My Relationship with Video Games, and How They Have Impacted My Perception of Gender

Picture this, it’s the mid 2000’s and your parents have decided that as a reward

for a great report card, they are going to take you to Toys ‘R’ Us. As you’re walking

through the aisles, you are enthralled by the bright expansive range of colors and

seemingly endless options and you can’t wait to pick something out. Your parents

finally stop walking and you have arrived at your destination. The range of colors were

no longer there, only to be replaced with various shades of pink. There’s nothing wrong

with pink, but it just doesn’t captivate you the way the other colors did. You remember

the GameCube your parents got your cousins to use when they’re at your house, and

you wonder where that section is.

Ever since my first introduction to video games with the GameCube, I have been

enthralled with them. Always looking over my cousins’ shoulders, pushing to be player

4. It has always felt natural for me to have a controller in my hands. However, what has

felt extremely unnatural is the way I interacted with people regarding video games. For

the past twenty years, it has been fairly common knowledge amongst those who study

video games that women make up close to half the gaming audience. So why was it so

prevalent for me to be called names on public servers? Or get ‘tested’ by my male

classmates to prove that I knew what I was talking about.

I think part of the problem comes from the games themselves. Looking back,

some of my favorite video games of all time include (but are not limited to) Super

Monkey Ball 2 (GameCube, 2002), LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga (PlayStation

3, 2007), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (XBox360, 2009), Portal 2 (XBox 360, 2011)

and Fallout 4 (XBox One, 2015). While I have spent months loving and playing these

games, something that I notice is that there are not very many prominent female

characters, and their treatment of the female characters they do have, is not necessarily

the best.

Taking the most ‘family friendly’ of the bunch and my first video game, Super

Monkey Ball 2, there are four main characters, AiAi, MeeMee, GonGon, and Baby. There

are also two antagonists, Dr. BadBoon and his assistant. The plot of the story mode is

that Dr. BadBoon wants to marry MeeMee but she doesn’t want to marry him. He

takes all of the bananas hostage on Jungle Island, the monkey’s home, and tells them

that he will only return them if MeeMee agrees to marry him. You then continue to play

as AiAi in an attempt to thwart Dr. BadBoon’s plan. As a small child, I didn’t really

comprehend the story, I just saw funny looking monkeys and an intriguing puzzle.

Looking at it now, however, I’m not surprised this was the plot. The idea of the damsel

in distress is a trope as old as time, and while this isn’t as explicitly represented like it

is in Donkey Kong (1981), it is still there.

LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga is a bit different from the rest of the

games I’ve mentioned, as it is not a new story and draws from other source material.

Considering the original trilogy came out in the late 70’s/early 80’s and the prequel

trilogy came out in the early 2000’s, I don’t think anyone is surprised when I say I can’t

name more than 3 female characters from these movies (Leia Organa, Padme Amidala,

and Aunt Beru). What is more ridiculous is that there are almost 130 playable

characters in the game and only 14 of them are women. And most of that 14 are just

various outfit changes for the few characters I’ve named. I can say I’m glad to see that

the women in the game are strong characters, but the numbers aren’t in their favor.

Activision changed the gaming landscape forever when they launched the first

Call of Duty in 2003. Since then, they have published many series of games with

extensive plots, one of which is the Modern Warfare series. Being a military emulation

aimed at a largely male audience, there was never a huge rush to integrate female

characters. Or any rush I suppose as there are no playable women characters in any of

the Modern Warfare games until the reboot in 2019.

Portal 2 is a captivating puzzle game and different in terms of story than the rest

of the list. It’s a fairly linear story and there are only 3 characters in the single player

campaign. The player is a young woman (even though you don’t get to see or hear her)

and the main antagonist is... a robot, but it’s a robot voiced by a woman, which is

something. It’s different to see that essentially 2⁄3 of the characters are women(ish) but

it’s not all that shocking that half the female characters are mute.

Fallout 4, an action role-playing game set during the aftermath of a nuclear war,

gives the player a choice of playing either as a man or a woman. Although, it’s only the

illusion of diversity and inclusion, as you can just as easily opt out as you can opt in. It

also relies heavily on the gender binary and doesn’t give room for you to explore

outside of it. I will say it is nice to be able to see someone who is supposed to look

more like you absolutely pummel the big bad of the game though.

Women are often not welcome in these male-dominated video game spaces,

which is reflected not only in the way women are treated in these spaces by other

gamers, but also by the way these games portray women in their worldbuilding and

character inclusion. This in turn makes playing these games a bittersweet experience,

where as much as I love the games and want to be involved in the communities

surrounding them, simply being the gender that I am negatively impacts my

experiences in these communities. This makes it feel like as a woman, I need to defend

my place in these communities as valid, considering the games themselves often do

not justly represent women within their content.

Caroline Cords