Gender and Video Games

As much as I love video games – I really hate the same old discussions about gender, be it in video games, movies or real life. The symposium group was dealing with a text about a study on the video game “Second Life” where women tend to create better looking avatars than they actually look in real life which eventually led to the idea that women in video games were always depicted as very attractive and sexy. Now, feminists tend to argue that this was an insult to all ‘real’ women, since they are rather seen as an object (princesses being taken away or wives and daughters getting killed) than a person and they would demand equality. The term ‘equality’ tends to be misunderstood though, since many feminists want women to become superior to men rather than equal.

I – being a woman – do not have any problems with women being depicted as the physically weaker sex, simply because we actually are. Although I have to say that I tend to get annoyed by the excessive use of women as kind of a sexual highlight for a game simply to reach more people (since most gamers are male), I really don’t like these overly strong women who can easily take out any man in a fight, no matter how strong and well trained he is. That is not my perception of equality between genders. As to the unrealistic attractive women being shown in video games: that’s the very same with male characters who tend to be way too muscular and/or attractive in comparison to a real person.  

I could go on and on about this topic, but I’ll just end it with one question: would you really want to play a female plumber saving a prince who got kidnapped?