| You know, I was going to just put this image in as a visual metaphor of stereotypical male gamers versus female gamers, but I actually really like the inflection of gender identities this picture's got going for it. Often times women in games have skimpy and revealing clothing while the men wear conservative clothing, but here the roles are reversed. Well, sort of. Sarah here is looking conservative compared to quite a few other characters, ESPECIALLY in the realm of fighting games. Sure, all the men are badass warriors that can be garbed in anything from traditional martial arts gear to full fledged armor, but as soon as you lose that Y chromosome, official tournament rules demand you remove at least half of your clothing. You know, because women have an unfair advantage against men with all of their extra muscle. Seriously, besides Chun Li, what other woman wears unrevealing clothing? And of course they had to sexualize her greatly in that one animated Street Fighter movie. Not the one with Jean Claude Van Damme. That movie rocks. Oops, I did it again. I took what should have been something simple like a caption and made it super long, complicated and half of it is probably irrelevant to my topic. Oh well, I still like that live action Street Fighter movie. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, the game this image comes from is Virtua Fighter 5. |
So why exactly did so many gamers think that it was perfectly normal to talk to (and about) women like they weren't the same? The answer is actually quite simple, we, the typical male gamer, have been conditioned to think of girls not as people, but as something else. It usually doesn't matter what this something else is, many video games until recently (and I mean VERY recently, like around 2014 when Gamergate first happened) treated women as a wholly different species from men. Women in games were, at best, a non playable character that in some way accelerated the plot. Often times they were damsels in distress (think Princess Peach and Zelda from the Mario and Zelda games), and the few times they were playable, most of the time they were disguised as men (think Samus from Metroid).
Other times women in games are treated as enemies. Ewan Kirkland discusses this using Silent Hill 2 as an example. As great a game as it is, and while the theme may not actually be about misogyny, you can't deny that many of the enemies in that game are either women, or sexualized to look like women (think H.R. Giger).
Sometimes it isn't that the games depict women in a negative light, but they have a gender theme that winds up being censored due to localization. For example, an enemy character in Final Fight, a woman named Poison, was removed in the original version and replaced with a male enemy instead. Granted, having a woman as an enemy wouldn't have been much better, but removing her altogether implies that women can't participate in arcade street brawlers.
It's not a completely un-salvagable scenario. The Tomb Raider reboot from 2013 saw a great redesign of the Lara Croft, depicting her as a more realistic human being and toning down on the highly sexualized design she originally had. Likewise, Role Playing Games (RPGs) are steadily increasing in popularity, and many of them discuss heavier themes such as gender (an outstanding example of gender and societal pressure is Persona 4 on the PS2).
Hopefully you'll all take something away from these blogs/rants. Hopefully they'll at least have you bust out the thinking cap the next time you pop in a Mario game and go Goomba stomping, remembering that Princess Peach is equally capable of crushing them as Mario. As Cherie Todd says in her article, one silver lining about the Gamergate debacle is that it's been forcing the issue into light, no longer able to be swept up under the rug.
