Sexism in Video Games

“Mom, pleaaaaaase let me buy Minecraft. I’m begging you! All of my favorite Youtubers play it,” I yelled to my mom as she grumpily glanced away from her telenovela. “No se,” she says. I jumped up and down with the biggest smile on my face. The fact that she didn’t say an outright no meant I could buy it. I ran up the stairs to my room, grabbed my laptop, and started my journey of years into the realms of video games.

I loved video games. I didn’t have many friends during my first two years of high school so I was able to escape that and join my several friends from Illinois, New Zealand, England, Alaska, and countless more places around the world.

However, as much as I loved exploring the many worlds and universes with my in-game companions, the sexism was not lost on me. In one of my favorite games Smite, people played as gods from different cultures’ mythologies. There were both female and male gods. However, there was a clear distinction in the way the two gods were modeled.

This is a picture of one of the characters available for players to choose named Anubis. Anubis comes from Egyptian mythology where he is believed to preside over the dead in the underworld. As you can see, besides the fact that he has some skin showing, he doesn’t appear to be sexualized. However, what it does manage to do is set some unachievable body standards for men, despite the fact Anubis is not fully human.

Now in comparison to that picture, you can see a compilation of female characters in the game. The obvious pattern is the insane amount of cleavage. There is not a single female character in this game that does not have exposed breasts. It becomes unacceptable when this is the only way women in a video game can be portrayed.

According to the Daily Mail, “previous studies have found that 80 per cent of female characters are sexualized or scantily clad.” Thus, this problem is not on an individual level, but rather an institutionalized and systemic problem.

It is also games like Grand Theft Auto where a player can have sex with a prostitute in a first-person view that promote bad representations of what relationships between a man and a woman should be.

Douglas Gentile, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University also said that within this game, you “pay them for sex, you can look at them or you can kill them - this is an extremely limited view of the value of women.” It reduces women’s value to simple acts of choosing their fates in a world where women are expendable.

It becomes easy to forget about the negative implications within a game when you’re having fun, but it is always important to question everything one consumes within the capitalist institution.