Do you think men and women have a level playing field in video games? If your answer is yes, then you must have lived in some ideal world that is far away from reality.
Just as in other media, the portrayal of men and women in video games has been the subject of gender studies research. But let me assure you that being a girl doesn’t make me biased – I have sat down with multiple male gamers and one (yes, just one – we’ll get to this) female gamer and discussed the subject for hours. This piece is going to sum what I made out of that.
Before we delve into the how and why male characters are featured more often in games than female ones, let’s just go through some examples of popular video games and the way women have been represented in them.
Last century, a very common concept in the pop culture of the time was that of the damsel in distress. This is a classical theme in which a female character is placed in a dire predicament by a villain and requires a hero to rescue her. This was (and, in some cases, still is) a very common theme in the popular video games of the time.
To use an example, in 1981, Shigeru Miyamoto created a video game called Donkey Kong for Nintendo. As the name suggests, this game is highly influenced by the 1933 classic film King Kong, which follows the damsel-in-distress formula as a girl is kidnapped by a massive gorilla and needs to be saved by the hero. The game follows pretty much these lines.
The playable character, Mario (the same Mario who is later developed into the character we all know as Super Mario) has to save a girl from the gorilla which holds her captive.
This brings us to Princess Peach – she appears in 14 of the core Super Mario Bros platform games and is kidnapped in 13 of them. The only one in which she is not kidnapped and is also a playable character is the 1988 Super Mario Bros II.
Fast forward to 2006, when another platform video game was created for the Nintendo DS handheld game console in 2006 called Super Princess Peach. In this game, Bowser has kidnapped Mario, Luigi, and Toad instead of Princess Peach and holds them prisoner on Vibe Island – however, Toad manages to escape from Vibe Island to the Mushroom Kingdom.
Peach must go through eight worlds on Vibe Island to rescue Mario and Luigi. Although the game was praised for the reversal of the roles, it was criticised for the gameplay, which was deemed too simple. Not to mention that Princess Peach’s powers here are still a little bit demeaning on the female players as they’re basically based on emotions – for instance, she fights opponents with tears.
More recently, in the New Super Mario Bros for Wii, Princess Peach is once again kidnapped by Bowser, while the four playable characters are Mario, Luigi, Blue Toad and Yellow Toad.
To move on from the Super Mario Bros platform, another female protagonist who needs saving is Princess Zelda in The Legend of Zelda. The series centres primarily on Link, the playable character whose task is to rescue Princess Zelda. Unlike Princess Peach, Princess Zelda sometimes plays a supporting role in battle, using magical powers and weapons such as light arrows to aid Link – a refreshing change, but still, she’s just aiding the male hero on his quest.
In contemporary gaming, gender equality continues to suffer. It even gets worse
In contemporary gaming, gender equality continues to suffer. It even gets worse. With the level of competition in the video game industry skyrocketing, video game creators need to come up with something more edgy to stand out, sometimes resorting to violence towards women. To steer emotion in gamers, some video games have applied the woman in refrigerator concept, whereby the main protagonist finds his wife murdered and, as a result, seeks revenge.
The concept was pioneered in an episode of Green Lantern comics, where the protagonist finds his wife dead and chopped into pieces in the fridge.
Some video games combine both the woman in refrigerator and the damsel in distress themes by having the wife brutally murdered in the beginning and the daughter kept hostage – this adds the save-the-girl motivation to the revenge-the-girl motivation. Examples of such games include Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (2007), Prototype 2 (2012), Inversion (2012), Asura’s Wrath (2012) and Dishonoured (2012).
Another popular concept is that of the male protagonist having to save his girl’s soul, such as in The Darkness II (2012), Shadows of the Damned (2011), Dante’s Inferno (2010) and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (2010).
So what about Remember Me (2013), Tomb Raider (1996), Mirror’s Edge (2008), Transistor (expected in 2014) and Velvet Assassin (2009)? Yes, there are some games in which the playable main character is female, but there is a significant difference in number when compared to the male playable characters.
Also, taking Remember Me as an example – this game was rejected by publishers because of its female lead. In fact, creative director Jean-Max Morris told The Penny Arcade Report, “We had some that said, ‘Well, we don’t want to publish it because that’s not going to succeed. You can’t have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that’.”
While Remember Me did get published by Capcom, it is not the first time a video game has been redesigned to replace the female playable character with a male one. In 1999, a game called Dinosaur Planet was designed for Nintendo 64. This star playable character was a female 16-year-old orphaned feline called Krystal – a strong, capable hero who had to save the world.
Sadly the game never got released. As the project came close to completion, Shigeru Miyamoto, Japanese video game designer and producer for Nintendo, thought it should be used as a third instalment in the Star Fox franchise instead, and over the following two years the game was rewritten and released in 2002 as Star Fox Adventures. In the revamped version, Krystal’s role is the damsel in distress, while the new hero is the male protagonist Fox McCloud.
Where am I going with this? When discussing the female role in video games with gamers, what everyone seems to agree on is that there are more male gamers than female and this means the games need to meet that type of audience. Ironically, some of the male gamers said that when they were given the option to choose their character (such as when playing Massive Multiple Online Games), they prefer the female role.
I remember myself as a child playing video games as Super Mario and all the other male heroes – I wasn’t given the option to be anyone else. My greatest concern, however, is not who the hero is. This is not a war of the sexes piece – rather, it’s how women are presented.
Pop culture influences the way people think and making women look passive and objectifying them into trophies for men is not the light in which I would like women to be seen in. I’m glad to see some modern video games are changing the formula. Now, I would like to see gamers welcoming the new take on video gaming – the demand needs to be there.
Christina Goggi is a web marketing content specialist and a regular blogger on various tech websites.