Women and videogames: blog tasks

Part 1: Reading - Is Female Representation in Video Games Finally Changing?

Read this short Medium feature on whether female representation in videogames is finally changing. Answer the following questions:

1) How have women traditionally been represented in videogames and what percentage of the video game audience is female?
For years, people have believed that gamers are typically male, which may have been true in the arcade age, but based on the survey “Distribution of Computer and Video Gamers in the United States from 2006 to 2017 by Gender”, 42% of the video game demographic is female, indicating that times have changed. Thus, video games cannot survive by solely targeting the male audience.

2) What recent games have signalled a change in the industry and what qualities do the female protagonists offer?
 Recent popular games like Tomb Raider, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, The Last of Us, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and The Walking Dead series have female protagonists, co-protagonists or otherwise important characters. These games were all released within the past 5 years. These games each have characters who are role models for real women, because they are strong, independent, intelligent, willful and compassionate. The companies that made these games have enough money where they can take a risk like this and have it pay off.

3) Do you agree with the idea that audiences reject media products if they feel they are misrepresented within them?

I would argue that the video game industry is aware of this and is making strides to change the way they represent women because they are losing sales by misrepresenting nearly half of their audience. Strum’s article continues, This perpetuates a cycle of exclusion…Women don’t like to be seen as sex objects. When they don’t feel like game content positively reflects [their sex], they’re not interested.” This is certainly true and I would argue that the current trend shows that certain game companies are trying to fix this issue by releasing games that paint women in a more positive way, focusing on their strengths instead of stereotypes.

1) How does Sarkeesian say things have changed in the videogames industry in the last 10 years? 

“If I tried to make any of these ‘Tropes’ videos today with only games from the last 10 years, it would be harder — not impossible, but harder,” Sarkeesian said. “There would be fewer examples and the patterns less egregious, and I think that that's saying something.” Sarkeesian pointed to examples like Dishonored 2, Horizon Zero Dawn and The Last of Us that featured strong female protagonists that didn’t fall into many of the same traps her “Tropes” series highlighted in past games.

2) Why is gaming still male dominated? Make sure your answer here includes the statistics quoted in the article. 

A survey the organizers of GDC conducted with developers last year found that only 38% of respondents said their companies proactively reached out to talk about harassment, discrimination and sexism, and respondents felt those conversations fell short of expectations.“Our industry has been moving towards service games, where you choose from a roster of characters, or maybe even have character creators, and I think this has done two things simultaneously,” Sarkeesian said. “We now have more characters and more diversity of characters. More players get to see themselves reflected in games than ever before. But it's kind of killed stories. We have less stories.”

3) How has the conversation shifted on representation in videogames? 

The conversation has shifted. Sarkeesian pointed out how it’s no longer taboo to voice feminist critiques of video games and industry culture, the very things that made her a prime target for vicious harassment during the early days of Gamergate. But improving representation is just one step. Sarkeesian said it’s important now to recognize and combat sexism and harassment happening behind closed doors, at game studios large and small.

Part 2: Further Feminist Theory: Media Factsheet

1) What definitions are offered by the factsheet for ‘feminism ‘and ‘patriarchy’?

Feminism is a movement which aims for equality for women – to be treated as equal to men socially, economically, and politically. It is a movement that is focused not on ‘hating’ men, or suggesting that women are superior. Instead, feminism is focused on highlighting the power and suppressive nature of the patriarchy (male dominance in society). Feminists see the patriarchy as a limitation to women receiving the same treatment and benefits as their male counterparts.

2) Why did bell hooks publish her 1984 book ‘Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center’?

3) What aspects of feminism and oppression are the focus for a lot of bell hooks’s work?

hooks challenged feminists to consider gender’s relation to sex, race, class and intersectionality. She argues that male involvement within the equality movement was important, encouraging men to do their part. Like Judith Butler (see Factsheet 125), hooks questioned the approach of feminist to treat women as a single and coherent group. hooks has forcefully argued that poor black women have more in common with poor black men, than with the white middle classed feminists, and this had been ignored by white academic feminists.

4) What is intersectionality and what does hooks argue regarding this?

The term intersectionality is used to describe overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination or discrimination. Its meaning is that multiple identities intersect to create  a whole that is different from separate component identities. These individual identities can include gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, age, mental disability, physical disability, mental illness, physical illness. bell hooks argues that experiences of class, gender, sexuality etc cannot be completely understood if the influences of racialisation are not considered. hooks argues that understanding intersectionality is vital to gaining political and social equality and improving our democratic system. hook describes intersectionality as something which can create and maintain systems of oppression and class domination. “Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression”

5) What did Liesbet van Zoonen conclude regarding the relationship between gender roles and the mass media?

 In Feminist Media Studies (1994) van Zoonen examined feminist theory and was the first to point out that feminist research had not been considered within the field of media studies. Her work puts her as a key figure in third wave feminism. Van Zoonen concludes that there is a strong relationship between gender (stereotypes, pornography and ideology) and communication, but it is also the mass media that leads to much of the observable gender identity structures in advertising, film and TV.

6) Liesbet van Zoonen sees gender as socially constructed. What does this mean and which other media theorist we have studied does this link to?

Van Zoonen has a postmodernist understanding of science as something which is socially constructed and grounded in the social experiences of its practitioners. Scientific feminist research always includes 3 perspectives: the individual, the social and the cultural influences in order to understand the different meanings of media content. For van Zoonen, culture is seen as “ways of life” or, as she quotes theorist John Corner, “the conditions and the forms in which meaning and value are structured and articulated within a society” (Corner, 1991). Feminist media studies focus on how gender is communicated within the media. For van Zoonen “gender is a, if not the, crucial component of culture”, in particular when investigating the production of mass mediated meanings.

7) How do feminists view women’s lifestyle magazines in different ways? Which view do you agree with?

Feminist theory has an “unconditional focus on analysing gender as a mechanism that structure material and symbolic worlds and our experiences of them” (van Zoonen, 1994). For many years, feminists have criticised women’s magazines as commercial sites of exaggerated femininity which serve to pull women into a consumer culture on the promise that the products they buy will alleviate their own bodily insecurities and low self-esteem. But it is difficult, when applying a feminist perspective, to reconcile the pleasure women get from consuming women’s magazines, and the political correctness surrounding hegemonic constructions of gender identities. Van Zoonen argues that women’s magazines mediate images that tell women “how to be a perfect mother, lover, wife, homemaker, glamorous accessory, secretary – whatever suits the needs of the system”. Feminists of the 1970s saw the ‘media-created woman’ – the wife, mother, housekeeper, sex object – as a person only trying to be beautiful for men.

8) In looking at the history of the colours pink and blue, van Zoonen suggests ideas gender ideas can evolve over time. Which other media theorist we have studied argues things evolve over time and do you agree that gender roles are in a process of constant change? Can you suggest examples to support your view?

Colours can be used to signal sex differences for example a baby wearing pink is a sign for its female sex, while boys would rather wear blue. The association of pink with femininity and blue with masculinity was made in 19th century France. In the 18th century however, a pink silk suit was regarded as appropriate attire for a gentleman. Gender should therefore not be seen as a fixed property of individuals, but rather as a part of an ongoing process where subjects are constituted, often in paradoxical ways as van Zoonen suggests. These underlying cultural

structures build our perception of our environments and things that we look at and interpret. It can be described as a process of constructing the world according to the inherent sign systems. But vice versa do the objects we are looking at also construct our personality, gender roles.

9) What are the five aspects van Zoonen suggests are significant in determining the influence of the media?

The Media’s Roles in Constructing Gender

Van Zoonen argues that the influence of the media is dependent on:

• Whether the institution is commercial or public

• The platform upon which they operate (print versus digital media)

• Genre (drama versus news)

• Target audiences

• The place the media text holds within the audiences’ daily lives

10) What other media theorist can be linked to van Zoonen’s readings of the media?

Van Zoonen builds on Stuart Hall’s negotiated readings, arguing that the negotiated readings and subsequent focus on the way meanings are encoded and decoded “implies acknowledgement of gender construction as a social process in which women and men actively engage.” Stuart Hall’s encoding/ decoding model

11) Van Zoonen discusses ‘transmission models of communication’. She suggests women are oppressed by the dominant culture and therefore take in representations that do not reflect their view of the world. What other theory and idea (that we have studied recently) can this be linked to?

Transmission models of communication position women as oppressed by the dominant culture expressed in media messages. Women, then, are apparently being flooded with images that do not reflect their own selves. As such, the interaction between men and women becomes a one-

way process. However, van Zoonen also notes that media is used to assert one’s identity, and as such women should establish and express an appropriate feminine identity for each social situation. Women can use media to “try out different feminine subject positions”.

12) Finally, van Zoonen has built on the work of bell hooks by exploring power and feminism. She suggests that power is not a binary male/female issue but reflects the “multiplicity of relations of subordination”. How does this link to bell hooks?

Society is not created by order and binary divisions of the oppressed, and those who would oppress. Van Zoonen cites the experience of black feminists, such as bell hooks, where the individual can be both the subordinate in relation (woman vs. man) and dominant in another (white woman vs. black woman). So, van Zoonen argues that the focus should be not who is ‘in power’ and who is not, but to “theorise the multiplicity of relations of subordination” (Mouffe, 1992) and to consider how these relations of subordination for individual and collections, such as gender and ethnicity, are being established. Van Zoonen understands that gender is a particular discourse, “a set of overlapping and often contradictory cultural descriptions and prescriptions referring to sexual difference which arises from and regulates particular economic, social, political, technological and other non-discursive contexts”.