Gender discrimination in games

Gender discrimination in games

I'd like to propose an extremely unpopular viewpoint that maybe sometimes female players bring the hate and discrimination upon themselves.

In big online games where you can chat and talk to your team members, some people have noticed a trend of females (or pretend "fake" females) using their gender to get special treatment or favours in games. No wonder some male players use this to say girls bring too much drama in games, or they need "real" players etc. Gender discrimination is a reality in the real world, but do we need more of this in the gaming world? Especially if whining, cyber-flirting or sending pictures online makes this matter worse. Female players want to be known as a good player who's a female and not just some random female who plays the game. In the readings we had this week, we looked a lot into female protagonists in games being the object of male sexual desire but some female players are actually jumping to become like this in real life. No wonder male don't take female players seriously. It takes a lot to build a good reputation but one group of people may be enough to wreck this.

This does go to show that it's right for female characters to be discriminated against, nor does it represent the big picture and the entire reason for these gender discrimination to occur but it definitely should be something to think about. If all female players play fair then it shows that female players deserve to be taken seriously.

http://wrongtarget.com/gender2012/

This website highlights some games in 2012/2013 which caused the issue of gender discrimination in games to be recognised further. However, I don't think that gender discrimination in games will be stopped anytime soon. I don't think it's realistic to think that it will stop. However, video games are becoming more and more established as a form of mainstream media, and this alone makes the issue very important. Just like the article states, obviously only ignoring this is not making matters any better. If we want the problem to improve, all of us have to be willing to take some responsibility and not tolerate this kind of discrimination. It's going to be difficult and maybe to a certain extent almost impossible to achieve but at least it's a start to trying to make things right.