Videogames: Women in videogames & Further feminist theory

 Women and videogames: blog tasks

Work through the following blog tasks to complete our work on women in videogames and further feminist theory.

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?  42% of the video game demographic is female, indicating that times have changed. It’s no secret that women are typically either objectified or “damsels in distress” in many major video games, like the iconic Lara Craft to Princess Peach in the Mario franchise.

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. 

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

Yes/no because some people are heavily sensitive to their representation while others do not care as much and just casually consume the content.


And now read this short Protocol feature on Anita Sarkeesian's talk to the Game Developers Conference in 2022. This covered the progress in gender representation in videogames and references Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West. Answer the following questions:

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

GDC she feels feminist voices in gaming media and criticism succeeded in holding companies, developers and fans accountable for their behavior, while also ushering in meaningful changes to both how games are made and how women are presented in the medium.

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

Gaming is still male dominated. Sarkeesian joked that the bestselling games when she started her “Tropes” series were Call of Duty, Halo and Madden, and that now the bestselling games of 2021 are … Call of Duty, Halo and Madden. She also said that many developers have skirted opportunities to tell female stories by creating live-service games and games without rich narratives.

• Studios at the center of the industry’s current reckoning around sexual harassment and discrimination are largely staffed by men. Women make up just 24% of employees at Activision Blizzard, for instance.

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

• 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

Use our Media Factsheet archive on the M: drive Media Shared (M:\Resources\A Level\Media Factsheets) or here using your Greenford Google login. Find Media Factsheet #169 Further Feminist Theory, read the whole of the Factsheet and answer the following questions:
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’?

In 1984, hooks published Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. She had identified a lack of diversity within the feminist movement, and argued that these diverse voices had been marginalised, being put outside the main body of feminism.

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. Here hooks argues that feminism’s goal to make all women equal to men is flawed; not all men are equal to men as a result of oppression, sexuality, ethnicity. hooks used her work to offer a more inclusive feminists theory that advocated for women within a sisterhood to acknowledging and accepting their differences.

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.

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

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?

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?

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?

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?

Stuart Hall

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? 

She notes, however, that 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”.