

Imangi Studios has dropped the asking price to unlock Scarlett Fox as a playable character in Temple Run 2. She will be free permanently.

The reason that Imangi has done this is to allow for a default female character as well as a default male character in the game.

This is in response to an article that the Washington Post ran back in March, written by 12-year-old Madeleine Messer.

Messer wrote about how a lot of the mobile games she and her friends played didn't have women or girls as default playable characters. It was only men or boys.

She then provided a gender breakdown of the characters in the top 50 apps at the time.

She found that 18 percent contained characters with non-identifiable gender (such as potatoes and cats). While 98 percent of the rest of the apps offered male characters and only 46 percent offered female characters.

Messer also notes that, of those 50 apps, 90 percent offered the male characters for free while only 15 percent offered female characters for free.

"Considering that the players of Temple Run, which has been downloaded more than one billion times, are 60 percent female, this system seems ridiculous," Messer noted.

Due to having its game called out specifically in that article, Imangi sought to rectify the situation. Hence, Scarlett Fox now being available for free.

So, from now on, when opening up Temple Run 2, you can choose to play as either Guy Dangerous or Scarlett Fox.

If you haven't downloaded the game yet then it's available for free on the App Store and Google Play.

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Chris Priestman
Chris Priestman
Anything eccentric, macabre, or just plain weird, is what Chris is all about. He turns the spotlight on the games that fly under the radar.