Video games are everywhere these days, more so than in 2001 when the GameCube was released, now with 3 competitive platforms for gaming, the Xbox 360, PS3 and the PC, video games are becoming a prominent part of everyone’s lives. Luckily most games these days are good value for money and aren’t just out to extort as much money as possible from their consumer.
Back when games were still relatively new to everyone, questions were raised about how healthy it was for children to be spending so much time holding a controller and tapping a few buttons and gawping at a screen, and honestly this question still hasn’t been answered today.
But back to the modern world where a slightly more serious question has been raised: when the majority of people think about video games and its audience, normally the word ‘female’ does spring to mind, the games industry is a male dominated industry but there have been queries about how important the voice of females actually are. But the truth is that the number of girls playing video games is constantly going up and people have come to question whether this niche market is going to have to change for the better or for worse.
Sooner or later some people are going to have to come to terms with the fact that not everyone in the Call Of Duty lobby or every player in the game is going to be male but most of the time everyone just assumes that the person sat in front of the television or computer screen is male. If you are called out on Call Of Duty, if you came top of the leaderboard or something and the other players are all angry because of that, they’ll never refer to you as ‘he or she’. Admittedly this isn’t really much of a problem because most girls and guys don’t really care that much, and obviously it’s just so much easier saying ‘he’. But what is that saying about the gaming community? There is no definitive line for those who are male and those who are female, everyone is male, which means there is barely any gender equality in community and the industry.
There is unfortunately a small section of girls that prefer to play games because they know that guys like to do the same thing, some girls like to play games because they want to find their dream boyfriend. You could say that’s quite clever but it kind of isn’t as well. If we go back to the sole purpose of game, that is to provide hours of entertainment for the player, and then we look at the reason of why some girls play games, I genuinely feel sorry for those few out there. If they can’t find the right boyfriend in reality then obviously they resort to going to find that special someone in virtual reality. What has the world come to?
Moving on to games like Lara Croft and Bayonetta which both have females as their main protagonists, when normally the main character of games are male, you never see any females in the Call of Duty series. I’m sure that there is a perfectly good reason for this, I’m not trying to be sexist when I say that some people just prefer their heroes to be male sometimes, the games industry has been going on the same kind of formula for a long time now: You have a strong, normally male, hero and a universe full of bad guys, you take your hero maybe improve him a little as he travels, hero defeats all the bad guys, one big bad guy left, take him down, hero learns something new. This kind of storyline has worked for so long now, how could they change it? Not to mention that this has always been aimed for the male audience.
But immersion is quite an important part of a game and if the player can’t even see themselves as the hero/heroine in the game then there’s really no point to the game. The sad truth is that no one wants to play themselves, games are said to be a form of escapism so why would anyone want to go back to the real world in a game? A few things you might notice about Lara Croft are her really prominent feminine features, an idealised form of what men want to see, Lara Croft is also extremely intelligent and athletic. You do spend a lot of time just staring at the back of Lara Croft because the game is in third person so having a big ass must improve some player’s enjoyment by quite a lot.
But people have to ask the question of if it’s really fair for females to be portrayed in such an exaggerated manner? What happens when people lose their sense of reality? The main female protagonist of Bayonetta also has overly enlarged breasts and ass, is this really what players want to see when they play these games?
There has been speculation of whether it’s tolerable to have such unrealistic characters, and the inevitable truth is yes, most players want to play as good-looking, strong, unique heroes. The reason that most male characters have bulging muscles and somehow know how to work every single gun in the universe is because, not only does it mean that it’s not surprising for the hero to be able to take down as many enemies as possible in the game (which improves the ‘realism’ in a game), but it’s also because that’s how players want to be in the universes that the games create. Players enjoy games that make them really feel like they’re heroes and if that means having to make a female character bustier than usual then that’s what the character designers have to do.
I am glad to see that there are more female heroes than usual for example Female Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect series. What mattered was that the gender you played would sometimes give the player new dialogue and cutscenes. Most of the time men don’t mind playing as women and vice versa, it was certainly a good idea for the developers to include something like this in the game, and it does mean that most game developers are willing to start exploring the themes and ideas behind gender in their game universes.
(Did anyone notice how all everyone in Aperture Science Laboratories are female? The turrets are voiced by females, also GLaDOS and Chell is already a female character, with the exception of Wheatley.)
Personally, I think that another gender having an influence on games is a good step forward, I may be a little biased, but if there are more interesting personalities involved in game development then the outcome will be more interesting. More ideas can be explored if players are allowed to choose the gender of their character, which means there is a chance of there being more endings and even more interesting storylines than there already are. Games are continually improving and with a new audience and more female developers contributing to games then well I suppose… the sky’s the limit (but not really because you can go further nowadays…).
Also check out How The Interactive Industry Is Failing Women By Sarah Doukakos
