It is a common stereotype that women who like to play videogames are considered a ‘lad’s girl’, a girl different from other girls, and a rare discovery. However, statistics show that female gamers are not uncommon. In 2015 a report released by Pew Research Center [1]reported that although findings had shown an equal number of American men and women played videogames, only 3.3% of those games starred female protagonists. In 2019, Statista articulated that 46% of all gamers in the US were female.
Nevertheless, every time I tell someone that I enjoy playing videogames, I am met with shock and surprise. Additionally, when faced with this statistic, male gamers often try to impose distinctions, on the one hand claiming games such as The Sims, Animal Crossing or mobile word/puzzle games (an area mostly driven by a female consumer base) are considered fake gaming or ‘girl games’. ‘Proper games’, on the other hand, include violent first-person shooters or adventure-based games that involve a minimum of 30 hours to complete. Yet again, statistics demonstrate that there is a relatively equal divide between male and female consumers of these ‘proper’ games.
Indeed, as an avid gamer myself, when telling people I ‘game’ I am usually faced with various sexist stereotypes:
Women are bad players and will only play on easy.
The idea that there is a right way to game, and that right way being that it must be as difficult as possible is an inherently macho/hyper-masculine assumption that places a high value on competition amongst others, establishing a hierarchy based on the difficulty of the game, implying that only ‘real’ (implicitly suggesting ‘male’) gamers can play properly. So much so that regardless if I play 10 whole games through on ‘easy’ mode in the time it takes a man to play one game on hard, I am still not considered to be gaming properly.
Women play videogames to impress men or to be more attractive to men.
The image of female gamers playing in lingerie is so common that women sexualised the instant they call themselves gamers. The picture is created intending to appeal to men. Listen, the average cost of a console is around $200, many coming in at much higher price points depending on how decked out they are, with games averaging an additional $60. That is a very expensive attraction technique. And on top of that, it is time-consuming. Any gaming session generally spans between 2-5 hours for me. The notion that I am dedicating that much money and time to impress someone is ludicrous, regardless of what I am wearing.
And finally, which we have already touched upon, that women only play ‘girl games’.
I will be the first to admit that I love, and have dropped a significant amount of money on, The Sims and its numerous extension packs. And while I will not be one to generally pick a first-person shooter, my games of choice often involve stabbing people through the neck (Assassin’s Creed) or shooting the heads off some zombies or mercenaries (The Last of Us or Uncharted). My choice of games depends highly on narrative and story, which can vary from intense, violent and hardcore to calm, relaxing and gentle. Even as children, parents are more comfortable letting young boys consume and play games of a violent nature than they are girls, perpetuating the belief that videogames are intended for males.
So, the real question is where is the gender bias in videogames coming from? In the early 1960s when the videogame industry was starting, statistics and focus groups concluded that men were more likely to experiment with new technologies and therefore centred men as the target group. However, contemporary consumer research suggests that this is no longer the case, as seen above. And yet, this is wildly ignored by game developers, who, along with many male gamers, are reluctant to feature female protagonists at risk of alienating men.
Implicit in this opinion is the underlying generic masculine whereby a male protagonist is considered to be able to represent a universal experience whereas that of a woman is a niche. Sarah Ditum, rightly called out the weakness of such an argument, stating:
‘You’ve played games as a blue hedgehog. As a cybernetically augmented space marine. As a sodding dragon-tamer. . . but the idea that women can be protagonists with an inner life and active nature is somehow beyond your imaginative capacities?’[2]
This response emerged from the 2014 controversy when Ubisoft declared that playable female characters were too much work. Creative director Alex Amancio, provided this, frankly ridiculous excuse,
‘It’s double the animations, it’s double the voices, all that stuff and double the visual assets. Especially because we have customisable assassins. It was really a lot of extra production work. It’s not like we could cut our main character, so the only logical option, the only option we had, was to cut the female avatar.’[3]
For a game that is constantly praised on its detail-oriented, impressive graphics and world-building of real-life cities, this is laughable to think it is beyond their abilities. Therefore, the only other conclusion is that female characters aren’t considered worthy of such an effort. As Criado Perez states,
‘[t]he fact is that worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can’t help but be biased against women. By default.’[4]
Part of that is, additionally, because, if women characters were to be portrayed, it is most often inevitable that they would be scantily clad, with jutting hips to emphasise their ‘femaleness’. In other words, by default, heroes are expected to be male, and females are divergent of the norms and need to be distinctly female to be represented.
Many games have come out in recent years that centre a female character, such as Jodie in Beyond Two Souls, Ellie in The Last of Us II, Jill Valentine in Resident Evil, Lara Croft in Tomb Raider and famously, Metroid, where players were subjected to a final surprise at the end of the game when it was revealed that Samus Aran was, in fact, a woman. It was considered the ultimate surprise because the natural assumption was that Aran was undoubtedly a man. And even with these characters, the chance with finding a non-white, female protagonist seems almost impossible. If one can play as a different species, how is it alienating to play as a woman or a non-white individual?
In the case of Sonic, players do not find the non-human character alienating because at least, they can identify in the blue hedgehog, the ‘standard, unmarked gender’[5] of male. The absence of pink, or a bow that is so often the marker for a female non-human character (Coco Bandicoot, Peach and Daisy, Amy Rose) necessarily assume male as the genderless base. But of course, it is not gender-less or gender neutral.
For example, it took FIFA twenty-two years to include female players in the games, perpetuating the notion that the sport (indeed, most sports) is innately male, even though it is well known that the US male soccer team has never won a World Cup, whereas the women’s team has won four times.
The implication here is that the videogame industry, along with most areas of society, function on the belief that the base of humanity is male. Specifically, white, middle-class male. So much so that every time a game includes or features a female character, it is notable. And so much so that calls for more representation of sex, race, sexuality etc. are often resisted with accusations of PC culture and identity politics gone wild. The seemingly obvious truth, however, is that being male is also an identity and not the implicit norm, but an attitude representative of those for whom the world has been designed around. Accusations that femaleness is a niche perpetuate the centring male representation and history, failing to take account of the gender-bias that ignored and erases female accomplishments and successes.
Videogame developers hold immense power in their hands to design a world that does not ignore or forget those whose existences have been routinely erased. A chance to imagine a world where the presence of women in positions of power are not considered inequitable for those who live under the illusion that the world has achieved equality. It is more than about time that female characters are represented without thinking of them as othered humanity and alienating to society.
~S~
[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/12/15/gaming-and-gamers/
[2] https://www.kotaku.co.uk/2014/06/16/whole-assassins-creed-thing
[3] https://www.polygon.com/e3-2014/2014/6/10/5798592/assassins-creed-unity-female-assassins
[4] 17, Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Chatto & Windus, 2019.
[5] Ibid, 15
Featured Image by Alexey Savchenko on Unsplash
