Women and videogames:
Part 1: Reading - Is Female Representation in Video Games Finally Changing?
1) How have women traditionally been represented in videogames and what percentage of the video game audience is female?
1) How have women traditionally been represented in videogames and what percentage of the video game audience is female?
Traditionally, women have been represented in a way that objectifies them as sexual objects or as damsels in distress.42% - based on the survey “Distribution of Computer and Video Gamers in the United States from 2006 to 2017 by Gender”. This contradicts the idea that most gamers are male, meaning the industry cannot continue survive by only targeting males.
2) What recent games have signalled a change in the industry and what qualities do the female protagonists offer?
Recent popular games like Tomb Raider, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, The Last of Us, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and The Walking Dead series have female protagonists or important female roles. The female protagonists act as role models for real women because they are strong, independent, intelligent, willful and compassionate.
3) Do you agree with the idea that audiences reject media products if they feel they are misrepresented within them?
Yes I agree with the idea that audiences reject media products if they feel they are misrepresented by them because they aren't interested in games that don't accurately represent them. Women don't like being seen as sex objects and don't like being negatively represented. Lora Strum’s article states that "Though 47 percent of gamers are female…those women aren’t playing games with hypersexualized representations of themselves,".
1) How does Sarkeesian say things have changed in the videogames industry in the last 10 years?
“We won.” In some ways, the talk was a victory lap for Sarkeesian, who told the crowd at GDC she feels feminist voices in gaming media and criticism succeeded in holding companies, developers and fans accountable for their behavior, while also ushering in meaningful changes to both how games are made and how women are presented in the medium.
- “If I tried to make any of these ‘Tropes’ videos today with only games from the last 10 years, it would be harder — not impossible, but harder,” Sarkeesian said. “There would be fewer examples and the patterns less egregious, and I think that that's saying something.”
- Sarkeesian pointed to examples like Dishonored 2, Horizon Zero Dawn and The Last of Us that featured strong female protagonists that didn’t fall into many of the same traps her “Tropes” series highlighted in past games.
- But Sarkeesian said that there are still deep-rooted issues, both in the number of games willing to tell unique female stories and in the conditions in which these games are made. “In the cultural war that ensued for the heart of gaming, I think it's fair to say that this talk is about winning. It's about what we won. And more than that, it's about how much more we have to do,” Sarkeesian said.
2) Why is gaming still male dominated? Make sure your answer here includes the statistics quoted in the article.
Gaming is still male dominated. Sarkeesian joked that the bestselling games when she started her “Tropes” series were Call of Duty, Halo and Madden, and that now the bestselling games of 2021 are … Call of Duty, Halo and Madden. She also said that many developers have skirted opportunities to tell female stories by creating live-service games and games without rich narratives.
- Studios at the center of the industry’s current reckoning around sexual harassment and discrimination are largely staffed by men. Women make up just 24% of employees at Activision Blizzard, for instance.
- A survey the organizers of GDC conducted with developers last year found that only 38% of respondents said their companies proactively reached out to talk about harassment, discrimination and sexism, and respondents felt those conversations fell short of expectations.
- “Our industry has been moving towards service games, where you choose from a roster of characters, or maybe even have character creators, and I think this has done two things simultaneously,” Sarkeesian said. “We now have more characters and more diversity of characters. More players get to see themselves reflected in games than ever before. But it's kind of killed stories. We have less stories.”
- Sarkeesian pointed to the indie game Gone Home, which she called a “revelation” for centering a queer female narrative, as an example of the kinds of the games the industry needs more of to continue evolving.
3) How has the conversation shifted on representation in videogames?
The conversation has shifted. Sarkeesian pointed out how it’s no longer taboo to voice feminist critiques of video games and industry culture, the very things that made her a prime target for vicious harassment during the early days of Gamergate.
- But improving representation is just one step. Sarkeesian said it’s important now to recognize and combat sexism and harassment happening behind closed doors, at game studios large and small.
- “You probably do not see the suffering that is happening right now in your companies,” Sarkeesian said. “This industry is drowning in trauma, abuse and harassment. Workers are being mistreated. They're being abused and harassed by people who hold power over them, by their communities and by their fans. As an industry, we are not OK and we haven’t been OK.”
- “Clearly, this industry is not yet prepared to truly reckon with these powerful men and the harm that they’ve caused. But that harm is not only happening at these massive companies, and it isn't just perpetuated by extremely wealthy executives,” she added. “It's happening at small studios, too, because this isn't fundamentally a problem of money. It’s a problem of power.”
Part 2: Further Feminist Theory: Media Factsheet
1) What definitions are offered by the factsheet for ‘feminism ‘and ‘patriarchy’?
Feminism is a movement which aims for equality for women – to be treated as equal to men socially, economically, and politically. It is a movement that is focused not on ‘hating’ men, or suggesting that women are superior. Instead, feminism is focused on highlighting the power and suppressive nature of the patriarchy (male dominance in society). Feminists see the patriarchy as a limitation to women receiving the same treatment and benefits as their male counterparts.
2) Why did bell hooks publish her 1984 book ‘Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center’?
In 1984, hooks published Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. She had identified a lack of diversity within the feminist movement, and argued that these diverse voices had been marginalised, being put outside the main body of feminism.
3) What aspects of feminism and oppression are the focus for a lot of bell hooks’s work?
hooks argues that feminism’s goal to make all women equal to men is flawed; not all men are equal to men as a result of oppression, sexuality, ethnicity. hooks used her work to offer a more inclusive feminists theory that advocated for women within a sisterhood to acknowledging and accepting their differences.
4) What is intersectionality and what does hooks argue regarding this?
The term intersectionality is used to describe overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination or discrimination. Its meaning is that multiple identities intersect to create a whole that is different from separate component identities. hooks challenged feminists to consider gender’s relation to sex, race, class and intersectionality. She argues that male involvement within the equality movement was important, encouraging men to do their part. Like Judith Butler, hooks questioned the approach of feminist to treat women as a single and coherent group. hooks has forcefully argued that poor black women have more in common with poor black men, than with the white middle classed feminists, and this had been ignored by white academic feminists.
5) What did Liesbet van Zoonen conclude regarding the relationship between gender roles and the mass media?
Her work puts her as a key figure in third wave feminism. Van Zoonen concludes that there is a strong relationship between gender (stereotypes, pornography and ideology) and communication, but it is also the mass media that leads to much of the observable gender
identity structures in advertising, film and TV.
6) Liesbet van Zoonen sees gender as socially constructed. What does this mean and which other media theorist we have studied does this link to?
Van Zoonen has a postmodernist understanding of science as something which is socially
constructed and grounded in the social experiences of its practitioners. Scientific feminist research always includes 3 perspectives: the individual, the social and the cultural influences in order to understand the different meanings of media content. For van Zoonen, culture is seen as “ways of life” or, as she quotes theorist John Corner, “the conditions and the forms in which meaning and value are structured and articulated within a society” (Corner, 1991). Feminist media studies focus on how gender is communicated within the media. For van Zoonen “gender is a, if not the, crucial component of culture”, in particular when investigating the production of mass mediated meanings.
7) How do feminists view women’s lifestyle magazines in different ways? Which view do you agree with?
Feminist theory has an “unconditional focus on analysing gender as a mechanism that structure material and symbolic worlds and our experiences of them” (van Zoonen, 1994). For many years, feminists have criticised women’s magazines as commercial sites of exaggerated femininity which serve to pull women into a consumer culture on the promise that the products they buy will alleviate their own bodily insecurities and low self-esteem. But it is difficult, when applying a feminist perspective, to reconcile the pleasure women get from consuming women’s magazines, and the political correctness surrounding hegemonic constructions of gender identities. Van Zoonen argues that women’s magazines mediate images that tell women “how to be a perfect mother, lover, wife, homemaker, glamorous accessory, secretary – whatever suits the needs of the system”. Feminists of the 1970s saw the ‘media-created woman’ – the wife, mother, housekeeper, sex object – as a person only trying to be beautiful for men.
8) In looking at the history of the colours pink and blue, van Zoonen suggests ideas gender ideas can evolve over time. Which other media theorist we have studied argues things evolve over time and do you agree that gender roles are in a process of constant change? Can you suggest examples to support your view?
Constructing meanings through signs is a fairly complex process because the notion of sign is quite extensive as it can regard written and spoken language, objects, images, motion pictures and so on. Many signs in the media are conventional and commonly known as they are culturally
generated. Colours can be used to signal sex differences for example a baby wearing pink is a sign for its female sex, while boys would rather wear blue. The association of pink with femininity and blue with masculinity was made in 19th century France. In the 18th century however, a pink silk suit was regarded as appropriate attire for a gentleman. Gender should therefore not be seen as a fixed property of individuals, but rather as a part of an ongoing process where subjects are constituted, often in paradoxical ways as van Zoonen suggests. These underlying cultural structures build our perception of our environments and things that we look at and interpret. It can be described as a process of constructing the world according to the inherent sign systems. But vice versa do the objects we are looking at also construct our personality, gender roles.
9) What are the five aspects van Zoonen suggests are significant in determining the influence of the media?
The Media’s Roles in Constructing Gender
Van Zoonen argues that the influence of the media is dependent on:
• Whether the institution is commercial or public
• The platform upon which they operate (print versus digital media)
• Genre (drama versus news)
• Target audiences
• The place the media text holds within the audiences’ daily lives
10) What other media theorist can be linked to van Zoonen’s readings of the media?
Van Zoonen builds on Stuart Hall’s negotiated readings, arguing that the negotiated readings and subsequent focus on the way meanings are encoded and decoded “implies acknowledgement of gender construction as a social process in which women and men actively engage.”
11) Van Zoonen discusses ‘transmission models of communication’. She suggests women are oppressed by the dominant culture and therefore take in representations that do not reflect their view of the world. What other theory and idea (that we have studied recently) can this be linked to?
Transmission models of communication position women as oppressed by the dominant culture expressed in media messages. Women, then, are apparently being flooded with images that do not reflect their own selves. As such, the interaction between men and women becomes a one-way process. However, van Zoonen also notes that media is used to assert one’s identity, and as such women should establish and express an appropriate feminine identity for each social situation. Women can use media to “try out different feminine subject positions”.
12) Finally, van Zoonen has built on the work of bell hooks by exploring power and feminism. She suggests that power is not a binary male/female issue but reflects the “multiplicity of relations of subordination”. How does this link to bell hooks?
Gender and power
Van Zoonen considers power as a key element of feminist thought and suggests that it is used or is evident in the following ways:
• As a non-issue when it is emphasised that women are a disadvantaged, minority group that needs equality and rights more than they need
power.
• Something an individual possesses, for example the power to criticise men or a group of men for the power they have over women.
• As an offspring of material conditions, when economic power relations of capitalism are named as the cause of women’s oppression.
She notes, however, that society is not created by order and binary divisions of the oppressed, and those who would oppress. Van Zoonen cites the experience of black feminists, such as bell hooks, where the individual can be both the subordinate in relation (woman vs. man) and dominant in another (white woman vs. black woman). So, van Zoonen argues that the focus should be not who is ‘in power’ and who is not, but to “theorise the multiplicity of relations of subordination” (Mouffe, 1992) and to consider how these relations of subordination for individual and collections, such as gender and ethnicity, are being established. Van Zoonen understands that gender is a particular discourse, “a set of overlapping and often
contradictory cultural descriptions and prescriptions referring to sexual difference which arises from and regulates particular economic, social, political, technological and other non-discursive contexts”.
