Women and Video Games: Pigeonholing the Past

As a student at Scripps much of my compulsory reading over the past four years has dealt with women's representation both in literal and metaphorical spaces. Despite the density and volume of the theories I have read, what I have learned is still just the tip of the iceberg. Similarly, the topic of video games expands each year as technology develops and demands for entertainment broaden. Research regarding games—once perceived as nothing more than frivolous entertainment—has boomed in recent years despite being a very contemporary topic. Both theoretical fields are massive, and only getting bigger as time passes; however, academic work dealing with the overlap between the two fields—video games and the representation of women—is still very limited and underdeveloped compared to the two fields themselves. My first formal experience with the overlap of these two studies occurred in ART 183, an art theory class required for my major focusing on art in relationship to women. The class had a very broad range of topics, but one unit was devoted entirely to women's portrayal and role in video games. Despite my initial excitement to see how self-identified feminist writers viewed my favourite past-time as well as hopefully my future career, I quickly found myself disappointed. The readings almost seemed to alienate female gamers and denounce them for enjoying something so chauvinistic and strictly formulated for the male gaze. This year, upon researching even more into the undeveloped realm of feminist studies in relation to video games, I found that this negative trend reached beyond just the scope of the readings selected for ART 183. In fact, every self-identified feminist theorist I could find texts from as well as many other critics of the video game industry had the same opinion —that female characters are consistently represented misogynisticly as titillating vixens, " pink " half-baked attempts to appeal to the female consumer, one-dimensional shoulder-ornaments to hyper-masculine characters, or fetishized victims of violence and bloodied abuse, and that female players are targets of sexual harassment from male players and discriminated against by the gaming community at large. However, if one can just look past the feminist jargon and unpack the complexity of the academic writing style to get a clear look at source material, the selection of games and characters not only becomes concerningly redundant from essay to essay, but also appears contrived in relation to the much wider scope of games …