It’s been a while since anyone dared challenge the might of the @rcade but finally a new challenger has bravely stepped forth and she plans on bulldozing her way right through the @rcade office!
Meet Kayleigh Testor, our Player 1.
Kayleigh claims she has been playing video games since before she could walk and collecting manga before she could even read. Her love for the world of gamers and geeks holds no bounds… except for girls and gaming. Here to put her side forward Kayleigh challenges the @rcade to another wholesome debate, this time: Has the role of women changed in the video game world?
Player 1 – Girl Powerless
For years the portrayal of women in video games has been the subject of much controversy. Women tend to be portrayed in the wrong light in video games, be it through objectification and sexualisation or as helpless damsels in distress.
How many games can you think of that require the player to rescue a captured princess? I, personally, find too many come to mind. Near all games in the much loved Mario series revolve around the player trying to hunt down Bowser to rescue Princess Peach, whom Bowser has kidnapped. The theme of rescuing a damsel in distress is present in many, many games, yet how many games can you recall having to save a male character in the same situation? Saving the president from a group of terrorists is hardly the same as rescuing a poor defenceless princess from a tower.
The gaming industry nowadays objectifies female characters to no end. In some games I find that female characters are only around as eye candy and nothing more. In some cases it wouldn’t be hard to think that the sole purpose of the game is to display half naked women, such as in Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball.
In modern times there has been an increasing trend for women to be used as the sole protagonists in video games, such as in the Tomb Raider and Perfect Dark series. These games tend to be violent and objectify the female characters in question, very few of these games having physically realistic characters or lacking in tight or revealing clothing. A more recent example of this would be Bayonetta; her costumes ranging from her standard tight leather outfit to schoolgirl, cheerleader and geisha outfits. When she performs certain actions she strikes suggestive poses and the sound of a camera is to be heard. And as if all of that weren’t enough there are multiple scenes in the game where she loses her all her clothes in order to turn her hair into a large summoned demon. Charming.
The distinction between male and female gamers tends to irk me. In particular I don’t like the term ‘gamer girl’, which for some reason has its own Wikipedia page. We’re gamers, we’re girls, and just because we are these things doesn’t mean they have to be tied in together and we most certainly don’t need to join societies or Facebook groups dedicated to being a female gamer. Gaming is a hobby that should be completely unaffected by gender which, unfortunately, isn’t the case.
Some female gamers do nothing to help the situation either. I’m sure you’ve all come across the stereotypical ‘Yeah-I’m-a-girl-but-I’ll-kick-your-ass!’ kind of female gamer before, who loves to tell everyone how much she loves video games and remind you that she’s a girl, spending more of her time trying to get attention in this manner than actually play video games. Then there are the majority of other female gamers, regular people, who stealthily blend in with the rest of society.
Some of you female gamers out there may have, on a number of occasions been told that ‘you don’t look like a gamer’. Why? Is it because we’re not unattractive, shower, don’t have a tri-force tramp stamp and don’t wear game related t-shirts 24/7? (Okay, some of us do, but not all!) Just as with male gamers we female gamers come in all various shapes and sizes, we don’t need to wear our love of video games on our sleeves to enjoy gaming. Recently I learned of a service called GameCrush, in which you can pay to play with an attractive female gamer, which I find objectifies female gamers. Why leave it at just the characters in the games, right?
Views tend to be wrong in regards to female characters and female gamers alike; games developers seem to be under the false impression that you can’t have a popular female character without sexualisation and objectification thrown into the mix, and society seems to think that if you’re a girl and you don’t scream your love of it and are attractive then you can’t really be a gamer. Prove me wrong.
VERSUS
the @rcade – Girl Power
You are not to blame if you have ogled at the rather curvaceous and sublimely pixelated body of Lara Croft or Joanna Dark – women are beautiful creatures and so too are the digital girls gamers come face to face with every day.
Admittedly this admiration for the female form can be taken to the extreme by some gaming companies and developers and many critics both male and female have risen up in arms, bras and lighter fluid at the ready BUT in the last few years of gaming history there has been a shift in the way women are portrayed in games and the way games cater to women.
Take a look at some of the more recent female game characters…
Faith Connors is a ‘Runner’ a courier of highly secret and priceless information, one of the fastest and agile free runners in the business. She opposes her totalitarian government and loyal to her fellow runners and her twin sister – Mirrors Edge
Zelda, everyone knows who Princess Zelda is, she is the damsel in distress, the girl Link must endeavour to save in nearly every single game. WRONG! Behind the guise of her royal garb lies a spirit ten times stronger than Links, she became Sheikh to aid the green robed hero and is the bearer of on the symbols of the Tri-force – Zelda Series
2nd in Command of Noble Team is Number Two, Lieutenant Commander Catherine-B320 is the team’s Intelligence officer, fiercely loyal and deadly, she is described ‘as an inspired tactician and an exemplary combatant, but also a brilliant cryptanalyst and a hacker; allegedly, there has not been a system yet that she has been unable to crack.‘ – Halo: Reach
All of these women look very different, act very different and come from very different styles of game but they have managed to turn the portrayal of female characters upside down. The image of a helpless girl ensnared in the clutches of a dastardly lizard king is fading away and girls/women are just as capable at putting the bad guy down, whether it involves wielding a shotgun, magic or simply outrunning a horde of Zombies… just like at Princess Peach as she finally has enough of Bowser and sets out to stop him and his goons all on her lonesome, finally tired of being the hapless victim. (Super Princess Peach)
Let’s not forget the female villains either, there have been some serious bad ass characters down through the years… Fortune from MGS 2, Ultimecia from Final Fantasy 8 and Sophia Lamb from Bioshock 2.
Game developers have also realised that not only are the attitudes of male gamers changing but women are just as likely to grab a controller and spend countless hours levelling, questing and progressing through their games. According to recent studies by The Entertainment Software Association, 40% of the game playing population is female and 34% of the overall population are women aged 18 or over. So it’s not just little Mary down the road who got Barbie’s Makeover Palace for the Nintendo DS, women are so active in the gaming world that the International Games Developers Association formed a special interest group focused on ‘Women in Game Development’.
So we have learned that girls are just as likely to be able to kick your ass at Street Fighter than a guy, they can bring as much value to a team in WoW than any guy can and that the roles for female characters in video games have changed or are at least more open and varied for the most part. However we really need to sit down and ask ourselves does it matter whether you are a female gamer, a guy gamer, straight gamer, gay gamer, white gamer or black gamer? We are all true diehard fans of video games and at the end of the day that’s all that really matters now get out of our way and someone pass us an Xbox controller, we’ve got some gender neutral grunts to take out!
So you’ve read both sides of the argument, now it’s time to vote. Do you believe the video game world is still a man’s world? Are female characters just as powerful as their male counterparts? Whatever you believe cast your vote and don’t forget to have your say now over on our FORUMS.
