Gender
As of 2011, over 40% of players are female, according to the video game industry. However, a 1998 study conducted at the University of Central Florida found that of the 33 games sampled, 41% do not feature female characters, 28% portrayed women as sex objects, 21% depicted violence against women, and 30% did not represent the female population at all. Furthermore, characterizations of women tended to be stereotypical: highly sexualized ("visions of beauty with large breasts and hips"), dependent ("victim or as the proverbial 'Damsel in Distress'"), opposed ("evil or as obstacles to the goal of the game"), and trivial ("females depicted in fairly non-significant roles").
However, this report has been criticized for not representing a wide range of video games, and that the games analysed, being up to 20 years old, do not represent the current status of the video game industry, and that strong female characters are now increasingly more prevalent.
Read more about this topic: Video Game Controversies, Demographics
Famous quotes containing the word gender:
“But there, where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence,
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)
“... lynching was ... a woman’s issue: it had as much to do with ideas of gender as it had with race.”
—Paula Giddings (b. 1948)