The Video Game Industry and the Objectification and Stereotyping of Women

A more in-depth study may look at video games from a Marxist point of view, characterizing the games as a modern day “opiate of the masses” with multi-billion dollar corporations publishing the games to keep the proletariat occupied and oblivious to their plights. A feminist may cite the standard role of female video game characters as being the “damsel in distress” and even strong female characters usually being relegated to sex symbol status.

Imagine this. You 're in the middle of a really intense, stressful, and energetic game where it 's you against four other people. You are all alone and struggling to survive and as you 're getting shot at all you hear is some ignorant teenage boy from the other team say “you won 't win... get back into the kitchen and make me a sandwich.” Now I know you might be wondering where this is heading, but this is one of the few examples that women, when playing video games, have to deal with. What many do not realize, is how sexist many can be and how rude or hurtful the things they say can be. They also do not realize that many of these problems come from teenage boys who are not allowing any female to have a chance to show how good they could potentially be or how beneficial they could be to the team or game. Sexism is a big problem in the gaming community that needs to be changed. There have been many problems involving both men and women and it 's all because of how sexist games can be or just based on how sexist people are behind their anonymous alias. On one side of the debate, many, including those who cause the sexism, say these things are said and done because they believe it will increase sales and it will get more attention to their company or game, they believe that these type of games are what gamers want or what they believe is best for their fans, and they believe that these sexist comments are just jokes and messing around. Although some could believe these things

According to several sources around 42% of the American population plays video games, and around 1.2 billion people worldwide play video games today. Gaming has become an increasingly more popular hobby since its creation. As such the medium has obviously attracted a multitude of different people and groups, all consisting of diverse backgrounds, body types, sexes, races, nationalities and the like. However, contrary to the numerous demographics video games have come to attract, it is very evident the vast majority of them do not seem to be marketed toward many of them via game characters, and their importance, if any, in a game. Video games show an overwhelming amount of white male characters, despite the many demographics they reach. Of the characters that are not white, or male, that are represented, are often represented poorly. For example, many black characters represented in video games are often characterized as vulgar, and violent. Women represented in games are often characterized as support characters, or objects of sexual desire. Considering forms of sexism, racism, and other such types of prejudices are still prominent in modern society, and these representations obviously do not help how people see these marginalized groups. Ultimately, these representations, or lack thereof, affect people in society in a number of ways, by perpetuating prejudice and harmful stereotypes.

As boys grow into men and girls grow into women the computer gaming industry begins to focus more on the male population. It is challenging to try and find a game that is not directed at men. The type of bias can simply be having a male figure that is designated as the player, this is a technique that The 7Th Guest employed, or a game that thrives on violence and has very little plot line. The one game that I came across that actually had

All people of all colors, ages and gender are represented in a similar way within the games, or do anyone stands out in all this? Someone is under-represented? How important to be represented in the media?

In her article, Shaw finds that gender is the biggest factor affecting people identifying as a gamer. Male who play video games is more likely to identify as "gamers" than Female and other players because the stereotype (male, teenage, etc.) of the gamers become

Overall, it was found from my research that even with the emergence of next-generation systems and shifting landscapes in gaming, there is still a cultural perception of the gamer as white male. There are exceptions to this, which can be seen in many commercials that challenge our expectations of what a gamer might look like and how he or she might behave. Certainly, as time goes on, it’s been found that there is an increased inclusivity in terms of who might actually appear in these commercials. Some commercials have begun to play with and tease out these representations: the commercials of Call of Duty: Ghosts, for example, that featured a wide variety of players. While representations of the gamer have mostly stayed consistent, these examples pre-empt the beginnings of a shift, as the video game industry continues to diversify.

Throughout the world women are depicted to be oversexualized among forms of media such as video games and comic books. The idea of oversexualization towards female characters is that they have been often drawn and animated in hypersexual ways. Even going as far as viewing them as a sex object, their revealing body images are eye candy through the eyes of men. Hence women found in comic books and video games are frequently emphasized by their excessive physical appearances, objectification, portrayal, and character role.

For years, the video game industry has catered almost exclusively to men and reinforced a heterosexual cis white male norm with regards to whom they portray as characters and which audiences they market toward. Walk into any toy store, and you’ll see most aisles clearly divided by gender: girls get dolls and dog collectibles while boys get racing tracks and action figures. Even toys that are marketed towards all children, like Legos, still reinforce this idea of binary gender separation: girls build princess castles, boys build space ships. Hoever, even though the products are exclusively marketed, all audiences are still targeted by the company as a whole. This is true for many different types of products, except for one huge, glaring exception: video games. While many other forms of media have mainstream activism to push their representation and inclusion along, video games aren’t often discussed in that kind of light beyond side blogs and dissertations.

Breuer et al. (2015) conducted their study in Germany to see if sexist video games produced sexist gamers. Unlike some of the previous studies, this study had a very large sample size and was conducted in three separate 'waves' (wave 1 = 4,500 gamers; wave 2 = 2,199 gamers; wave 3 = 902 gamers). Like other studies, they used a survey to measure the degree of sexism of gamers; they had utilized computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) in the study. The results of the study found that there was little to no evidence that perceived sexist video games contributed to sexist attitudes among gamers, contrary to previous studies in this field. The authors concluded there was no cultivation effect of sexist attitudes present in video games.

Looking past the blatant sexism of how females are depicted, even more disturbing is the way that many of the more popular video games appear to parallel real-life standards of normative masculinity. In Western society in particular, standards for men dictate that they must constantly strive to be successful and must compete with other men in order to reach the “top,” the most powerful position, the best paying job, the most attractive wife and family, and so on. In examining the design of video games, Soukup is quick to point out how popular games have this same “entelechial motivational system,” with players constantly striving to master the game and gain power, often so that they can dominate other players or destroy NPCs in combat, or to otherwise gain complete control of the game, at which point they have finally “beaten” it (Soukup, 165-168). These

Gender disparity in video games is a topic that both scholars and major gaming icons have discussed before. However, the topic recently resurfaced with the upsurging population of female gamers. The integration of females was a spectacle that caused a massive culture shock. Many members of the gaming community were unsure how to handle the change and took to discriminating females. While discrimination may seem unimportant, many scholars and icons believe it is a prominent factor of gender disparity: an environment which typically favors males, a hostile or “toxic” atmosphere, and repeated stereotypes all manifest certain behaviors of both genders that can cause a disparity to grow. Although some sources claim gender disparity is evident in gaming as a whole, others insist the novelty of female discrimination in video games is less prominent due to a more leveled percentage of male-to-females in gaming. However, both agreed that the competitive gaming community is a different story. Time and time again the competitive gaming community was mentioned for its exclusion of women due to biased and misogynistic members who sexualize and degrade females. These members believe women are inferiors that encroach on their territory with unskilled and seductive natures. Therefore, for the females in the gaming community, their actions will shape the future of women in the competitive gaming community. The change in female treatment is detrimental to gender disparity. Not only because

Video games have long been a medium that belonged to the sectors of the population that felt as if they did not belong in their society. They are enticing games, from the arcade games of the 80’s and 90’s, to the PC and console games of the 2000’s, to hand held games and mobile apps that have become so popular in the past decade. Everyone from children to grandparents, and stay-at-home mothers to business men play video games or have played video games in their life times. They have been used as a form of empowerment and escapism for their audiences from their inception. The audience for video games is larger now than it’s ever been. As more and more women are getting involved with gaming, both in their creation and consumption, video games are not only becoming more diverse but are becoming an ideal conduit for feminist discourse. Because video games have such a broad audience, representation matters to the consumers; seeing and playing characters both like oneself and unlike oneself help individuals better understand their society. If feminism aims to create equality among genders, video games are the best forum for doing so because video games can allow gender to be see through difference lenses (i.e. race, class, ethnicity) while being accepted in all of its varied forms.

“None of it will come as a surprise to anyone who’s remotely familiar with video games. For decades, players have been rewarded with flesh, sex and innuendo for progress in games spanning the original “Metroid” to the most recent “Grand Theft Auto.”” (Beres) The stereotype “gamer” used to be a nerdy, white, young male, in fact that image has been changing over the past couple years. Females nowadays are starting to play video games more and more but the video game industry is putting out an image of females that is just unrealistic, their bodies and or looks, their personalities and actions. Young girls could be playing the games like “Grand Theft Auto” and begin to watch the female characters and start to think and or believe that she is less than perfect in everyone else 's eyes. Young boys who play these games like “Grand Theft Auto” or “Call of Duty”, the images of the female characters have major potential to destroy their (the male 's) personal views of females. While women are not the targeted audience of action-adventure and role-playing video games. The gaming industry should have more female characters that are more realistic to women and less sexualized because women aren 't objects to be owned and the female characters on video games not only destroy females view on themselves, but also young males view’s on women.

The portrayal of men and women in video games, as in other media, is a subject of research in gender studies. This topics is discuss in terms of sexism in video gaming. Especially, women are underrepresented or use as objectification in mainstream games. Women in video games are generally, as a rule of thumb, killed, raped, abused or rescued by the male heroes. This is extremely sad to see because the role of women in society is changing compare to ten years ago. Women has been proven themselves to be stronger and tough in different fields such as sports, politics, education but the representation hasn’t change.