Women and Gaming

Warning: This post is on the long side.

I'm a gamer, I'll admit it, anything from old-school Mario to the newer games like Call of Duty.

One thing that has always made me a little upset is that it's mostly, well very targeted to men and this blog entry pretty much sums it up. It's hard to find blogs about gaming from a feminist perspective but I found a few. The three blog posts I read were interesting but the one about the objectification of women in video games seemed to be the most interesting.

It seems that every video game makes women appear way too sexy, we know that there are sexy women out there, but do we need to put them in costumes that show practically everything?

Let's compare characters from the fighting game Soul Calibur IV:
Here we have two female fighters:

And two male fighters:
Well there is an obvious difference between the two, the men are in full heavy armor, while the women are covered by very small pieces of fabric. Not only that but they have huge breasts, unusually huge, which are very noticeable by not only their costumes but by their fighting moves, such as jumping. It would make sense that the women would be wearing armor too or well even more clothes since they are fighting with swords. In a real life situation I doubt that any woman would wear a costume like that when fighting to the death.

The game does let you customize the characters and for a woman to be able to have relatively normal sized breasts she had to be extremely thin (possibly anorexic) which didn't make her much of a fighter due to her weight and size. If you want a medium sized fighter like the women pictured above with armor, their breast size was still very much apparent under their armor.

There are very few (positive) female protagonists in gaming, and most are very weak or have their faults.

First up is Princess Peach from the Mario Bros. series.

She has her own video game called Super Princess Peach. In this game she is the one to save Mario (for once!) from danger. The game play is very disappointing. Instead of wearing what would be considered a fighting outfit (jeans and a shirt maybe?) she wears her long gown and heels. Her powers are very limited and they are controlled by her emotions: Joy, Gloom, Rage and Calm. So this makes her either seem bipolar or going through though PMDD because she is sad one minute, sad another minute and full of rage the next!

Next up is Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider series.

Lara Croft is a very confident young woman who is much like Indiana Jones (the game was originally designed to be very similar to the Indiana Jones movies). She collects ancient artifacts and fights bullies. The downside? She of course wears extremely small shorts and has huge breasts. You would figure that a successful, confident archeologist would have no need to run around in a tight shirt and small shorts to show off her figure, but it's more appealing if she does.

And last but not least Alyx Vance

One of the most positive women I have seen in video games is Alyx from the Half Life series. In the game she is a computer savy young woman who helps the main character (Gordon Freeman) throughout the game. She's very brave, independent and caring. Why can't there be more women like her in video games? Unfortunately she is merely a sidekick in the series and only helps out Gordon in very desperate situations, it would have been great for her to have been the main character but I guess men wouldn't be interested in playing the game if that were to be the case.

So to sum things up, women in gaming need to be portrayed in a better light. Women don't need to be objectified to be able to be a part of a game. They should be portrayed as strong, independent and fierce not worried about their figure and clothes. They should look like normal women, not playboy bunnies. If women in gaming were portrayed in the manner previously stated maybe then would the gaming industry get better reviews from feminist gamers.