Women In Video Games

Women and Video Games The way women are sexually portrayed in video games is pathetic. The lack of effort to change this is disappointing, and sadly women’s portrayal in video games is an accurate representation of how this country view women. By portraying women negatively in video games, designers are adding to the normalization of certain gender roles. From early on in video games women have been over sexualized, current games have not changed the view of women, and kids are being misinformed on how women should be in the real world.
Video games as early as 1986 represented women sexually. Metroid, the 8-bit game on the Nintendo Entertainment System was one of the first games to sexualize a women. It did this by removing Metroid’s armor
at the end of the game if you finished in a certain time, and showing that it was a girl the whole time. This wouldn’t be bad if she wasn’t wearing a red bikini in one of the big reveal (Romano). Metroid’s pixelated body in a swim suit was shown to anyone who could get their hands on the game and beat it in a certain time. Based on how quickly you beat the game you would see more of Samus without her armor. According to gamefaqs.com Metroid sold 1.35 million copies (zoogelio). That is a ton of people that could would have been exposed to this game and the unarmored Samus. The message this is sending is that women can be exposed to anyone and its fine. Also, this normalizes the sexual depiction of women in video games for future generations of gamers and game designers.
Games have changed a lot over the years, but the difference in women’s portrayal have not advanced much. Newer video games have a more realistic view of women, but still do not accurately represent them. Women are still being viewed as weaker and more fragile. They are not main characters in most games and usually have unrealistic body type. “Males were more likely to be heroes and main characters, use more weapons, have more abilities, and were more muscular and powerful. Females were more often supplemental characters, more attractive, sexy, and innocent, and also wore more revealing clothing” (Miller and Summers). In every gaming system there are multiple examples of women as being treated second hand to men. The game GTA V is a very popular video game that won Rockstar Games 2013 game of the year (IMDb.com), and is known for its oversexualized women. There are women prostitutes you can pick up and strip clubs that you can visit to watch animated women preform. The word women is intentionally being used to criticize the game, because there are no male prostitutes or strip clubs. There are no female playable characters either, so if a girl is to play this game she has to be a man and does not have the option to see a CGI of a male stripper or prostitute. These shouldn’t be something that is included in the game period, but it is and it excludes any non-hetero, non-male game. The Wii is supposedly a very family friendly, but it recently put out a game called Bayonetta that is very inappropriate. The main character is a women and so is the secondary character. They are demon fighters and are pretty badass, but every noise that comes from them is sexual. Every move that they make shows an aspect of how curved their body is and how flexible they are. They wear make-up, earrings, and high heels. Also, they wear a full body leather suit with holes in it to show parts of their body off. No game system is safe from the sexism of men.
One thing that is over emphasized with women in video games, where they are actually a playable character, are the “jiggle physics” of their breast. Jiggle physics defined by urbandictionary.com is “the art of representing the beauty of the bouncing bosom in a dynamic three-dimensional digital environment” (Anarcholis). Women’s breast in video games are usually developed as two gigantic balls that bounce with the slightest movement. It is as if their breast are not affected by gravity. Also, the clothes that are used to cover up their anti-gravity breast are inadequate. From what I have seen women tend to only wear enough clothes to hold their weapons and cover their lady bits. No matter where they are at they only have on bare minimal clothing. As a gamer I usually want my character to have clothes so that they are protected from the things that they fight, but women tend to have an invisible shield around them so that they can wear seemingly nothing and be fine.
Women are usually not in video games as lead characters.
If there is a women in a video game she is in danger, or she is just there to fill up space. She is usually presented as weaker, less capable, and undesirable. According to the conclusions drawn by Berrin Beasley & Tracy Collins Standley women appeared in games less than characters of “indeterminate gender”. Which means there were more animals and aliens in video games than women for the top two consoles (Beasley and Standley). Women make up half of the world’s population, yet no one considered that it should be pretty often that they appear in the game world. The easy fix for this is to create more women in video games. Yet, game designers avoid putting women in games and when they are in a game they are made as second rate. In reference to video games Beasley and Standley’s studies showed that, “Male participants reported less confidence in female physical capabilities, in comparison to male physical capabilities…” (Behm-Morawitz and Mastro). Males believed that females were not as capable as themselves because a video game did not present these two genders equally. If games have an effect on the way people view others, and we only represent women in a negative way in video games, what could the possible outcome
be?
Kids are playing games from a young age and if they see women with non-realistic breast, small amounts of clothing, and always needing to be saved by men, then they will grow up believing these things about women.
Also, women would see other women as a background character to men and will learn to be more submissive. Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz and Dana Mastro studied the effects that sexualized female video game characters have on “female self-concept” (808-823). According to them, “playing a sexualized female video game character negatively affected feelings of self-efficacy in women, compared to playing no video game character” (Behm-Morawitz and Mastro). Playing video games made girls think less of themselves in respects to their confidence on their abilities to succeed in certain situations. Kids are being brought up in a world that hates women and things need to
change.
In conclusion, what needs to be done first is to bring this to the mainstream and make sure that it is known how bad it is to sexualize ladies. Huffingtonpost.ca talks about the reveal of the new StreetFighter 5 game where one of the characters was made with extremely bad ‘jiggle phsyics’. The gamers took to Twitter and discussed how ridiculous she was created, and said that she needs to be changed (Ferreras). So, I believe that we are becoming more aware of how ridicules and unnecessary it is to have women presented like this. The fact is that it is still present even in newer video games. If more people address it and voice their views of this problem game designers will start to change their techniques to satisfy the public’s needs.