Fair Play: Gender

Even when women receive a leading role in video games, they are still influence by men. They are hyper-sexualised, whereas men are hyper-muscularised, female characters are often accentuated with increasingly revealing clothing, a prime example of both of these is Lara Croft from Tomb Raider as she as hardly any clothes and the clothes that she wears have a very hard time covering up her enlarged breasts and other sexualised features. Other stereotypes included in games were that men showed more aggression without the aid of a weapon and seemed more unaffected by violence than women. It seems ridiculous that in order for a female character to even be considered as taking the leading role she has to be subject to the fantasies of men as otherwise they will not succeed. Games lean tremendously in males favour in terms of characters, players, designers, etc and one cannot forsee that changing anytime soon.

The gender argument in video games reflects that of the culture of power in everyday life, no matter what way you look at it female characters in video games are few and far between, especially playable female characters. There was a study of 1716 video game characters and the percentages of male characters completely overshadow that of the female characters and even the non-human characters. The study found that 64% or 1106 characters were male (human), 17% or 283 were female (human) and the rest were non humans, which still numbered higher than female characters.

Mentioned in the article was how gender stereotypes were incorporated, such as male characters showing more physical aggression than female characters, whereas it was the other way round when it came to that of verbal aggression, ridicules, screaming and other behaviours that are more likely to be associated with females. Seldom do you see a main female character, Tomb Raider has been one of the few games to break this trend, not even giving you an option of choosing a male character, and yet it has been a very successful game, so why have we not seen more games like this? Truth is that the culture of power in society does not reflect that, therefore it is not reflected in video games, which can be seen as infuriating at times, yet it not only concerns women but also ethnicities as well, something that was later addressed in the article.