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When many think of Halo, the image of the green, armor clad Master Chief running with his assault rifle comes to mind. The image evokes a romantic appeal of space warfare; charging into battle with fellow space marines, going up against insurmountable odds and driving heavily armored vehicles to blast away a fortified position. The one thing that Halo has changed in the past few years is the notion that not all of the warfare is performed by men. The Halo series has made small steps to include women on the front lines more than any other first person shooter (FPS) or action franchise.
In a narrative sense the first Halo game didn’t prominently feature women, save for Cortana, who technically is just an artificial intelligence. Looking at it from a story perspective it seems a bit odd that women are absent in the first Halo game. An intergalactic war in which every human body is needed on the front line to defend against the Covenant? And no women decided to show up? Sure. Fortunately Bungie address this short coming through the subsequent games and books that were released afterwards. Examples include Miranda Keyes (Halo 2 and Halo 3) and Veronica Dare (ODST).
The inclusion of such prominent females in both the story and combat is a step forward for not only games, but for FPS niche. Sure, we have Joanna Dark from Perfect Dark and even Samus Aran from the recently released Other M. But it seems that these women are the exceptions and not the norms for a FPS game. Another example of this is the latest Call of Duty and Medal of Honor games, which are based around contemporary conflicts. Both titles take place in the current day or a not too distant future and we never see one female special operations soldier, not even in multiplayer.
Other games have started to bridge the gap, such as Borderlands.  Gearbox wasn’t trying to do anything special to have a women in a shoot ‘em up, it just seemed natural. This seems to be the same philosophy that Bungie worked with, especially when we first saw Kat in the Halo: Reach teaser. She wasn’t trying to be too girly, or too tough, she was giving the new guy crap and preparing for battle. This new development of the normalized woman in battle is also present in the multiplayer features as one can choose to be a man or a woman. Bungie went so far as to include a feature for a women voice during multiplayer match ups.
Bungie and the Halo series as a whole has made subtle but significant changes to their games to make women more inclusive. The addition of Keyes, Dare and now Kat have all shown that war isn’t just a novelty for women. Even with Bungie’s progress, the bigger questions remains: we will ever see a first person shooter with a female lead character who isn’t a novelty? A game that follows Dare or Kat’s adventures? Or maybe a whole new series which chronicles a female ODST? Only time will tell if women in FPS games will shoot through the glass ceiling.
