The Message: Women’s Voices: Special
The Message: Women’s Voices: Special Guest Blogger Hannah Elstrom
http://www.gamermessage.com/2012/12/05/womens-voices-special-guest-blogger-hannah-elstrom/
It doesn’t even have to come in the form of actual harrassment – just a glance at how female characters are presented in video games tells us everything we need to know about what kind of demographic most developers want to appeal to. It’s certainly not us women. Now, to get something out of the way as soon as possible, I’m not saying that ‘sexy’ character design always equals ‘bad’. Sometimes a sexy character design completely fits the character and the context. For example, Isabela from Dragon Age 2 is one of my favourite BioWare characters of all time, partly because her sexy appearance isn’t meant to titillate a presumably male audience, but is rather deeply rooted in her behaviour and lifestyle. No, the problem with ‘sexy’ character design is that it’s grossly overused, as if the only way a female character can be appealing is if she gives the player an erection. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that women sometimes feel alienated by that.
It’s not difficult to see why some women are turned off by the idea of gaming. It’s not that the actual gameplay is something women just aren’t built to do (which is a ridiculous idea), it’s the harrassment, the entitlement, the ‘boy’s club’ mentality, the lack of outrage at sexism when it happens, the character designers who think armor that exposes your midsection and cleavage is a good idea (hint: it’s a horrible idea, you will get stabbed in the heart and die before the battle has even begun). When my brother says that girls don’t play video games, he’s speaking from observation. He might not be consciously aware that developers intentionally cater to a largely male demographic while ignoring all the rest, that only 10% of developers are female, that 85% of playable characters in games are men, but he certainly feels the effects of it, even at such a young age.
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In a perfect world, “xxxGamerGurlxxx” might not feel the need to emphasize her gender in gaming spaces. In a perfect world, she wouldn’t feel the effects of the gaming community’s broken perception of women every single day. She wouldn’t be painfully aware that every time she uses her headset she risks being treated like less than a person by people who thinks it should be okay to call women sluts and cunts at least somewhere. She wouldn’t feel like being a woman makes her different in any way when she picks up a controller. However, we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world that needs us to fix it. And we can’t do that by being quiet.
(This is just an excerpt, go to the link to read the whole thing. Credit to Hannah Elstrom as the author.)
This is yet another great piece about how women feel alienated in “geek” spaces, in this case, video games. This is on topic also because she mentions that part of the alienation comes from the way women are depicted in video games and in promo art for video games, including battle bikinis that’s meant to be armor, and women’s attack poses that start with our butt facing the enemy. These things clearly mark gaming as something meant for hetero men, that women are meant to be the object, not the subject, and it does send a message to female gamers that this place is not for us.