Sexism in games and the gaming industry
This question has been around for years. But for years nothing has been done about it, until now as games have been developing through the gaming industry, such as apps for instance which are a huge hit now on mobile phones and the majority of the consumers are female, research has shown me females use mobile phones more than males, there are about 53% of female gamers now which are mobile based players.
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| Samus |
There aren't many actual female protagonists in video games, the very first was Sammus from the metroid prime series (picture above) which Nintendo released in 1986 where basically you were a kick ass female who was armored up in some weird space suit shooting aliens and saving the world, basically like every shooter game back in the day but this one was unique. Many games such as mortal kombat and tomb raider later on became big hits because of some of the female characters in the game, tomb raider especially for her raunchy uniform which many women obviously were quite annoyed about even though tomb raider was a massive hit with the movie with Angelina Jolie I think the makers of the game picked up on this and with the new tomb raider game out surprisingly
she isn't wearing short shorts shes wearing combat trousers which makes no difference to the gameplay whatsoever but its somewhat nice to see a female actually looking like a female instead of some enhanced boobified character.
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| Tomb raider throughout the years |
One of the biggest WTF's Ive ever witnessed is probably 'dead or alive xtreme 2' here's an intro trailer to the game.
(WARNING THIS TRAILER ISN'T FOR THE YOUNGER VIEWERS)
This game is basically an island full of women with jiggly breasts in bikinis I'm not even lying. You can engage in sports like volleyball and water skiing. There is even a shop where you can buy skinny bikinis, it really does make women look bad though it is so unrealistic and it's made by 'team ninja', surprisingly they did make 'Hyrule warriors' and co-makers (omega force helped) on the Wii U which has some very well designed female characters and aren't at all made sexists, as the stats on the female characters are similar to the male characters.
Today there has been an increase in gamers online, it currently stands at around 48% for female gamers and 52% for male gamers. According to the 'International game developers association' females working in the gaming industry are around 22% which is very small and a lot of that 22% are working in Bungie or 343 industries and as you can see in the halo series there are a fair few female characters in the series even playable characters so I wonder if the female work force have actually influenced in putting female characters in the game.
Overall I think that it doesn't matter to me personally if I am a female or male character in a game all I really care about is the overall game-play. But if other people are considering that there aren't enough female characters then well maybe there should be, but not to be portrayed in a sexist way such as in the game dead or alive xtreme.
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(These images and videos are not mine but of others and they are only used for educational purposes)
©Jack Llewellyn
