Video Games are profoundly sexist, and largely reflect a dominant ideology, which reinforces unequal power relations men and women. Agree or disagree, use at least 3 examples.

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NAME                        Louise Alexander

NO.                         s1545100

SUBJECT                Video Games Culture

CODE                        3411FMC

TUTOR                David Cox

ASSESSMENT        Item 3 – Culture Issue Essay

WORD COUNT        2,082 words

DATE                        30th May 2003

QUESTION:

Video Games are profoundly sexist, and largely reflect a dominant ideology, which reinforces unequal power relations men and women. Agree or disagree, use at least 3 examples.


As the popularity and accessibility of video games continues to increase, the question of the effect of the portrayal of women in video games arises. Also, the roles of males and females in this text, and how they differ from one another. The idea of male dominance in video games is demonstrated by these traits: expectation that males should be tough, brave, and aggressive; exclusion of women as a powerful force; and frequent quarrelling and fighting. A wide variety of media messages can act as teachers of values, ideologies, and beliefs and can provide images for interpreting the world. This paper illustrates that the video games that are being played by today's society present an overwhelmingly traditional and negative portrayal of women and that the development of gender identities and expectations (especially among youngsters) may be affected by these portrayals. For example, girls may expect that they will continue to be victims and needy and that their responsibilities include maintaining beauty and sexual appeal while boys may determine that their role is to protect and defend women and to possessive them even through the use of violence.

Since the first video game character was Pac Man in 1980, then the first female role in video/computer/arcade games is therefore Mrs. Pac Man. While the female role in video games has developed over time it is still very much dominated by the male counterparts. In other words as technology has progressed and the quality of the image of the female has reached new heights, the principles of the female character has not. This can be seen through video games history.

Until a few years ago, there seemed to be a distinct deficiency of positive female roles. The Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda games at least had the damsels having magic powers. Even then, the male characters vastly outnumbered them. Then take every RPG you'll see there are usually two female characters (one being a love interest for the main character, and the other likely being best friends with the main character) to choose from. And usually their magic powers are healing other members of the group, and their fighting power is normally lower then any men in the RPG. The Super Mario games only recently brought back the Princess Toadstool clone; Princess Daisy. This is both because they needed more women in the series (note they increased the percentage 100%), and possibly because of a rumour that had people on the net wanting Luigi and Daisy to be an "item".

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The ‘Children Now’ study surveyed the top 10 selling games for each of three popular console systems — Sony Corp.’s PlayStation, Sega Corp. Dreamcast and Nintendo Co. Ltd’s Nintendo 64. From this survey it was discovered that 54 percent of the games surveyed contained female lead characters while 92 percent had male lead characters. Those games that do feature female characters tend to display women in an exaggerated and stereotypical manner, with 38 percent displaying significant body exposure, including thighs, cleavage and midriffs. In addition, 38 percent of female game characters had large breasts and 46 percent had unusually ...

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