sexism in videogames

After taking this week’s lectures, I did realize for the first time that video games have already been one of the most popular entertainment media in the world, and I was totally shocked and kind of feel sick about the representation of women and sexuality in video games. As said before I almost never play video games, so of course the topic of gender and sexuality in video games is a thing that I never thought about and the representation of women in video games is also a thing that I never paid attention of. However, after watching those videos and pictures about the representation of women in video games in this weeks’ lectures, some female figures in some videogames’ advertisements which I cannot skip each time before watching some movies and TV shows just popped up in my brain. Before I always classify those kind of video games, in which women are represented with big booms or big bums and seductive sound, as “bad” games, and thought the themes and content of those games must be something related with sexuality although maybe they are not; people who play those games are just like people are watching a r-rated film. I never talk about this with others before, so I do not it is only my own stereotype of video games, or it is a general stereotype that lots of people also have.

It seems until now that, in most video games, women are portrayed either as victims or as so called “damsel in distress”, or represented as sex objects because of their physical appearance or sexually-oriented actions. I can understand that the reason why women used to be and still are portrayed in this way is the marketing targets of video games are mainly men. But based on the recent study that Kevin mentioned in the lecture that forty percent of all game players are women, so I seriously doubt that whether or not the current marketing strategies of most video games will and should still be the good and right choices of videogame companies.

Among the video games I currently knew a little bit about from the lecture, Lara Croft in Tomb Raider is one of the popular games that not mainly and obviously gain its players through portraying Lara’s sexuality. However, as discussed in the lecture, as the simulation technology used in video games develop we currently have a hyperreal Lara in the recent version of the game which makes the physical femaleness of Lara has become more and more obvious. Lara for me is like the Jane Smith acted by Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, beautiful and sexy, who cannot only attract men’s eyes, but also women’s attention. So I would say that both “femininity”  and “masculinity” are all represented on Lara which should be one of the main reasons why this game can be so successful.