Gender and Video Games

It's quite poignant that we're tackling this topic this week, as I had just seen an interesting video dealing with girls and toys, aimed at adjusting the kinds of toys made for girls in an effort to promote the design and sale of toys that encourage young girls to be engineers, scientists and builders.

I found the article to lack scientific rigour, as some of my classmates have mentioned in their blog postings, with Loke's methods seeming somewhat haphazard, with what to me was far too small a sample size, a lack of standard questions, and not all the same information provided by the interviewees (some provided pictures, some didn't etc.). 

In terms of gender roles in the virtual space, I thought it focused much more on the blurring of real and virtual life than it did on an in depth study of gender in games and virtual spaces. Games such as Tomb Raider and Resident Evil could have been utilized to discuss the representation and depiction of women in games, as could The Sims and World of Warcraft which both skew a little closer to Second Life, and which were in wide release when this article was written. Dealing more with issues of addiction, self-esteem, the tendency to blur real and virtual lives, the article could have been more provoking if it had addressed how female characters have been, and are, portrayed, in virtual spaces such as games, if that has changed over the years and if there are movements or efforts to change these portrayals.

Female characters in video games are not new, Samus Aran, the protagonist of Metroid has been around since 1986, before most of the people in the class were even born, but as graphics and technology has developed that allowed us to create more realistic and visual games, did the (seemingly) male dominated arena of video gaming create unrealistic and unrepresentative female characters? (if you take a look at the video below, you can see how Samus now looks similar to many other female characters, with the small waist, big breast, and very fit)