Busting Down the Glass Ceiling: Female Characters in Video Games

With game companies targeting their growing female audiences more, numerous games have been released in recent years with gender issues in mind. There are many strong female leads to choose from; Metroid’s Samus Aran, Resident Evil’s Jill Valentine, Yuna from Final Fantasy X, Lara Croft, etc. Now it seems the list of weak or stereotypical female characters is limited to the genres of retro, arcade, and fighting.



Part of the reason is that, like the feminist movement, it takes a while for people to change their attitudes towards gender roles. Take Half Life as an example. Half Life 1 starred a male protagonist and male scientists, security guards, and soldiers (much like Officer Jenny and Nurse Joy from Pokemon). Half Life 2 introduced Alyx Vance, the gifted daughter of one of Gordon Freeman’s colleagues, who does get into trouble a few times (as does Gordon), but is just as ass-kicking as our crowbar-wielding hero.

Several story and gameplay issues are involved here. One is the nature of video game characters and how we view them. If a game to you is just something to play to blow off steam or play with friends, then gender doesn’t matter. When you play Mario Party, do you really care if you’re Yoshi or Daisy (though her annoying voice may make this a moot point)?

It also matters how game developers view games. Does it matter that Mario must rescue the princess from Donkey Kong, or is it just a player navigating a virtual world by way of a sprite that just happens to look like a plumber? If video game developers do not aspire to tell stories with their games, then their characters, male or female, are simply placeholders and nothing else.

As game designers change the way they approach games, their stories have become more developed and thus have room for real characterization, more than just sticking a bow on Pac-Man’s head and calling it Ms. Pac-Man. Let’s take a look at the Resident Evil series. Female and male characters alike are developed to various lengths, and there is usually a male and female lead in each game. For example, Resident Evil 4 had two returning characters, Leon and Ada, and both are zombie-killing machines. RE characters run the gamut from pathetic Sherry to Wesker the badass, and everything in between. Some are stereotypes (Ashley, the damsel in distress) and others have a bit more depth (Claire the biker chick).

The point is that gender is not a factor here. Jill may be stacked like older video game icon Lara Croft, but she can decapitate a zombie faster than you can say “objectify.” And we have a variety of macho and not so macho guys to choose from for our protagonists (there’s a reason Chris has been in more games than Steve). In this series, it is character, not gender that matters. I take this as a sign that video game stories have seen improvement in the way women are portrayed, and I predict we will see even more development in other aspects of storytelling and social issues as well.







A couple of researches at Stanford are doing excellent work finding out how games influence us.

Here is an article, describing some of their research. (the video should be enough, so you can save yourself some reading) The study that shocked me was, that the people who were exposed to more stereotypically suggestive female characters were more likely to give sexist response in a following questionnaire, and were more likely to agree that when a woman gets raped, she probably has done something to provoke that rape.

Basically the portrayal of women in many of today's games is making you more sexist as you play these games.

They checked for two types of female characters: a) the woman who needs protection and b) the dominant, sexy woman. Both made it more likely that the subjects give more sexist responses. It also didn't matter if the subjects were male or female. They also did an experiment with female subjects, where the virtual character had the subject's face, and that did not change the outcome.

The complete study is here. Quickly summarized: They put either a sexily dressed or conservatively dressed female character in a room, and either made her look directly at the player (to act dominantly) or had her lower her gaze (to act submissively). The subject's task was to first examine the woman, (they were told that they had to provide feedback on virtual creations) and then perform a simple task in the game while the woman remained present. The whole thing took no more than five minutes.

People did not have more sexist response to the sexily dressed character who lowered her gaze, or to the conservatively dressed character who looked directly at the players.

The conservatively dressed character who lowered her gaze resulted (the "virgin") in more benevolent sexism (women are fragile and need protection) and the sexily dressed character who looked directly at the player (the "vamp") resulted in more hostile sexism (prejudices and antipathy towards women). But both resulted in increases of both types of sexism.


Credits: Youtube, http://rockpapershotgun.com, http://roslynayers.wordpress.com

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