14years £3.7billion 43,000,000 is the average time that adult gamers have been playing.
is the amount that the UK spent on video games in 2010.
hours are spent on video games in the UK every day, with the average gamer playing 12.6 hours a week.
Games for girls? The portrayal of women in video games has often been the subject of both academic studies and controversy. Two recurring themes are the level of independence of female characters from their male counterparts, and their objectification and sexualization. Early portrayals presented women in subsidiary roles, dependent of a male protagonist. More modern video games have evolved to include women in active and self-reliant attitudes, but in some cases have also increased the level of physical attractiveness catering to the audience of male players. Controversy centers on the same lines of the portrayal of women in general media including sexism, the girl treated as an archetype, and violence towards women. The latter has been perceived as being aggravated by the interactivity inherent to the media. Apart from roles as ancillary non-player characters, some games include women in a prominent role within the storyline.
Female characters are often cast in a role of damsel in distress and their rescue as the final objective of game. Princess Zelda in the early The Legend of Zelda series and Princess Peach through much of the Mario series are paradigmatic examples. Both of them, however, became playable in the later games of their series. A number of games will feature a female character as an ally or sidekick to the male hero. Some of them, like Ada Wong and Mona Sax, were turned into player characters in later instances of their series. Alyx Vance, a supporting protagonist of Half-Life 2, was praised for her “stinging personality” and intelligence, developing a close bond with the player without simply being “eye candy”. Some games feature female characters as major enemies or even main villains. The Dark Queen in the Battletoads series, is one of the first female villains in video games, and GLaDOS, an insane computer with a female voice, was widely praised by game critics as one of the best new characters. of the decade.
42% of gamers in the UK are over 50.
82% of women in the UK play games regularly.
85% of playable characters in video games are male.
33m
people play video games in Britain alone!
"Who says that a bit of fantasy violence can't be therapeutic?” -Dr. Who
The recognition that the gender disparity in video games is a problem has come separately from academic and social theory groups and from corporate marketing groups. The concept that video games are a form of art is one that has begun to gain force in the later half of the 2000s with the US National Endowment for the Arts recognizing games as a form of art in May 2011, for example, and the Supreme Court of the United States holding video games to be a protected form of speech in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. In viewing video games as cultural artifacts and the industry as a cultural industry, the disenfranchisement of women from the medium is regarded as negatively impacting the female voice in the industry and the woman’s capacity to take part in the cultural dialogue that gaming inspires. In short it is comparable to cutting women out of any other cultural medium like the fields of film, music, or literature. From an education perspective, certain gaming genres particularly lacking in female players such as the first-person shooter game have been shown to increase spacial skills thereby giving advantages to players of the games that are currently skewed along gender lines. Video games have also been determined to provide an easy lead-in to computer literacy for children and correlations have been drawn between male video gaming and the predominance of male workers within the computer industry. With the increasing importance of tech jobs in the 21st century and the increased role of online networking, the lack of female video game players suggests a loss of future career opportunities for women. Finding the reasons for the gender disparity in video games, and attempting to change game content and advertising to attract females and
change the percent of women buying games drives professionals to research and to find solutions to improve the gaming industry. Primary among the issues identified by researchers are the lack of female game creators, gender biases in research and marketing, social and cultural attitudes, and ultimately a few basic fundamental differences between male and female preferences.
The Majority
The majority of the people who work on game development teams are males. As a result the team’s best efforts often result in a game that closely matches the male perspective and expectations. Researchers have identified that one of the best ways to increase the percentage of female players comes from the aspect of authorship (either in-game as with Neopets and Whyville, or indirectly as with the Harry Potter series’ inclusion of Hermione as a playable character subsequent to fan requests). Female gaming is on the rise but the industry is still a male-dominated one and some researchers argue that the female perspective is necessary to vitalize the industry. For this reason, groups like WomenGamers.com (founded 1999) are seeking to increase female gamer demographics by giving scholarships to girls considering getting into game development, and game developers like Check Six Games, HerInteractive, GirlGames, GirlTech, Silicon Sisters and Purple Moon have openly courted female coders and developers. Regarding elements of game design, areas such as gameplay, mechanics, and similar features have been described as gender neutral, however presentational aspects of games have been identified as strongly gender-linked.
“GENDER HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT”
ATTIT
IT’S ALL ABOUT YOUR What’s the problem? Critics attribute the seeming lack of female interest in video games to a misogynistic attitude that is common among the professional and hardcore gamers and to the negative portrayal of women in video games. These biases have entered mainstream culture as well leading to the recognition that when males and females are responding to gaming surveys, context and the nature of the person or group posing the question matters to a considerable degree with males publicly disavowing playing games like Dance Dance Revolution while privately playing the game and females disavowing gaming in any form while privately playing video games. Female gamers also face the problem of having few or no role models of the same gender which leads to paranoia over how the gamer is perceived in-game. This in turn makes some women feel that they should edit their femininity in order to maintain credibility as a gamer, and that they must fit into the caricatured role of the
“girl gamer” in order to be accepted.Some critics have identified parents as partially to blame for perpetuating some of the stereotypes that female gamers face as boys are bought gifts like Xboxes while girls are bought non-video-game “girl games” or nothing but girl-focused games like the Barbie video game series or educational games. Furthermore, the purchase of games for children is infrequently accompanied by parental oversight and so parents are often unaware of over-sexualized and other negative images relating to women characters in games. Comparable to a rite of passage, negative stereotyping of all female video game players as “girl gamers” quite often come from male gamers who have themselves been negatively stereotyped by the broader society. The solution to the problem of societal pigeonholing of female gamers is often identified as interventionist work such as the insertion of women into the industry.
TUDE
“Lara’s a girl that kicks ass and then later bears hers for your virtual pleasure”
LET’S FACE The portrayal of women in video games has often been the subject of both academic studies and controversy. Two recurring themes are the level of independence of female characters from their male counterparts, and their objectification and sexualization. Early portrayals presented women in subsidiary roles, dependent of a male protagonist. More modern video games have evolved to include women in active and self-reliant attitudes, but in some cases have also increased the level of physical attractiveness catering to the audience of male players. Controversy centers on the same lines of the portrayal of women in general media including sexism, the girl treated as an archetype, and violence towards women. The latter has been perceived as being aggravated by the interactivity inherent to the media. Apart from roles as ancillary non-player characters, some games include women in a prominent role within the storyline.
Female characters are often cast in a role of damsel in distress and their rescue as the final objective of game. Princess Zelda in the early The Legend of Zelda series and Princess Peach through much of the Mario series are paradigmatic examples. Both of them, however, became playable in the later games of their series. A number of games will feature a female character as an ally or sidekick to the male hero. Some of them were turned into player characters in later instances of their series. Alyx Vance, a supporting protagonist of Half-Life 2, was praised for her “stinging personality” and intelligence, developing a close bond with the player without simply being “eye candy”. Some games feature female characters as major enemies or even main villains. The Dark Queen in the Battletoads series, is one of the first major female villains in video games, and GLaDOS, an insane computer with a female voice, was widely appraised by game critics and public as one of the best new characters of the decade.
IT, SEX SELLS Many video games include selectable female characters. This is especially prominent in fighting games, including the popular Dead or Alive, Darkstalkers, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Soul, Tekken and The King of Fighters series, where the women are most often fighting against male characters as equals.
Role Models
Role-playing-games offer the player the choice to assume the role of a female character in addition to featuring the established female characters, usually as the party members, such as the female protagonists and supporting characters in various Phantasy Star or Final Fantasy games. The effects of choice of male or female gender in most games are often limited to the appearance of the character and responses from non-player characters and rarely affect the attributes of the character, like in PokĂŠmon Crystal and the games following it. However, certain RPGs have character classes of which some are exclusively female and featuring unique abilities and
attributes, such as in the case of Diablo 2. Among real time strategy games, some games include female units that can be created/ recruitedand controlled by the player and also include female characters as part of the storyline. While Warcraft III features a fair share of female combat units, earlier titles like Age of Empires lacked female units altogether, though they appeared later in this series as well. There has also been an increasing trend for women to be used as the sole protagonists in modern games. In the 1980s, outside of a few Japanese arcade and console titles, such characters were featured mostly in the roleplaying and adventure games but this has changed through the 1990s and 2000s. Samus Aran is held up as a positive example of women protagonists in video games, as players were unaware that the protagonist was female until the end of the first Metroid game, due to a heavy suit of mechanical armor.
“She looked like a character from a One of those improbably busty, impossibly well-armed superchicks who could do acrobatics and hit the kill zone even while firing guns from both hand during a cartwheel...
According to a survey done in 2004 by the Entertainment Software Association, 25 percent of console players and 39 percent of PC game players are women. Also, 40 percent of online game players are women; however, these numbers also include casual games. According to another study conducted by the Entertainment Software Association in 2010, 40% of the game playing population is female, and women 18 or older now comprise 33% of all gamers. Also, the percentage of women now playing online has risen to 42%, up several percent since 2004. The same study shows that 46% of game purchasers are female (Entertainment Software Association). In recognition of the importance of the issues of women and girls as game developers and players, the International Game Developers Association, an association of companies and individuals in the games industry, has formed a Special Interest Group on Women in Game Development. This is an active field of discussion and a topic in many conferences in the video gaming industry. Girl gamers (aka Gamer Girls) are females who regularly engage in the playing of video games, role-playing games, or other games (colloquially referred to as “gaming”). This can be from the most casual interest to the most serious professional gaming. While some critics have advocated use of the label as a reappropriated term, others have described the term as unhelpful, offensive, and even harmful or misleading. The word “girl”, for example, has been seen as an inherently age-linked term that inappropriately glosses over the fact that women
over 30 are very different from women under 30. Furthermore, the term “girl gamer” rather than simply “gamer” has been discussed as one that perpetuates the minority position of female gamers by entrenching the concept making it more difficult to become culturally obsolete. For many critics, “girl gamer” as a term is not a comfortable one and its over-embracement may lead to perpetuation of negative stereotypes of female gamers as oversexualized, casual/fake, and sometimes defiant/confrontational. This in turn can result in poor game design. According to this argument there is no single definition of a female gamer and applying such a label to them does the industry a disservice. The female gamer is simply a female who plays games and she is not a monolithic block but is as diverse as any other market.
video game...
YOU LOOK FUCKING RIDICULOUS SHE TOLD HERSELF.”
“It’s both offensive and hilarious.” - Fat Ugly or Slutty
The Facts According to a survey done in 2004 by the Entertainment Software Association, 25 percent of console players and 39 percent of PC game players are women. Also, 40 percent of online game players are women; however, these numbers also include casual games. According to another study conducted by the Entertainment Software Association in 2010, 40% of the game playing population is female, and women 18 or older now comprise 33% of all gamers. Also, the percentage of women now playing online has risen to 42%, up several percent since 2004. The same study shows that 46% of game purchasers are female (Entertainment Software Association). In recognition of the importance of the issues of women and girls as game developers and players, the International Game Developers Association, an association of companies and individuals in the games industry, has formed a Special Interest Group on Women in Game Development. This is an active field of discussion and a topic in many conferences in the video gaming industry. Girl gamers (aka Gamer Girls) are females who regularly engage in the playing of video games, role-playing games, or other games (colloquially referred to as “gaming”). This can be from the most casual interest to the most serious professional gaming. While some critics have advocated use of the label as a
reappropriated term, others have described the term as unhelpful, offensive, and even harmful or misleading. The word “girl”, for example, has been seen as an inherently age-linked term that inappropriately glosses over the fact that women over 30 are very different from women under 30. Furthermore, the term “girl gamer” rather than simply “gamer” has been discussed as one that perpetuates the minority position of female gamers by entrenching the concept making it more difficult to become culturally obsolete. For many critics, “girl gamer” as a term is not a comfortable one and its over-embracement may lead to perpetuation of negative stereotypes of female gamers as oversexualized, casual/fake, and sometimes defiant/confrontational. This in turn can result in poor game design. According to this argument there is no single definition of a female gamer and applying such a label to them does the industry a disservice. The female gamer is simply a female who plays games and she is not a monolithic block but is as diverse as any other market.
"I don't think we just want games where you dress up Barbies. I think my daughter would love to go around picking up gems, cutting the heads off donkeys or whatever it is that the game involves."
30. Furthermore, the term “girl gamer” rather According to a survey done in 2004 by the Entertainment Software Association, 25 percent than simply “gamer” has been discussed as one that perpetuates the minority position of female of console players and 39 percent of PC game gamers by entrenching the concept making it players are women. Also, 40 percent of online more difficult to become culturally obsolete. game players are women; however, these numbers also include casual games. According to another study conducted by the Entertainment “Games for Girls” For many critics, “girl gamer” as a term is not a Software Association in 2010, 40% of the game comfortable one and its over-embracement may playing population is female, and women 18 or lead to perpetuation of negative stereotypes of older now comprise 33% of all gamers. female gamers as oversexualized, casual/fake, Also, the percentage of women now playing online has risen to 42%, up several percent since and sometimes defiant/confrontational. This in turn can result in poor game design. 2004. The same study shows that 46% of game purchasers are female (Entertainment Software According to this argument there is no single Association). In recognition of the importance of the issues definition of a female gamer and applying such a label to them does the industry a disservice. The of women and girls as game developers and female gamer is simply a female who plays games players, the International Game Developers and she is not a monolithic block but is as diverse Association, an association of companies and as any other market. individuals in the games industry, has formed a Special Interest Group on Women in Game Development. This is an active field of discussion and a topic in many conferences in the video gaming industry. Girl gamers (aka Gamer Girls) are females who regularly engage in the playing of video games, role-playing games, or other games (colloquially referred to as “gaming”). This can be from the most casual interest to the most serious professional gaming. While some critics have advocated use of the label as a reappropriated term, others have described the term as unhelpful, offensive, and even harmful or misleading. The word “girl”, for example, has been seen as an inherently age-linked term that inappropriately glosses over the fact that women over 30 are very different from women under