So first off, did you ever notice female video game characters are totally not what girls really look like in REAL life? This would be because game developers attempt to make the "perfect" woman and by doing so, hypersexualizing females.
Hypersexual can be defined in two ways: Conceptual and Operational
The conceptual definition is like a dictionary definition: "excessive concern with, or indulgence in, a sexualized appearance or activity.
The operational definition is like a list of descriptions:
- Sexually revealing clothing
- Nudity or partial nudity
- Sex talk
- Sexual behavior
-Character body proportion
- Attire (or lack of)
- Breast size
- Waist size
Seriously...
Second, do you ever notice that there aren't many games out there that star a female character!? Alright, I know, there is Lara Croft, but really, think of ten games that feature a female character as the lead.
Can't do it? That's because there aren't many. This leads me to think there is a huge problem with how society views women. I'm not going to "hate" on game developers, because really, they make what SELLS. Not many game players are going to pick up a game with a chick on front who is in full armor and a mask on when there is a game with a picture of a chick on front that looks like the Lara Croft picture above. This just sickens me.
This brings me to the Gender Schema Theory. What the Gender Schema Theory says is that exposure to stereotyped sexual interactions on television can provoke schema that categorize women as sexual, submissive and less intelligent than their male counterparts. This can sing the same tune for video games as well as television. This theory screams that we as a society are sexist, and that is incredibly wrong. Because of exposure to these types of female displays, we actually believe that this is what women are supposed to be like and look like.
This doesn't just go for women either. Video games also routinely emphasize the "muscular, white male". Many times in games your first pick for a character, sometimes only pick, is a white male. They also hypersexualize the male characters to make them look "buff-er" and have more muscles than humanly possible. Characters like Kratos are hard to come by in real life. If you ask me, I would rather see characters like Link again; normal looking.
There was a study done by Downs and Smith where they looked at the top 20 games across three consoles (Xbox, Playstation and Game Cube) examining hypersexuality for both genders. A few findings are below:
1. Males were predominant as primary or secondary characters.
2. There were more revealing clothing for males and females characters among Game Cube than Playstation or Xbox games.
3. Females were least likely to be found in E-rated games.
4. Females are 10 times more likely than males to show nudity.
This study is but one of many that show that males and females are both hypersexualized, with an emphasis on females.
But another study (Ivory, 2006) conducted a content analysis looking at game review sites to see if players would comment on the hypersexuality. In doing a purposive sample (using units of interest that meet some predetermined criteria) of 100 game reviews, they found that male characters were referenced in the reviews (the sample unit) more often than females and that males were more often than not in the image as their avatar (unit of analysis) for the review. They concluded that there is a gender dichotomy (not equal) in video game characters, meaning that females are highly underrepresented, but when they are shown they are more likely than males to be portrayed in a sexualized fashion.
Now that we wrapped that up, let's move onto something a little less depressing: MORE THEORIES!
Vorderer, P., & Bryant, J. (2006). Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences. New York, NY: Taylor and Francis Group.
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