Portrayal of women in video games

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 the girl treated as an archetype, sexism, and violence towards women. The latter has been perceived as being aggravated by the interactivity inherent to the media.

Roles of female characters in video games

Non-player characters

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, including Princess Zelda in the early The Legend of Zelda series and Princess Peach through much of the Mario series (both of them, however, became playable in the later games of their series), and Elaine Marley in the Monkey Island series.

A number of games will feature a female character as an ally or sidekick to the male hero, such as it is in the case of Ada Wong in the Resident Evil series (a double/triple agent, later also a player character), Mona Sax in the Max Payne series (a player character in the second game), Cortana in the Halo series, and Chloe Frazer and Elena Fisher in the Uncharted 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".^[1][2]

Some games feature female characters as major enemies or even main villains, such as Dark Queen in the Battletoads series, Elexis Sinclaire in the SiN series, Franziska von Karma in the Ace Attorney series, and Sarah Kerrigan in the StarCraft series.

Player characters

Many video games include selectable female characters. This is especially prominent in fighting games, including the popular Dead or Alive (Ayane, Kasumi), Darkstalkers (Felicia, Morrigan Aensland), Mortal Kombat (Jade, Kitana, Mileena, Sonya Blade), Street Fighter (Cammy, Chun-Li, Elena, Ibuki, Juri, Makoto, Sakura Kasugano), Soul (Hildegard von Krone, Ivy Valentine, Sophitia, Taki, Tira), Tekken (Alisa Bosconovitch, Christie Monteiro, Nina Williams) and The King of Fighters (Athena Asamiya, Blue Mary, Mai Shiranui, Yuri Sakazaki) series, where the women are most often fighting against male characters as equals.

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 Aerith Gainsborough, Tifa Lockhart, Yuffie Kisaragi, Lulu, Rikku, Yuna and Lightning in the Final Fantasy series or Xion in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days). 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 Pokémon 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 (or recruited) and controlled by the player and also include female characters as part of the storyline. While Warcraft III (2002) 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.^[3]

Other notable player characters include Ayame in the Tenchu series, and Claire Redfield, Jill Valentine, Rebecca Chambers and Sheva Alomar in the Resident Evil series.

Female protagonists

There has also been an increasing trend for women to be used as the sole protagonists in modern games.^[4] In the 1980s, outside of a few Japanese arcade and console titles, such characters were featured mostly in the role-playing and adventure games (the first western action game with an exclusively female hero was Saboteur II: Avenging Angel in 1987), but this has changed through the 1990s and 2000s. Notable examples of such characters include Aya Brea (the Parasite Eve series), Chell (Portal), Lara Croft (the Tomb Raider series), Samus Aran (the Metroid series), Rayne and Bayonetta starring in the games that are named after them.

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, which she wears for the majority of the game. Thus, her female characteristics were at first not emphasized over her viability as a character.^[5]

Lara Croft is the best known in a trend of strong, beautiful women in a variety of media that do not depend on men to achieve heroic deeds, with ambivalent reception for their independence as action heroines and their eroticized portrayal.^[6] April Ryan, protagonist of The Longest Journey, has been compared to Lara Croft in that respect, as she shows less prominent physical feminine attributes than Lara but more feminine psychological traits, as contrasted with Lara's masculine connotations like aggressiveness and force.^[7] Contrarily, Jade, the protagonist of Beyond Good and Evil, was widely recognised as a strong and confident female character lacking any overt sexualisation^[8] and Chell, the main character of Portal was noted for the fact that she was neither in third-person or sexualised unlike most female characters in first-person shooters.^[9]

Claims of negative portrayals

"The girl" as a character archetype

Many of the flaws regarding the portrayal of women in video games mirror that of comic books. At its core is a fundamental perception of "the woman" as an archetype in and of itself, and simply being female being considered enough of a "trait" in comparison to the male "norm". Unlike with male characters, who are defined by what they do (i.e. the way they interact with the world surrounding them), excessive emphasis is given on what "the woman" is, sometimes going as far as negatively influencing their character proper in stereotypically "female" ways.

Gender discrimination and censorship

The titular hero in the Japanese game Ninja Princess was turned into a male character in the English version of the game, re-titled as Sega Ninja.^[10] A number of female enemies in the Japanese beat'em up games were also either gender-changed or removed in the export versions.^[11] Notably, such a thing happened to the Capcom character Poison, who was originally a post-op male-to-female transsexual but was changed into a pre-op transsexual in the game's English version.

Objectification and sexualization

See also: List of adult video games

Female video game characters tend to suffer from a particularly extreme manifestation of the male gaze — even when not serving the male characters (be it as a plot device, reward, or something else), "the woman" will virtually always find herself serving the male players through the systematic enforcement of sex appeal,^[12][13] with rarely much regard to how gratuitous, out-of-place or out-of-character such appeal might be (e.g. high heels in armed combat). Another common feature often used for sex appeal is the use of "jiggle physics," when a female character's large breasts bounce, sway, and make various other random movements. Like with many other media, complaints have been made regarding a perceptible underlying implication that there is quite simply no point for a female character to even exist if her presence does not in some way entail the sexual pleasure of male consumers.

Since her introduction in 1996, the character of Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider series in particular has been criticized for her unrealistic breast size; Lara was claimed personify "an ongoing culture clash over gender, sexuality, empowerment, and objectification."^[14] However, the game's creators maintain that she was not designed with marketing in mind, and have claimed to be rather surprised at her pinup-style adoration;^[15] in fact, it has been claimed that this fandom objectification is harmful to the character (in Tomb Raider: Legend, Lara underwent a radical redesign, ostensibly to make her less sexualized^[16]).^[17][18]

Similarly, Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball has been criticized as being more about eye candy than it is about the sport of volleyball, having been created merely for the purpose of displaying women's breasts.^[19] In two sequels of fighting games Soul Calibur and Tekken that take place several years after the original issue, recurring male characters were allowed to age but all female characters were kept the same age or replaced by their daughters.^[20]

Rape

1984's Custer's Revenge was first noted for containing elements of rape and some Native American groups and the National Organization for Women have criticised this as well as alleged racism.^[21] More recently, major controversies were sparked by some Japanese games such as RapeLay and Battle Raper.

Violence

Violence in video games is a hotly debated topic, especially with regards to the Grand Theft Auto series; however, some sources have specifically condemned the series and similar games for promoting violence against women.^[22]

Reactions

Ubisoft has formed a group of female gamers called the Frag Dolls; the intent is to create "role models for a whole legion of girls out there who may have been too intimidated to play games online - or even play at all".^[14] In addition, to attract female gamers to a generally male-dominated market, many game companies are becoming more family-friendly.^[23]

See also

	Video games portal
	Gender studies portal
	Feminism portal
	Fictional characters portal

• Girl gamer
• LGBT characters in video games
• Video game controversy

References

1. ^ Top 50 Videogame Hotties. UGO.com. Retrieved on 2008-12-14
2. ^ Top 11 Girls of Gaming. UGO.com. Retrieved on 2008-12-28
3. ^ Geoff Richards. "Age of Empires II : Age of Kings". http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/aok. Retrieved 2008-09-22. 
4. ^ Janz, Jeroen; Martis, Raynel (February 2007). "The Lara Phenomenon: Powerful Female Characters in Video Games". Sex Roles (New York) 56 (3–4): p. 141. doi:10.1007/s11199-006-9158-0. 
5. ^ Nadia Oxford (2006-08-07). "One Girl vs. the Galaxy - The Woman Inside the Suit". 1UP.com. http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3152658. Retrieved 2007-07-09. 
6. ^ Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon; Smith, Jonas Heide; Pajares Tosca, Susana (2008). "Player culture". Understanding video games: the essential introduction. Taylor & Francis. pp. 163. ISBN 978-0415977210. http://books.google.com/books?id=31XHdVXlbt0C&lpg=PP1&ots=tREkVWaxHo&dq=%22april%20ryan%22&lr&pg=PA163#v=onepage&q=%22april%20ryan%22&f=false. Retrieved 2011-07-03. ""Helen Kennedy [...] summarizes these arguments, and Lara Croft's ambivalent role as both an action heroine [...], and an eroticized object of the male gaze with a great deal of voyeuristic appeal"." 
7. ^ Lie, Merete. "Lara Croft and her sisters". Norwegian University of Science and Technology. http://www.csi.ensmp.fr/WebCSI/4S/download/download_page.php?file=lie.pdf. Retrieved 2011-07-03. ""She is attractive, but no sex bomb" "April may, however, appear as more feminine because even if she is tough and brave, she is depicted as both sensitive and vain"" 
8. ^ "Jade (Rebel with a Cause)". thumbbandits.com. http://www.thumbbandits.com/Oakley04.asp. ^{[dead link]}
9. ^ Joe McNeilly (7 December 2007). "Portal is the most subversive game ever". GamesRadar. http://www.gamesradar.com/f/portal-is-the-most-subversive-game-ever/a-20071207115329881080. Retrieved 27 April 2011. 
10. ^ Ninjas in Games | An evolution of ninjas in video games throughout the years., UGO.com, June 4, 2008
11. ^ Sidbillies | ScrollBoss: the Minus World
12. ^ Top 20 Overlooked Game Babes, GamesRadar, July 8, 2008
13. ^ The 50 Hottest Women In Video Game, Complex, November 8, 2010
14. ^ ^{a b} Zoe Flower. "Getting the Girl: The myths, misconceptions, and misdemeanors of females in games". 1UP.com. http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3137700. Retrieved 2007-09-09. 
15. ^ N'gai Croal and Jane Hughes (1997-11-10). "Lara Croft, the Bit Girl". Newsweek. 
16. ^ "Lara's curves reduced to appeal to female gamers". The Sydney Morning Herald. 2005-05-21. http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Real-appeal/2005/05/21/1116533572111.html. Retrieved 2007-07-09. ^{[dead link]}
17. ^ Poole, Steven (2001-06-15). "The extraordinary life of Lara Croft". London: The Guardian. http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,506934,00.html. Retrieved 2007-07-09. 
18. ^ Robin Yang. "The Man Behind Lara". GameDaily. http://www.gamedaily.com/games/tomb-raider-anniversary/playstation-2/game-features/the-man-behind-lara/5588/66813/. Retrieved 2007-07-09. 
19. ^ Brad Gallaway (2003-01-29). "Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball". GameCritics.com. http://www.gamecritics.com/review/doaxvolleyball/main.php. Retrieved 2006-12-07. 
20. ^ Geordie Tait. "To My Someday Daughter". http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/22786_To_My_Someday_Daughter.html. 
21. ^ "Top Ten Shameful Games: 1. Custer's Revenge (Atari 2600)". GameSpy. 2002-12-31. http://archive.gamespy.com/top10/december02/shame/index4.shtml. Retrieved 2007-07-09. 
22. ^ "Women's role in popular video games: Stripped down and killed off". Media Report to Women 31 (1): p. 1. Winter 2003. http://mediareporttowomen.com/issues/311.htm. Retrieved 2007-09-09. 
23. ^ Jennifer Kulpa (2001-06-25). "PC games are becoming kinder, gentler to attract females". Drug Store News. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3374/is_8_23/ai_76335062. Retrieved 2007-09-09. 

External links

• The 50 Greatest Female Characters in Video Game History, Tom's Hardware, 21 February 2007
• Top 9 greatest video game heroines, San Francisco Chronicle, February 17, 2009
• Giant Bomb video game concepts: Female Protagonists, Female Antagonists, Damsel In Distress Strong Women, Sexualized Women