Women in Gaming

Brianna Myers for Race, Gender and the Media

When it comes to video games, I like to stick the basics. It's crazy because although I tend to gravitate a little to everything that is popular, video games have just never been my thing. I love Mario Kart and I used to be obsessed with this game called Crash Bandicoot that my brother never let me play when we were younger but that is the extent of my knowledge. Whenever I see a video game compared to another one, they don't look at all similar so watching the video in class this week about the common themes spread across various games really took me by surprise.

The one theme that really struck a nerve with me was that they are consistently using the death of a women to somehow give the male main lead some sort of emotional death. Why does the mom or lover have to die? Why can't it be his father or his best childhood friend. A woman's life is not even seen as valuable. The "value" it has to offer is some sort of background for this character's vengeance. Although we did talk in class about how there aren't many studies that show that it is hard to put a direct line of video game play leads to certain behaviors in everyday life, I find it hard to believe that somewhere back in the subconscious NOTHING is being affected.

When trying to do research about this I searched "video game playing women hate" which I thought would give me the results that I needed but instead a bunch of articles popped up about why women hate men playing video games *insert eye roll here*. The fact is, even with women being consumers of the gaming world, they are still not as accepted and the themes in popular games seem to keep enforcing this. I speak only as a heterosexual woman but why in the world would I want to look at the ONE woman in the game die or prance around in flimsy clothing? It does not make sense; but it's like if a close-minded man doesn't want a woman in the workplace what is she supposed to do at home all day?