Women In Video Games

Women and Video Games The way women are sexually portrayed in video games is pathetic. The lack of effort to change this is disappointing, and sadly women’s portrayal in video games is an accurate representation of how this country view women. By portraying women negatively in video games, designers are adding to the normalization of certain gender roles. From early on in video games women have been over sexualized, current games have not changed the view of women, and kids are being misinformed on how women should be in the real world.
Video games as early as 1986 represented women sexually. Metroid, the 8-bit game on the Nintendo Entertainment System was one of the first games to sexualize a women. It did this by removing Metroid’s armor
If there is a women in a video game she is in danger, or she is just there to fill up space. She is usually presented as weaker, less capable, and undesirable. According to the conclusions drawn by Berrin Beasley & Tracy Collins Standley women appeared in games less than characters of “indeterminate gender”. Which means there were more animals and aliens in video games than women for the top two consoles (Beasley and Standley). Women make up half of the world’s population, yet no one considered that it should be pretty often that they appear in the game world. The easy fix for this is to create more women in video games. Yet, game designers avoid putting women in games and when they are in a game they are made as second rate. In reference to video games Beasley and Standley’s studies showed that, “Male participants reported less confidence in female physical capabilities, in comparison to male physical capabilities…” (Behm-Morawitz and Mastro). Males believed that females were not as capable as themselves because a video game did not present these two genders equally. If games have an effect on the way people view others, and we only represent women in a negative way in video games, what could the possible outcome
Also, women would see other women as a background character to men and will learn to be more submissive. Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz and Dana Mastro studied the effects that sexualized female video game characters have on “female self-concept” (808-823). According to them, “playing a sexualized female video game character negatively affected feelings of self-efficacy in women, compared to playing no video game character” (Behm-Morawitz and Mastro). Playing video games made girls think less of themselves in respects to their confidence on their abilities to succeed in certain situations. Kids are being brought up in a world that hates women and things need to