Video Games are for Dudes

I am always a fan of seeing equality in media. TV shows, movies, literature, it is always nice to see men and women being given equal time and treatment. Unfortunately the one area where women have yet to shine is video games. Video games still remain primarily a guys club. And not just guys, but dudes. Video games are designed to appeal to a very specific type of male.

Now while not every guy acts like a dude all the time, we all have dude tendencies. What are “dude tendencies” you might ask? Going long periods without cleaning. Yelling “boobies” whenever you see a woman scantily clad, and even worse if you laugh after you do it. And a large and unhealthy lust for violence. All the things that video game culture is aimed towards.

When one looks at the history of video games you can pinpoint a moment when video games went from being for everyone to being towards guys. The earliest video games certainly have no sense of gender identity. Pong or Pac-Man (before the Ms. Showed up) certainly do not show any preference towards boys or girls. It is when titles like Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Centipede enter the arcades that the shift towards male dominated content began. Video games started to be filled with Sci-Fi content and science fiction has (especially in the 60s and early 70s when video game culture started)  been male dominated.

But while science fiction grew and changed to encompass more strong feminine roles (Princess Leia and Lieutenant Uhura being the best examples), video games did not follow suit. In fact the first time any women even showed up in a video game it was to serve as the damsel in distress. Women in the earliest video games were there primarily to give the hero something to do. When video game consoles brought the arcade into our homes, it brought characters like Princess Peach and Princess Zelda (apparently you can only be rescued if you’re royalty). Both characters are featured in long running franchises and yet they are always portrayed as victims.

The one strong female character to show up in early console games is Samus from the popular game Metroid. The only problem is that she is clad from head to toe in bionic armor and unless you read the information packet that came with the game, the average player had no idea she was a woman. Young boys everywhere blasted away at alien monsters, never for one second realizing they were playing a girl.

Even when games finally adopt a strong female lead, the gameplay and character design shows the game is clearly meant to appeal to guys. Take the most famous female video game heroine, Lara Croft, of the game Tomb Raider. The gameplay is an action third person shooter where you get to control an extremely buxom female character. Many male players (guilty) spent most of the game just trying to make her crawl around on the ground and zoom the camera in and out on her cleavage. What truly shows though how much of a male oriented game Tomb Raider is the myth of the “Nudie Raider” code.   Supposedly there is a code that allows the player to play the game with Lara Croft completely nude. At the time of this writing, no such code has been found but that does not eliminate the hope of nerds everywhere.

More than just the sexualization of women in most video games, it is the content itself that shows what kind of audience they are aiming for. The top selling video games are usually first person shooters or sports games. Or hyper violent sandbox games like the Grand Theft Auto series. When Grand Theft Auto III came out and ignited the franchise, one of the most scandalous features was the fact that in order to restore your health you needed to hire a prostitute. And then as an added horror, most gamers would choose to simply bludgeon to death (guilty) the aforementioned hooker and take their money back. I can’t imagine many women who would find this action appealing (actually thinking about my friends, I probably can).

Team Unicorn

Graphics advance, gameplay advances, but the perceived image of women in video games seems to have slowed to a crawl. Such an odd thing to learn that a mature woman is into video games that the Gamer Girl has joined the elite male fantasy ranks of the Playboy Bunny or Lingerie Super Model. Rare creatures that we know exist but doubt we shall ever encounter. There do exist games that appeal to a female audience but when you look at the actual content of these games (Ico, Wind) there is nothing particularly feminine about them, they simply exist in a gender neutral realm where the bulk of male gamers have abandoned them.