April 23, 2014 • 41 mins
What's it like for women who play video games, having to deal with gamer girl stereotypes, in-game harassment and a shortage of strong female characters to play? In part two of their series on video games, Cristen and Caroline take a look how video games and gaming culture treat women.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
They see April Monsters to exist in this place. Animal Planets,
River Monsters returns with an all new season the Amazon,
the one place whose mysteries keep calling me by here,
I've seen many monsters, yet to see my last night.
(00:23):
River Monsters Sunday Nights at nine starting April six, Animal
plan and Surprisingly Human. Welcome to Stuff Mob Never told
you from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Caroline and I'm Kristen. This is
(00:46):
part two looking at women in a video games. The
last episode, which I'm sure you listen to, was focusing
on women in the actual gaming industry, the women who
designed the games, run the companies, come up with these
great ideas, and the fact that well the numbers aren't great,
there is hope out there. We gave you a list
(01:08):
of a lot of really interesting women who are heading
up companies and designing the games. This episode, we're gonna
be talking about both the women playing the games and
the women in the games. Yeah, so let's kick off
with some numbers for a little refresher. Women comprise of
the entire gaming population and that includes all kinds of games.
(01:31):
And then from there we comprise of video gamers. So
anyone who says women and girls don't play video games
don't know what they're talking about. One thing that has
kind of lobbed against women gamers, though, is that a
lot of us play social games. These might be on
(01:53):
social media. They're called social or casual gaming, and it's
things like candy Crush for instance. Yeah. The interesting thing
is how King, which is a company that publishes Candy Crush,
actually tests all of its new games on a target
demo of women to fifty five and if they like it,
they go ahead and put it out because they've found
(02:16):
that if women to fifty five respond well to a game,
it goes on to be a smash hit with all audiences.
What do you know about that? Who knew? Well? So
women comprise of social gamers compared to forty six percent
of men, and the average age is forty what's up
with that? Why? Why do women make up such a
(02:37):
huge percent of social gamers. I think it could have
something to do with the fact that, I don't know,
we're busy and we might not have a tendency to
sit down and play Halo for five hours. Yeah. I mean,
first of all, we dominate social media. There are more
of us on places like Facebook, where you see so
many candy Crush updates and ads. Um. But experts suggest
(02:59):
that essentially women are adult women where I mean, think
about moms, Okay, working moms. They are multitasking, they have
so much to do. And there was a story that
I was reading interviewing one woman about her candy crush addiction,
and she I think she had she had a very
young child, and she said, I play it during naptime
(03:20):
because it's just this little window of time that I
have all to myself, and it allows me to forget everything.
She can't sit down and play Call of Duty for
eight hours, and she says that playing it offers her
just this window of escape and because she doesn't have time,
for instance, to not that all men have hours to
kill playing Call of Duty kill Call of Duty un pun,
(03:43):
but that they think that that's one reason why adult
women tend to play more on the go games is
just because we have smaller pockets of time throughout the day. Perhaps, um,
but this whole women being more drawn to social and
casual gaming as it's called. I kind of hate the
term casual gaming because it plays into the stereotype that
(04:05):
women aren't legit gamers because if you start talking to
quote unquote hardcore gamers and you are a female identified,
well just get ready because they will challenge your credibility
because they're gonna want to know. As soon as you
say that you enjoy games, you're gonna need you essentially
need to resume to prove that you know what you're
(04:26):
talking about, kind of like talking to like record store guys,
no offense. Yeah, well so you mentioned hardcore, like that's
that's actually a thing. That's a demographic. Hardcore gamers are
defined by play time per week and are basically a
smaller subset of a games core audience. These are the
top ten percent of gamers who spend the most time
(04:47):
playing per week, at nineteen hours a week. Nineteen hours
a week. That's incredible. That's a second job. That's like
a part time job. And Dennis Schameeca over at Venture
be looked into jen D and core and hardcore gaming
because don't confuse core gaming and hardcore gaming. Core gamers
(05:08):
simply refer to anyone who plays video games on consoles
like Xbox three sixty p S three UH as well
as like Nintendo we and UH three D s. And
when you look at the top selling super genres as
they're called for these core gamers as console players, it
is a lot of guy oriented stuff. First person shooter games,
(05:30):
action games, sports games. Those are the three, not surprisingly
top sellers, and they have overwhelmingly over male audiences. Although,
as we mentioned in that last podcast in part one
of our video game series, do not discount women for
not wanting to play first person shooter games, action games,
et cetera. Because what was it like thirty of women
(05:54):
enjoy playing violent video games. Absolutely, And when you talk
about these core gamers, these are the people who really
have the most influence over how the public thinks about
video games and gamers. So when you think of a gamer,
the image that comes to mind is not a forty
year old married woman playing candy Crush. You think of
(06:14):
that demographic that is playing a first person shooter game
on the Xbox three sixty for instance. So when you
look at the age breakdown for core and hardcore gamers,
the core audience has an average age of about thirty
and is excuse sixty forty mail. The hardcore average age
(06:35):
is lower, it's about five and skews eighty five to
fifteen mail and that I mean that breakdown of the
hardcore gaming population is where a lot of this idea
that well, women don't play video games, no women are
actual legit gamers. That's where a lot of this comes in.
But the thing is, you got to remember when you're
hearing from hardcore gamers, we're talking about like the nineties
(06:58):
percentile gamers. These are the people who play in the
top ten percent, like nineteen. Like you said, an average
I means some people play plenty more than nineteen hours
a week. These are It's like the voices a few
are being broadcast too many exactly. Well, now, Christine, you
(07:18):
said something a minute ago about like if if a
woman or a young girl says that she's a gamer,
she basically has to prove herself, like she needs a
resume to prove that she knows about and plays games.
This ties into the whole girl gamer stereotype, and girl
usually spelled when it's being used as a pejorative term
g u r L. Not to be confused with the
(07:39):
generic just a girl game or a female person who
plays games, and not to be confused with fake geek girls.
Like all of these things that arouse such ire in
a lot of young men playing video games, and a
lot of stereotypes that come up with this girl gamer
surround the idea that any woman or young girl who
(07:59):
is playing game games is just doing it for attention.
And god forbid you claim the term girl gamer for yourself.
God forbid you want to set yourself apart as a
woman and own it, because there's that notion that if
you're doing it, you do just want attention. You're not
even allowed to own your own femininity or femaleness. Yeah,
and and this spawned an entire meme across the internet
(08:22):
where and you have like women participating in it as well,
talking down about oh, girl gamers. She's just the girl
gamerh did she instagram herself looking cute with her joy
stick in our hand? Then you're just a girl gamer.
You don't actually enjoy these games. And um, I got
into a little bit of a Reddit rabbit hole reading
(08:43):
up on girl gamers because it's just interesting to see
just first person these perceptions and people's supposed experiences with them.
And there was one woman's post on Reddit talking about
you know what, she kind of copped to it. She said,
I was a girl gamer for a while, she started
talking about how she kind of found gaming and it
(09:06):
was the first place where she ever received attention, any
kind of attention from God. She never really fit in,
she was overweight, she just never felt good about herself,
and finally when she found gaming, all of a sudden,
men were taking interest in her because she was into
this kind of male oriented hobby. And she said that
(09:29):
for a while she kind of played it up because
she enjoyed that so much. And to me, her experience
was telling because it seemed like this wasn't an issue
of oh, well, this most mean that women aren't legitimate gamers,
but more just has to do with you know, flirtation,
body image, how we deal with the world and our
attractions and attractiveness, etcetera. Where But but what is what
(09:53):
what it's led to is a lot of slut shaming
that happens and just ickiness that women have to deal with.
That was one of the main things that our Facebook
stuff Mom Never told you followers responded to when we
asked what we should talk about regarding video games. So
many women said, oh, please talk about girl gamers and
(10:14):
how I always have to prove myself. Yeah, but those
girl gamers are a lot of the times having to
prove themselves based on their looks, Whereas if a dude
comes along and wants to play a game, it's like, okay,
well we're going to test you based on your skill.
Are you any good at this? No? Okay, well then
obviously you're not worth it, Whereas when a woman comes along,
it's like, okay, well are you hot? Are you really
playing the game? Are you just posing with your joystick
(10:35):
and like licking it and posting pictures of yourself on
the internet, Like, yeah, first of all, why are you
looking at joystick? But that's the thing. There's like that
horrible divide where men at least get the get the
favor of being judged on their actual skill, whereas women
are just like are you cute or not? Or yeah,
I don't. I don't think i've ever heard anyone termed
a guy gamer. Oh he's a guy gamer. He's just
(10:56):
he's just posing with that joystick by his abs for
just just for the ladies. Well, then, I mean that's
another thing. You hear a lot of guys saying, like,
shut up about being a girl gamer. I don't call
myself a guy gamer. You're just a gamer and so,
but then that discourages girls and women who do want
to own it because yes, okay, well there's a girl
gamer demographic. That's like just doing it for attention according
(11:18):
to these guys. But then what happens when the girls
and women actually want to say, no, I'm different from you,
I play differently, I want different things, and why do
all of these criteria have to exist? Katie Heeney over
at BuzzFeed created just such a perfect collection of all
of the slut shamy, confusing, and sometimes straight up sexist
(11:40):
and contradictory rules for being a girl gamer, where it's like,
you gotta play games, but you can't be too obvious
about it, because if you're too obvious about how you
like games, and they're just going to assume that you're
a girl gamer. And then you know, they guys want
you to be attractive because we like looking at attractive people.
But if you're too attractive, you know, it's just like
(12:01):
and so that's why a lot of times women will
end up going just like won't speak, for instance, on
you know, like multiplayer games. They won't. They just keep
their femaleness as hidden as possible, just to not have
to even deal with it. Yeah, Blogger Stephanie ben Dixon
basically said the exact same thing. She was talking about
how she finds herself editing certain aspects of her femininity
(12:25):
for fear that it would somehow damage her credibility. And
I mean, this gets into all sorts of issues that
krist and I have talked about before as far as
fem phobia goes. But Stephanie says, hey, look, I have
a lot of pink tech accessories, and she goes into it.
It starts to sound really cool, and she's like owning
her differences. She says she accepts the term girl gamer
because for now we're still a minority that faces a
(12:48):
wall of angry nerd rage. But in talking about her
pink accessories, I noticed something very interesting because at first
she's like, yeah, I'm owning it, like pink is different.
But then she says, I liked the idea of how
this obnoxiously defiant and slightly sickening color would go against
the grain somewhat. And then I'm like, oh, it's Stephanie, Like,
there's still she while she is owning pink and owning
(13:10):
the term girl gamer, there's still sounds like there's from
phobia in that because she's calling the color pink obnoxious
and sickening, and so it still sounds like she's been
discouraged over her game playing career from kind of owning
her femaleness. Well, I think it's because of a lot
of those contradictory rules in quotes that pop up for
(13:30):
you know, just you can't you can't look like you're
trying too hard, you know. Um. And it's fascinating to
me that in this segment specifically like in gaming, that
it's such a prominent aspect of it, like this just
this common assumption that that women have some kind of
ulterior motive for wanting to play games. Um. But unfortunately,
(13:54):
like the kinds of you know, the issues of harassment
that women in the video game industry, the ones who
are making the games sometimes run up against. Another thing
that was echoed among people on Facebook was the issue
of also dealing with straight up harassment from other gamers
as soon as their female identity is revealed. Sometimes they
just get an onslaught of come ons, or just gendered epithets. Uh.
(14:21):
There was a survey conducted by Emily Matthew at the
price charting blog, which found that women are harassed four
times as often as men and six reported being called
a slut, whore or other words that I can't say
on this podcast. And there are also lots of charming
requests for women to just get back in the kitchen
and start making lots of sandwiches. Yeah, and in that
(14:43):
pole of the people she talked to believe that sexism
is rampant. Interesting don't but I mean, you know, you would,
you would think that they're okay. So there is a
degree of awareness, but it sure is still bad out
there despite out awareness. Yeah, I mean, and it does
go both ways. Fifteen point seven percent of men also
(15:05):
reported that they had experienced sex based taunting, harassment, or
threats while playing video games. Um and ten percent of
women unfortunately copped to using their gender for favors, basically
like strolling into a world of warcraft and being like, oh, yes,
you wanted to give me gold shore a no problem?
(15:27):
See he Well, and just like we talked about in
the last episode, where um, a lot of well not
a lot, but but many women, probably many more than
we even know. Many women have left the industry because
of the abuse. Nearly thirty six percent of women that
Emily Matthew pulled reported having to quit playing temporarily because
of the abuse and the harassment, versus eleven point seven
(15:49):
percent of guys that she pulled. Game is game is,
you'd be mean sometimes. We're looking a little bit deeper
into this issue. A team over at Ohio University looked
at the reactions by gamers to female voices versus male
voices on Xbox Alive, like looking at first person shooter games,
(16:12):
and they published a study in the journal New Media
and Society, and one of the researchers, why En tang Um,
explained how, on average, female voices received three times as
many negative comments as male voices or no male voices,
and on top of that, women's voices received more queries
(16:33):
and messages from other gamers than male voices or no voices.
So it's kind of the same thing of uh, just
by virtue of being a woman, you sort of open
yourself up to either being called terrible things or being
solicited for sex. Yeah, So you basically your option is
to speak and get abused or remain silent. Yeah, And
(16:55):
tang said, the take home message is that female players,
when heard aren't treated as well as their male counterparts,
despite skill level wins or losses. They women aren't attracting
negative comments just because they be terrible a gaming. Yeah,
it's like there's there's that little sign up on the
clubhouse store no girls allowed. Yeah, unfortunate. Although I know
(17:17):
that not all male gamers are like this. Guy. Guy
gamers listening, I'm gonna call you guy gamers, don't worry.
I know that it's it's again. I feel like it's
the loud voices of this horrific minority that often get
the most all. They're generating all of this negative press
because it's horrifying. It horrifying. So let's look a little
(17:39):
bit more, maybe into what women want in their games,
aside from harassment, obviously, because this is a question that
ties back to our part one episode, looking more at
the industry of like what they're trying trying to figure
out of well aside front, we know, we know the
Canadie Crush is popular, but what kind of games do
(18:00):
women really like playing? Because if you look back into
the early days of gaming, the titles that were made
specifically for women and girls were so hilariously riddled with
hearts and sparkles and pink. And there's actually a site
called femicom that's calm with an M, which calls itself
(18:23):
the Feminine Computer Museum. It's a website dedicated to archiving
these quote unquote girl games from like the early eighties
and nineties, and it's kind of fascinating to see. I mean,
these are also the days when you have alone Carol
Shaw or Donna Bailey at atari, like the only woman
like in the room. So not surprisingly that you have
(18:43):
such kind of overtly just let's play house. You have
to do the dishes for twenty points kind of games
coming up. Christen accepts that challenge. She will organize the dishwasher.
I will I would win that game, would but I mean, yeah,
the a museum founder I guess we'll call her, basically
said that she's preserving these games to spark conversations. Not
(19:06):
necessarily preserving them because they are so awesome, but preserving
them because nobody's playing them anymore and nobody's talking about them.
They're not talking about them the way you would like.
Duck Hunt, Like everybody has a duck Hunt memory of
standing up against the TV with the gun even though
you're not supposed to, but nobody has those collective memories
of these quote unquote girly games, and so she is
(19:27):
working to preserve them just so that we can take
a look at why we do the things we do,
why we look at certain games the way we do. Yeah,
and and she pointed out how girly video games are
rarely advertised, reviewed or written up, and rarely demoed in stores.
And she says, even if it's a huge seller, like
(19:47):
the more recent game Style Savvy for Nintendo d S,
which I mean Style Savvy, come on, hardcore gamers roll
their eyes, but it's a big seller. And yeah, it's
kind of like um with fandom in general. A lot
of times, girly fandom is sort of relegated to the corner,
just like go Go Away hearts and Polka dots. No, no,
(20:09):
you over here. There's a little pink corner over here,
s behind that line. I picture like the Lego movie,
Like there's all these little universes, different universes for different videos.
Polka dot, Polka dots. You go over there and they're
all like pa dot. But the fact of the matter is,
don't don't worry women gamers listening We're not suggesting that
style savvy is what women want in video games. We're
(20:31):
also not suggesting the Candy Crush or Halo or Grand
theft Ato or whatever games. You know what people are realizing, Caroline,
women want different things. We don't all want the same
kind of game. Weird. Women are different then each other,
that's what you're That's what you're saying. Women are different
from each other. Yeah, you and me. We might even
(20:53):
want to play different games. I want to load, I
want to play the Dishwasher game. Maybe you want to
play Prince of Persia, Build the Sandwich game. Yeah, this
is coming from Kevin Kelly over at joystick dot com.
He was talking about how women do like story driven games.
We do appreciate in game tutorials because honestly, who reads
manuals or even like instruction manuals when you're putting together
(21:14):
in ikea shelf, Like nobody reads these things. Um. But
but the point is just making women aware of more games,
you know, letting them know that, hey, they might also
like Halo as well. But it's a matter of not
advertising it to everyone across the board with just some busty,
sexy sexpot on the cover. You know, keep in mind
(21:36):
that your audience is very diverse. Yeah, I mean, there
is market research that does suggest that certain themes, like
games that are more story driven or sort of a
more communication based the sims, for instance, massively popular among women.
Maybe games that might be a little more emotionally evocative
(21:57):
tend to appeal more to women. But don't get pigeonholes
in just trying to remake those games over and over again. Rather,
you know, consider all of these women who are also
really loving to frag people and see, hey, maybe we
can maybe we can put a female protagonist in there.
Put put a gun in the hands of a woman.
(22:18):
Shall we get video game wise? Well, we are going
to talk about women in video games, the female protagonist
of video games, and and how telling their roles are
when we come right back from the quick break and
now back to the show. So when we left off,
we had established that while market research has suggested that
(22:40):
there are certain types of games that women like, surprise, surprise,
women like different kinds of things. And yet if you
look at the legacy of female characters in especially like
big name video games, they start to fall into very
predictable types of roles. So for instance, in the late eighties,
(23:02):
this game called Metroid came out, and I'm sure a
lot of people have played Metroid, and it features this character, Sammuss,
female character, and for all of the game she's wearing
kind of this genderless robotic exo skeleton. But then and
it's like super cool because you can like play Sammy's
and she's doing all sorts of cool stuff. But then
(23:24):
when you win the game, the exo skeleton is taken
off to reveal her bikini body. Yeah, and and an
article about this had a really really important point about this,
which is that as you're playing the game, that robot
exo skeleton character that is you, You were the hero
and you were shooting. But once you win and the
(23:48):
robots suit is removed and you see a bikini clad woman,
then that character isn't you anymore. It's just a passive
object that you get to you get rewarded with. Yeah, yeah,
and they out. We'll get into this a little bit more,
but speaking of that sort of the role playing that
happens within video games, there is a type of self
objectification that happens just by virtue of playing a character,
(24:13):
like you take on the role of that character, and
when you see that character then stripped down to reveal
a busty bikini body, studies have shown that it makes
us think about our own bikini bodies, and usually more
negative ways. And so there was a two thousand nine
study essentially that took a census of video games and
it found that not surprisingly, male characters not only outnumber
(24:37):
women in video games, but also female characters are overwhelmingly
stereotypical and sexualized, even the case of a potentially really
cool character like Sammus And now that's people are probably
but christ And that happened in like the eighties. That
was like the eighties. Things have like totally changed, right, No,
(24:57):
what who are these fictional people that you're referencing? Kristen
guy gamers? Yeah, no, things are not better. And someone
who has done a ton of research to dig into
these kinds of tropes is one Anita Sarkasian, who made
quite a name for herself in the video game industry.
For uh. She had done a Tropes Versus women's series
(25:18):
for a while, just looking at the portrayals of women
in pop culture, and she decided that she wanted to
really dig into the video game industry because it is
such uh massively popular and growing form of entertainment for people,
and she began she had a Kickstarter campaign, and essentially
she got cyber mopped by a lot of people who
(25:39):
are not happy about someone wanting to talk about video
games from a feminist perspective, essentially kind of taking a
deeper look at like, well, what how do these video
games portray women? And the good news is her Kickstarter
massively exceeded expectations because she was see such an onslot
(26:01):
of cyber attacks from people, she publicized it and people
then rushed to her aid um, and she's still I mean,
if you google her name, especially if you look her
up in YouTube, you find her videos, but you also
find so many videos of people trying to discredit her.
So I feel like we need to give a little
context to who Anita Sarkisian is because if you are
(26:22):
a gamer, you've probably heard of her, and there's a
good chance that it isn't in a good light. But
I will tell you I have watched her videos. She
does a great job of offering a comprehensive and non
threatening look at women in games while admitting that she
still enjoys these games. She's not saying burn video games
to the ground, but it's worthwhile to look into how
(26:45):
women are portrayed, because she explained this so well in
an interview with I g N, saying, think of it
this way. If gaming is the air we all breathe.
Right now, the air quality is currently extremely polluted with
thick clouds of toxic sexism with a radio actor particles
of misogyny floating around everywhere. Sounds terrifying, right well, that
society Hello, And of course that's not to say and
(27:08):
and christ and I are trying to drive home that
it's not everybody, it's not all the time, it's not everywhere.
But there are a lot of tropes in these games
that are worth talking about even if you do like
playing them. And we're not saying you shouldn't play them.
We are And so I think Sarkisian is pleading for
a little bit of media savvy to just be kind
of aware of what you're looking at when you're looking
(27:29):
at it. And anyway, one of the tropes that she
focuses hard on is the whole damsel in distress. What
harm could a damsel in distress possibly have? But you
know a lot of these in your face. Things that
we see over and over again tend to drive home
stereotypes about women and the way we think about women.
But anyway, before we get into that, what is this trope? Basically, Uh,
(27:53):
it's princesses, wives, girlfriends, basically women in these games who
often end up kidnapped or somehow frozen and disempowered, or
they're put under a spell, or they're frozen in a crystal.
Basically they're trapped somehow. Yeah, and by trapping the women,
it gives the male hero some kind of incentive to
(28:14):
go through this journey. And hey, you know what, I
love Super Mario Brothers. Princess Peach. What a gal. She's great,
but she's kind of the quintessential damsel in distress um
And but this started even before Super Mario Brothers with
Donkey Kong and Pauline also known as the Lady and Pauline,
who was a damsel in distress and Donkey Kong was
(28:35):
actually kind of the model for Princess Peach and Peaches
kidnapped for instance, in thirteen out of the fourteen Mario
games she's featured in, and she's only a playable character.
And Super Mario Brothers too, which came out in nine um.
And she also talks about how you see the same
kind of thing in Zelda named for the damsel in distress,
(28:58):
and she's really Zelda's never really been to star in
her own adventure, isn't Isn't that a sad metaphor? It
is it really is, ladies, let's not be Zelda's let that,
let him, let that to settle over the crowd um.
Although Sarkisian points out how she does sometimes get more
active roles, she becomes more of a helpful damsel at times,
(29:20):
but she always ends up at least getting re kidnapped.
She has to be saved at some point, and she
says this exists and pretty much any type of game,
whether you're looking at first person shooters, RPGs, MMOs, like,
you're gonna find damsels in distress everywhere. And even when
you have a heroic archetype of the hero being imprisoned,
(29:44):
a lot of times the way that hero will escape
is through his own strength and cunning huzzah. And this
poor freaking damsel like so not only is she like
imprisoned in a castle or she's trapped or tied up
or whatever, she also is the victim of pretty horrific
violence and all these different kinds of video games. She
tends to be basically a disposable woman who falls victim
(30:07):
to any number of horrific violent acts. So Sarcassian takes
through all of these different game titles about how they
follow similar paths of for instance, the hero's wife being
brutally murdered and then you have to rescue the daughter.
That happens over and over and over again. Or you
have a wife or girlfriend's soul being trapped in hell
(30:28):
and so then you know the hero has to travel
to try to like save the soul. And then you
might also have damsels who martyr themselves that will then
propel the hero on his journey. Sometimes also you have
games that force the hero to brutally kill the wife
or girlfriend, either because it turns out done da da
(30:49):
da she was a villain the whole time, or that's
like the only way that you can win the game.
Violence against women solves everything according to these games, right basically,
I mean it's sort of the way that these a
lot of these games work is it sort of forces
you into, you know, having one solution, which is beating up, killing, stabbing, shooting, strangling,
(31:12):
whatever it will take to kill these women. And that's
that's not so good Caroline now. And and you know,
you could be wondering, well, what does this have to
do with anything as far as real life goes? Why
do we care about violence and video games? Haven't there
been studies showing that it doesn't make us a more
violent culture. Well, actually, unlike needless violence against women and
(31:34):
all these games actually does have quite a big impact. Yeah.
Why Yen Tang, who's one of those Ohio University researchers
we mentioned earlier, said quote, the general GISTs of sexual
content in video games is an exposure to such content
leads to attitudes that are unfavorable toward women. And you
see this reflected in so many studies. For instance, the
(31:55):
two thousand twelve study found that a video game depicting
sexual objective a case of women and violence against women
resulted in statistically significant increase rape myth acceptance, essentially sort
of rape supportive attitudes, the whole idea of like, you know,
women asking for it, essential, etcetera. Um. And that was
more prevalent among male study participants, but not for female participants.
(32:19):
But that's not to say that these kinds of video
games that sexually objectify women don't have negative impacts on
female players. Right. Yeah. Stanford study found that women who
played with a sexualized avatar, whether it was basically with
her face on it or with another woman's face, engaged
(32:40):
in more self objectification and bought into rape myths more. Yeah.
You see this theme of increased rape myth acceptance a
lot in these studies. Um. Also in two thousand nine,
there was a study that came out which found stereotype
confirming virtual women correlated to higher levels of sex is
them and again rape myth acceptance in male and female players.
(33:04):
And we could go on and on and on. There
are a number of studies finding over and over again
that hey, when we basically use women, highly sexualized women
in video games as props upon which to inflict violence
or rape, there are you know there there's the infamous
rape UH scene in Grand Theft Auto. There was also
(33:26):
a rape scene I believe in I don't know if
it was in the game or just in promotion for
UH tomb Rator addition that came out and basically it's like, no,
we don't because we're playing. It's different. I feel like
It's different from sexual assault being portrayed in movies and
television in a way because it's almost more engaging because
(33:47):
you're playing those characters, right. And I feel like when
rape and sexual assault are depicted in movies and TV shows,
it's always a bad thing. It's always like a crime
and a negative thing that needs to be solved. Whereas
if you're the first person player in a video game
that involves rape and sexualizing women, objectifying women, it's there's
(34:12):
there's nothing necessarily telling you it's wrong. Yeah, it's fodder
for your heroism and and that can have negative impacts
on male and female players. And the solution isn't yet. Again,
it's not a call to get rid of video games,
but rather to ask for better raise the bar. I mean,
you can have you can you can shoot up as
(34:33):
many things as you want to in games. This isn't
us railing against gun violence and video games, but rather,
like you said, you know, Sarkisian kind of requesting a
little bit of media savvy. It's important to pay attention
to what we're consuming, and yeah, and not do away with,
like you said, shoot him up games or whatever, but
(34:53):
just offer more and different things like left Behind, which
has garnered incredible praise. People are coming out of the
woodwork to be like, oh my god, this game is
amazing a change in my life. It features a fourteen
year old girl protagonist, Yeah, and she also interacts with
her best friend Riley, but she still has to do
(35:15):
a lot of really tough things. And Laura Hudson wrote
about left Behind recently in Wired magazine and it was
headlined something along the lines of left Behind was the
first video game that really made me feel like proud
to be a woman, and she writes, we don't just
need more women in video games, we need more women
(35:35):
who don't fit in boxes. And she talks about how
left Behind isn't remarkable just because it meets a quota,
but because Ellie and her best friend Riley are people.
They're fully realized, they're quirky, they're funny, and they're dangerous.
And she says that Ellie is there because she's herself
and for once, that's reason enough. She's not there to
(35:55):
just titillate and motivate. Players are like, oh, you know,
Ellie has been beaten, so go go kill somebody. Yeah,
it's all about her. And like we said in episode
number one. Uh, Call of Duty Ghosts, for instance, is
going to have a female playable character in its multiplayer component. Yeah.
(36:16):
BioWare's Mass Effect three has implemented changes that allow for
gay romance. I mean, diversity beyond just women is something
that we didn't even have time to talk about in
a two part series on video games. Um So, LGBT
acceptance and visibility in games is something too that needs
to be strongly addressed. Me. A lot of what we
(36:38):
see is is very headeronormative violence against women or just
headteronormative romances, and it's like, hey, uh, I'm over here,
I'm an LGBT player. I exist too, And not to
mention two racial diversity as well, overwhelmingly male or female,
the protagonists are going to be white. A lot of
(36:58):
the industry itself is very white. Um So, there's a
lot of room for improvement. And the thing is a
lot of gamers sometimes get up in arms about the
possibility of changes. You get attached to a game. You
love a game, if you're spending, like if you're a
hardcore gamer nineteen plus hours a week with a game,
it's understandable that you might be a little resistant to change.
(37:20):
But it's only going to make things better, yeah, you know,
and it's gonna make things better for you know, not
just the games, but for the people who play them
as well. And shouldn't that be the the ultimate goal? No?
Not for No, people want to people want to just
shoot things on a screen, right, Yeah, that's what it is.
Crush candies. I don't know the answer, Caroline. This is
(37:43):
this is why I really want to hear from listeners
on this issue. What is it like to be a gamer,
especially if you are a woman out there? I mean,
do you deal with issues of having to prove your credibility? Um?
Are you harassed or are you immune to all of
this stuff? Do you find this kind of these kinds
of issues sensationalized? We want to hear from everybody. What
(38:04):
are your thoughts on this? Mom Stuff at Discovery dot
com is where you can email us or you can
tweet us at Mom's Stuff podcast, And we've got a
couple of messages to share with you right now. Well,
I've got a message here from Christopher about our men
Scaping episode, and he said, I'd like to make a
(38:25):
statement of opposition in regard to your comments about male
body hair still being socially acceptable in the US. As
a twenty two year old guy with body hair, I
get ridiculed and laughed at on a nearly daily basis
by my peers and coworkers, and I'm often told that
if I want to get a girlfriend, quote, you need
to not be an abominable snowman bro. Maybe this is
(38:47):
just East Coast college town culture, but my experience here
and in Houston were about the same. As a side note,
I've tried manscaping in the past, both with near and
traditional methods, but removing all that hair is an arduous
task that rewards me within her own hair and a
sensation of sandpaper taped to the backside of all my shirts.
I can only hope that I find a lady who
doesn't mind my body hair if any exists, and Christopher,
(39:11):
they absolutely exist. Yeah, I'm pointing at myself right here,
because my question to you about these people who are
like trying to humiliate you, are they all dudes? Because
there are plenty of ladies out there who don't mind
it or do like it. My my gentleman caller does
have quite a bit of hair in places, and he's
(39:36):
very handsome. Yeah, yeah, I say, don't don't listen. Don't
listen to the hair haters. And this is also an
example too of why we wanted to talk about this issue,
because you're experiencing the same and so many other guys
i'm sure are experiencing the same kind of body hair shame.
There's usually just been targeted on women. But Christopher, don't worry.
(39:56):
There are plenty of women who don't mind, and might
even a hairy bag. Yeah, because if you're getting a
bunch of that flak from fellow dudes, all that means
is that they're buying into the junk that like those
men's magazines are selling them, and they're probably voicing some insecurity. Okay,
I have a letter here from es may Um, also
about our grooming episode. She says, for as long as
(40:18):
I can remember, as a woman, I have been very
aware of this expectation to remove almost all body hair,
and personally, it's never really sat right with me. I
was brought up with role models like Patty Smith, who
not only grew out their body hair, but we're not
afraid to show it off. The cover to Patti Smith's
album Easter is a perfect example of this. But as
a woman in her early to mid twenties. I've never
come across someone who shares the beauty in body hair.
(40:41):
I'm more than happy with every other aspect of my body,
but hate having to shave for other people. I found
it interesting when you spoke of the anxiety that some
men and women feel when not shaving, and I think
I feel the opposite. I prefer how I look when
I let my body do its thing, and I wish
that wasn't seen as such a disgusting choice. So thank you, Esme,
and thank you for sending that picture of Patti Smith's cover,
(41:03):
and thanks to everybody who's written into us. Mom Stuff
at Discovery dot com is where you can send your emails.
If you want to reach out to us on social media,
check out this podcast with all the links to all
of our sources, watch our videos, read our blogs. There's
one place to go, and that's Stuff I've Never Told
You dot com. For more on this and thousands of
(41:28):
other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com
They see April Monsters to exist in this place. Animal Planets,
River Monsters returns with an all new season the Amazon,
the one place whose mysteries keep calling me by here,
I've seen many monsters, yet to see my last night.
(00:23):
River Monsters Sunday Nights at nine starting April six, Animal
plan and Surprisingly Human. Welcome to Stuff Mob Never told
you from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Caroline and I'm Kristen. This is
(00:46):
part two looking at women in a video games. The
last episode, which I'm sure you listen to, was focusing
on women in the actual gaming industry, the women who
designed the games, run the companies, come up with these
great ideas, and the fact that well the numbers aren't great,
there is hope out there. We gave you a list
(01:08):
of a lot of really interesting women who are heading
up companies and designing the games. This episode, we're gonna
be talking about both the women playing the games and
the women in the games. Yeah, so let's kick off
with some numbers for a little refresher. Women comprise of
the entire gaming population and that includes all kinds of games.
(01:31):
And then from there we comprise of video gamers. So
anyone who says women and girls don't play video games
don't know what they're talking about. One thing that has
kind of lobbed against women gamers, though, is that a
lot of us play social games. These might be on
(01:53):
social media. They're called social or casual gaming, and it's
things like candy Crush for instance. Yeah. The interesting thing
is how King, which is a company that publishes Candy Crush,
actually tests all of its new games on a target
demo of women to fifty five and if they like it,
they go ahead and put it out because they've found
(02:16):
that if women to fifty five respond well to a game,
it goes on to be a smash hit with all audiences.
What do you know about that? Who knew? Well? So
women comprise of social gamers compared to forty six percent
of men, and the average age is forty what's up
with that? Why? Why do women make up such a
(02:37):
huge percent of social gamers. I think it could have
something to do with the fact that, I don't know,
we're busy and we might not have a tendency to
sit down and play Halo for five hours. Yeah. I mean,
first of all, we dominate social media. There are more
of us on places like Facebook, where you see so
many candy Crush updates and ads. Um. But experts suggest
(02:59):
that essentially women are adult women where I mean, think
about moms, Okay, working moms. They are multitasking, they have
so much to do. And there was a story that
I was reading interviewing one woman about her candy crush addiction,
and she I think she had she had a very
young child, and she said, I play it during naptime
(03:20):
because it's just this little window of time that I
have all to myself, and it allows me to forget everything.
She can't sit down and play Call of Duty for
eight hours, and she says that playing it offers her
just this window of escape and because she doesn't have time,
for instance, to not that all men have hours to
kill playing Call of Duty kill Call of Duty un pun,
(03:43):
but that they think that that's one reason why adult
women tend to play more on the go games is
just because we have smaller pockets of time throughout the day. Perhaps, um,
but this whole women being more drawn to social and
casual gaming as it's called. I kind of hate the
term casual gaming because it plays into the stereotype that
(04:05):
women aren't legit gamers because if you start talking to
quote unquote hardcore gamers and you are a female identified,
well just get ready because they will challenge your credibility
because they're gonna want to know. As soon as you
say that you enjoy games, you're gonna need you essentially
need to resume to prove that you know what you're
(04:26):
talking about, kind of like talking to like record store guys,
no offense. Yeah, well so you mentioned hardcore, like that's
that's actually a thing. That's a demographic. Hardcore gamers are
defined by play time per week and are basically a
smaller subset of a games core audience. These are the
top ten percent of gamers who spend the most time
(04:47):
playing per week, at nineteen hours a week. Nineteen hours
a week. That's incredible. That's a second job. That's like
a part time job. And Dennis Schameeca over at Venture
be looked into jen D and core and hardcore gaming
because don't confuse core gaming and hardcore gaming. Core gamers
(05:08):
simply refer to anyone who plays video games on consoles
like Xbox three sixty p S three UH as well
as like Nintendo we and UH three D s. And
when you look at the top selling super genres as
they're called for these core gamers as console players, it
is a lot of guy oriented stuff. First person shooter games,
(05:30):
action games, sports games. Those are the three, not surprisingly
top sellers, and they have overwhelmingly over male audiences. Although,
as we mentioned in that last podcast in part one
of our video game series, do not discount women for
not wanting to play first person shooter games, action games,
et cetera. Because what was it like thirty of women
(05:54):
enjoy playing violent video games. Absolutely, And when you talk
about these core gamers, these are the people who really
have the most influence over how the public thinks about
video games and gamers. So when you think of a gamer,
the image that comes to mind is not a forty
year old married woman playing candy Crush. You think of
(06:14):
that demographic that is playing a first person shooter game
on the Xbox three sixty for instance. So when you
look at the age breakdown for core and hardcore gamers,
the core audience has an average age of about thirty
and is excuse sixty forty mail. The hardcore average age
(06:35):
is lower, it's about five and skews eighty five to
fifteen mail and that I mean that breakdown of the
hardcore gaming population is where a lot of this idea
that well, women don't play video games, no women are
actual legit gamers. That's where a lot of this comes in.
But the thing is, you got to remember when you're
hearing from hardcore gamers, we're talking about like the nineties
(06:58):
percentile gamers. These are the people who play in the
top ten percent, like nineteen. Like you said, an average
I means some people play plenty more than nineteen hours
a week. These are It's like the voices a few
are being broadcast too many exactly. Well, now, Christine, you
(07:18):
said something a minute ago about like if if a
woman or a young girl says that she's a gamer,
she basically has to prove herself, like she needs a
resume to prove that she knows about and plays games.
This ties into the whole girl gamer stereotype, and girl
usually spelled when it's being used as a pejorative term
g u r L. Not to be confused with the
(07:39):
generic just a girl game or a female person who
plays games, and not to be confused with fake geek girls.
Like all of these things that arouse such ire in
a lot of young men playing video games, and a
lot of stereotypes that come up with this girl gamer
surround the idea that any woman or young girl who
(07:59):
is playing game games is just doing it for attention.
And god forbid you claim the term girl gamer for yourself.
God forbid you want to set yourself apart as a
woman and own it, because there's that notion that if
you're doing it, you do just want attention. You're not
even allowed to own your own femininity or femaleness. Yeah,
and and this spawned an entire meme across the internet
(08:22):
where and you have like women participating in it as well,
talking down about oh, girl gamers. She's just the girl
gamerh did she instagram herself looking cute with her joy
stick in our hand? Then you're just a girl gamer.
You don't actually enjoy these games. And um, I got
into a little bit of a Reddit rabbit hole reading
(08:43):
up on girl gamers because it's just interesting to see
just first person these perceptions and people's supposed experiences with them.
And there was one woman's post on Reddit talking about
you know what, she kind of copped to it. She said,
I was a girl gamer for a while, she started
talking about how she kind of found gaming and it
(09:06):
was the first place where she ever received attention, any
kind of attention from God. She never really fit in,
she was overweight, she just never felt good about herself,
and finally when she found gaming, all of a sudden,
men were taking interest in her because she was into
this kind of male oriented hobby. And she said that
(09:29):
for a while she kind of played it up because
she enjoyed that so much. And to me, her experience
was telling because it seemed like this wasn't an issue
of oh, well, this most mean that women aren't legitimate gamers,
but more just has to do with you know, flirtation,
body image, how we deal with the world and our
attractions and attractiveness, etcetera. Where But but what is what
(09:53):
what it's led to is a lot of slut shaming
that happens and just ickiness that women have to deal with.
That was one of the main things that our Facebook
stuff Mom Never told you followers responded to when we
asked what we should talk about regarding video games. So
many women said, oh, please talk about girl gamers and
(10:14):
how I always have to prove myself. Yeah, but those
girl gamers are a lot of the times having to
prove themselves based on their looks, Whereas if a dude
comes along and wants to play a game, it's like, okay,
well we're going to test you based on your skill.
Are you any good at this? No? Okay, well then
obviously you're not worth it, Whereas when a woman comes along,
it's like, okay, well are you hot? Are you really
playing the game? Are you just posing with your joystick
(10:35):
and like licking it and posting pictures of yourself on
the internet, Like, yeah, first of all, why are you
looking at joystick? But that's the thing. There's like that
horrible divide where men at least get the get the
favor of being judged on their actual skill, whereas women
are just like are you cute or not? Or yeah,
I don't. I don't think i've ever heard anyone termed
a guy gamer. Oh he's a guy gamer. He's just
(10:56):
he's just posing with that joystick by his abs for
just just for the ladies. Well, then, I mean that's
another thing. You hear a lot of guys saying, like,
shut up about being a girl gamer. I don't call
myself a guy gamer. You're just a gamer and so,
but then that discourages girls and women who do want
to own it because yes, okay, well there's a girl
gamer demographic. That's like just doing it for attention according
(11:18):
to these guys. But then what happens when the girls
and women actually want to say, no, I'm different from you,
I play differently, I want different things, and why do
all of these criteria have to exist? Katie Heeney over
at BuzzFeed created just such a perfect collection of all
of the slut shamy, confusing, and sometimes straight up sexist
(11:40):
and contradictory rules for being a girl gamer, where it's like,
you gotta play games, but you can't be too obvious
about it, because if you're too obvious about how you
like games, and they're just going to assume that you're
a girl gamer. And then you know, they guys want
you to be attractive because we like looking at attractive people.
But if you're too attractive, you know, it's just like
(12:01):
and so that's why a lot of times women will
end up going just like won't speak, for instance, on
you know, like multiplayer games. They won't. They just keep
their femaleness as hidden as possible, just to not have
to even deal with it. Yeah, Blogger Stephanie ben Dixon
basically said the exact same thing. She was talking about
how she finds herself editing certain aspects of her femininity
(12:25):
for fear that it would somehow damage her credibility. And
I mean, this gets into all sorts of issues that
krist and I have talked about before as far as
fem phobia goes. But Stephanie says, hey, look, I have
a lot of pink tech accessories, and she goes into it.
It starts to sound really cool, and she's like owning
her differences. She says she accepts the term girl gamer
because for now we're still a minority that faces a
(12:48):
wall of angry nerd rage. But in talking about her
pink accessories, I noticed something very interesting because at first
she's like, yeah, I'm owning it, like pink is different.
But then she says, I liked the idea of how
this obnoxiously defiant and slightly sickening color would go against
the grain somewhat. And then I'm like, oh, it's Stephanie, Like,
there's still she while she is owning pink and owning
(13:10):
the term girl gamer, there's still sounds like there's from
phobia in that because she's calling the color pink obnoxious
and sickening, and so it still sounds like she's been
discouraged over her game playing career from kind of owning
her femaleness. Well, I think it's because of a lot
of those contradictory rules in quotes that pop up for
(13:30):
you know, just you can't you can't look like you're
trying too hard, you know. Um. And it's fascinating to
me that in this segment specifically like in gaming, that
it's such a prominent aspect of it, like this just
this common assumption that that women have some kind of
ulterior motive for wanting to play games. Um. But unfortunately,
(13:54):
like the kinds of you know, the issues of harassment
that women in the video game industry, the ones who
are making the games sometimes run up against. Another thing
that was echoed among people on Facebook was the issue
of also dealing with straight up harassment from other gamers
as soon as their female identity is revealed. Sometimes they
just get an onslaught of come ons, or just gendered epithets. Uh.
(14:21):
There was a survey conducted by Emily Matthew at the
price charting blog, which found that women are harassed four
times as often as men and six reported being called
a slut, whore or other words that I can't say
on this podcast. And there are also lots of charming
requests for women to just get back in the kitchen
and start making lots of sandwiches. Yeah, and in that
(14:43):
pole of the people she talked to believe that sexism
is rampant. Interesting don't but I mean, you know, you would,
you would think that they're okay. So there is a
degree of awareness, but it sure is still bad out
there despite out awareness. Yeah, I mean, and it does
go both ways. Fifteen point seven percent of men also
(15:05):
reported that they had experienced sex based taunting, harassment, or
threats while playing video games. Um and ten percent of
women unfortunately copped to using their gender for favors, basically
like strolling into a world of warcraft and being like, oh, yes,
you wanted to give me gold shore a no problem?
(15:27):
See he Well, and just like we talked about in
the last episode, where um, a lot of well not
a lot, but but many women, probably many more than
we even know. Many women have left the industry because
of the abuse. Nearly thirty six percent of women that
Emily Matthew pulled reported having to quit playing temporarily because
of the abuse and the harassment, versus eleven point seven
(15:49):
percent of guys that she pulled. Game is game is,
you'd be mean sometimes. We're looking a little bit deeper
into this issue. A team over at Ohio University looked
at the reactions by gamers to female voices versus male
voices on Xbox Alive, like looking at first person shooter games,
(16:12):
and they published a study in the journal New Media
and Society, and one of the researchers, why En tang Um,
explained how, on average, female voices received three times as
many negative comments as male voices or no male voices,
and on top of that, women's voices received more queries
(16:33):
and messages from other gamers than male voices or no voices.
So it's kind of the same thing of uh, just
by virtue of being a woman, you sort of open
yourself up to either being called terrible things or being
solicited for sex. Yeah, So you basically your option is
to speak and get abused or remain silent. Yeah, And
(16:55):
tang said, the take home message is that female players,
when heard aren't treated as well as their male counterparts,
despite skill level wins or losses. They women aren't attracting
negative comments just because they be terrible a gaming. Yeah,
it's like there's there's that little sign up on the
clubhouse store no girls allowed. Yeah, unfortunate. Although I know
(17:17):
that not all male gamers are like this. Guy. Guy
gamers listening, I'm gonna call you guy gamers, don't worry.
I know that it's it's again. I feel like it's
the loud voices of this horrific minority that often get
the most all. They're generating all of this negative press
because it's horrifying. It horrifying. So let's look a little
(17:39):
bit more, maybe into what women want in their games,
aside from harassment, obviously, because this is a question that
ties back to our part one episode, looking more at
the industry of like what they're trying trying to figure
out of well aside front, we know, we know the
Canadie Crush is popular, but what kind of games do
(18:00):
women really like playing? Because if you look back into
the early days of gaming, the titles that were made
specifically for women and girls were so hilariously riddled with
hearts and sparkles and pink. And there's actually a site
called femicom that's calm with an M, which calls itself
(18:23):
the Feminine Computer Museum. It's a website dedicated to archiving
these quote unquote girl games from like the early eighties
and nineties, and it's kind of fascinating to see. I mean,
these are also the days when you have alone Carol
Shaw or Donna Bailey at atari, like the only woman
like in the room. So not surprisingly that you have
(18:43):
such kind of overtly just let's play house. You have
to do the dishes for twenty points kind of games
coming up. Christen accepts that challenge. She will organize the dishwasher.
I will I would win that game, would but I mean, yeah,
the a museum founder I guess we'll call her, basically
said that she's preserving these games to spark conversations. Not
(19:06):
necessarily preserving them because they are so awesome, but preserving
them because nobody's playing them anymore and nobody's talking about them.
They're not talking about them the way you would like.
Duck Hunt, Like everybody has a duck Hunt memory of
standing up against the TV with the gun even though
you're not supposed to, but nobody has those collective memories
of these quote unquote girly games, and so she is
(19:27):
working to preserve them just so that we can take
a look at why we do the things we do,
why we look at certain games the way we do. Yeah,
and and she pointed out how girly video games are
rarely advertised, reviewed or written up, and rarely demoed in stores.
And she says, even if it's a huge seller, like
(19:47):
the more recent game Style Savvy for Nintendo d S,
which I mean Style Savvy, come on, hardcore gamers roll
their eyes, but it's a big seller. And yeah, it's
kind of like um with fandom in general. A lot
of times, girly fandom is sort of relegated to the corner,
just like go Go Away hearts and Polka dots. No, no,
(20:09):
you over here. There's a little pink corner over here,
s behind that line. I picture like the Lego movie,
Like there's all these little universes, different universes for different videos.
Polka dot, Polka dots. You go over there and they're
all like pa dot. But the fact of the matter is,
don't don't worry women gamers listening We're not suggesting that
style savvy is what women want in video games. We're
(20:31):
also not suggesting the Candy Crush or Halo or Grand
theft Ato or whatever games. You know what people are realizing, Caroline,
women want different things. We don't all want the same
kind of game. Weird. Women are different then each other,
that's what you're That's what you're saying. Women are different
from each other. Yeah, you and me. We might even
(20:53):
want to play different games. I want to load, I
want to play the Dishwasher game. Maybe you want to
play Prince of Persia, Build the Sandwich game. Yeah, this
is coming from Kevin Kelly over at joystick dot com.
He was talking about how women do like story driven games.
We do appreciate in game tutorials because honestly, who reads
manuals or even like instruction manuals when you're putting together
(21:14):
in ikea shelf, Like nobody reads these things. Um. But
but the point is just making women aware of more games,
you know, letting them know that, hey, they might also
like Halo as well. But it's a matter of not
advertising it to everyone across the board with just some busty,
sexy sexpot on the cover. You know, keep in mind
(21:36):
that your audience is very diverse. Yeah, I mean, there
is market research that does suggest that certain themes, like
games that are more story driven or sort of a
more communication based the sims, for instance, massively popular among women.
Maybe games that might be a little more emotionally evocative
(21:57):
tend to appeal more to women. But don't get pigeonholes
in just trying to remake those games over and over again. Rather,
you know, consider all of these women who are also
really loving to frag people and see, hey, maybe we
can maybe we can put a female protagonist in there.
Put put a gun in the hands of a woman.
(22:18):
Shall we get video game wise? Well, we are going
to talk about women in video games, the female protagonist
of video games, and and how telling their roles are
when we come right back from the quick break and
now back to the show. So when we left off,
we had established that while market research has suggested that
(22:40):
there are certain types of games that women like, surprise, surprise,
women like different kinds of things. And yet if you
look at the legacy of female characters in especially like
big name video games, they start to fall into very
predictable types of roles. So for instance, in the late eighties,
(23:02):
this game called Metroid came out, and I'm sure a
lot of people have played Metroid, and it features this character, Sammuss,
female character, and for all of the game she's wearing
kind of this genderless robotic exo skeleton. But then and
it's like super cool because you can like play Sammy's
and she's doing all sorts of cool stuff. But then
(23:24):
when you win the game, the exo skeleton is taken
off to reveal her bikini body. Yeah, and and an
article about this had a really really important point about this,
which is that as you're playing the game, that robot
exo skeleton character that is you, You were the hero
and you were shooting. But once you win and the
(23:48):
robots suit is removed and you see a bikini clad woman,
then that character isn't you anymore. It's just a passive
object that you get to you get rewarded with. Yeah, yeah,
and they out. We'll get into this a little bit more,
but speaking of that sort of the role playing that
happens within video games, there is a type of self
objectification that happens just by virtue of playing a character,
(24:13):
like you take on the role of that character, and
when you see that character then stripped down to reveal
a busty bikini body, studies have shown that it makes
us think about our own bikini bodies, and usually more
negative ways. And so there was a two thousand nine
study essentially that took a census of video games and
it found that not surprisingly, male characters not only outnumber
(24:37):
women in video games, but also female characters are overwhelmingly
stereotypical and sexualized, even the case of a potentially really
cool character like Sammus And now that's people are probably
but christ And that happened in like the eighties. That
was like the eighties. Things have like totally changed, right, No,
(24:57):
what who are these fictional people that you're referencing? Kristen
guy gamers? Yeah, no, things are not better. And someone
who has done a ton of research to dig into
these kinds of tropes is one Anita Sarkasian, who made
quite a name for herself in the video game industry.
For uh. She had done a Tropes Versus women's series
(25:18):
for a while, just looking at the portrayals of women
in pop culture, and she decided that she wanted to
really dig into the video game industry because it is
such uh massively popular and growing form of entertainment for people,
and she began she had a Kickstarter campaign, and essentially
she got cyber mopped by a lot of people who
(25:39):
are not happy about someone wanting to talk about video
games from a feminist perspective, essentially kind of taking a
deeper look at like, well, what how do these video
games portray women? And the good news is her Kickstarter
massively exceeded expectations because she was see such an onslot
(26:01):
of cyber attacks from people, she publicized it and people
then rushed to her aid um, and she's still I mean,
if you google her name, especially if you look her
up in YouTube, you find her videos, but you also
find so many videos of people trying to discredit her.
So I feel like we need to give a little
context to who Anita Sarkisian is because if you are
(26:22):
a gamer, you've probably heard of her, and there's a
good chance that it isn't in a good light. But
I will tell you I have watched her videos. She
does a great job of offering a comprehensive and non
threatening look at women in games while admitting that she
still enjoys these games. She's not saying burn video games
to the ground, but it's worthwhile to look into how
(26:45):
women are portrayed, because she explained this so well in
an interview with I g N, saying, think of it
this way. If gaming is the air we all breathe.
Right now, the air quality is currently extremely polluted with
thick clouds of toxic sexism with a radio actor particles
of misogyny floating around everywhere. Sounds terrifying, right well, that
society Hello, And of course that's not to say and
(27:08):
and christ and I are trying to drive home that
it's not everybody, it's not all the time, it's not everywhere.
But there are a lot of tropes in these games
that are worth talking about even if you do like
playing them. And we're not saying you shouldn't play them.
We are And so I think Sarkisian is pleading for
a little bit of media savvy to just be kind
of aware of what you're looking at when you're looking
(27:29):
at it. And anyway, one of the tropes that she
focuses hard on is the whole damsel in distress. What
harm could a damsel in distress possibly have? But you
know a lot of these in your face. Things that
we see over and over again tend to drive home
stereotypes about women and the way we think about women.
But anyway, before we get into that, what is this trope? Basically, Uh,
(27:53):
it's princesses, wives, girlfriends, basically women in these games who
often end up kidnapped or somehow frozen and disempowered, or
they're put under a spell, or they're frozen in a crystal.
Basically they're trapped somehow. Yeah, and by trapping the women,
it gives the male hero some kind of incentive to
(28:14):
go through this journey. And hey, you know what, I
love Super Mario Brothers. Princess Peach. What a gal. She's great,
but she's kind of the quintessential damsel in distress um
And but this started even before Super Mario Brothers with
Donkey Kong and Pauline also known as the Lady and Pauline,
who was a damsel in distress and Donkey Kong was
(28:35):
actually kind of the model for Princess Peach and Peaches
kidnapped for instance, in thirteen out of the fourteen Mario
games she's featured in, and she's only a playable character.
And Super Mario Brothers too, which came out in nine um.
And she also talks about how you see the same
kind of thing in Zelda named for the damsel in distress,
(28:58):
and she's really Zelda's never really been to star in
her own adventure, isn't Isn't that a sad metaphor? It
is it really is, ladies, let's not be Zelda's let that,
let him, let that to settle over the crowd um.
Although Sarkisian points out how she does sometimes get more
active roles, she becomes more of a helpful damsel at times,
(29:20):
but she always ends up at least getting re kidnapped.
She has to be saved at some point, and she
says this exists and pretty much any type of game,
whether you're looking at first person shooters, RPGs, MMOs, like,
you're gonna find damsels in distress everywhere. And even when
you have a heroic archetype of the hero being imprisoned,
(29:44):
a lot of times the way that hero will escape
is through his own strength and cunning huzzah. And this
poor freaking damsel like so not only is she like
imprisoned in a castle or she's trapped or tied up
or whatever, she also is the victim of pretty horrific
violence and all these different kinds of video games. She
tends to be basically a disposable woman who falls victim
(30:07):
to any number of horrific violent acts. So Sarcassian takes
through all of these different game titles about how they
follow similar paths of for instance, the hero's wife being
brutally murdered and then you have to rescue the daughter.
That happens over and over and over again. Or you
have a wife or girlfriend's soul being trapped in hell
(30:28):
and so then you know the hero has to travel
to try to like save the soul. And then you
might also have damsels who martyr themselves that will then
propel the hero on his journey. Sometimes also you have
games that force the hero to brutally kill the wife
or girlfriend, either because it turns out done da da
(30:49):
da she was a villain the whole time, or that's
like the only way that you can win the game.
Violence against women solves everything according to these games, right basically,
I mean it's sort of the way that these a
lot of these games work is it sort of forces
you into, you know, having one solution, which is beating up, killing, stabbing, shooting, strangling,
(31:12):
whatever it will take to kill these women. And that's
that's not so good Caroline now. And and you know,
you could be wondering, well, what does this have to
do with anything as far as real life goes? Why
do we care about violence and video games? Haven't there
been studies showing that it doesn't make us a more
violent culture. Well, actually, unlike needless violence against women and
(31:34):
all these games actually does have quite a big impact. Yeah.
Why Yen Tang, who's one of those Ohio University researchers
we mentioned earlier, said quote, the general GISTs of sexual
content in video games is an exposure to such content
leads to attitudes that are unfavorable toward women. And you
see this reflected in so many studies. For instance, the
(31:55):
two thousand twelve study found that a video game depicting
sexual objective a case of women and violence against women
resulted in statistically significant increase rape myth acceptance, essentially sort
of rape supportive attitudes, the whole idea of like, you know,
women asking for it, essential, etcetera. Um. And that was
more prevalent among male study participants, but not for female participants.
(32:19):
But that's not to say that these kinds of video
games that sexually objectify women don't have negative impacts on
female players. Right. Yeah. Stanford study found that women who
played with a sexualized avatar, whether it was basically with
her face on it or with another woman's face, engaged
(32:40):
in more self objectification and bought into rape myths more. Yeah.
You see this theme of increased rape myth acceptance a
lot in these studies. Um. Also in two thousand nine,
there was a study that came out which found stereotype
confirming virtual women correlated to higher levels of sex is
them and again rape myth acceptance in male and female players.
(33:04):
And we could go on and on and on. There
are a number of studies finding over and over again
that hey, when we basically use women, highly sexualized women
in video games as props upon which to inflict violence
or rape, there are you know there there's the infamous
rape UH scene in Grand Theft Auto. There was also
(33:26):
a rape scene I believe in I don't know if
it was in the game or just in promotion for
UH tomb Rator addition that came out and basically it's like, no,
we don't because we're playing. It's different. I feel like
It's different from sexual assault being portrayed in movies and
television in a way because it's almost more engaging because
(33:47):
you're playing those characters, right. And I feel like when
rape and sexual assault are depicted in movies and TV shows,
it's always a bad thing. It's always like a crime
and a negative thing that needs to be solved. Whereas
if you're the first person player in a video game
that involves rape and sexualizing women, objectifying women, it's there's
(34:12):
there's nothing necessarily telling you it's wrong. Yeah, it's fodder
for your heroism and and that can have negative impacts
on male and female players. And the solution isn't yet. Again,
it's not a call to get rid of video games,
but rather to ask for better raise the bar. I mean,
you can have you can you can shoot up as
(34:33):
many things as you want to in games. This isn't
us railing against gun violence and video games, but rather,
like you said, you know, Sarkisian kind of requesting a
little bit of media savvy. It's important to pay attention
to what we're consuming, and yeah, and not do away with,
like you said, shoot him up games or whatever, but
(34:53):
just offer more and different things like left Behind, which
has garnered incredible praise. People are coming out of the
woodwork to be like, oh my god, this game is
amazing a change in my life. It features a fourteen
year old girl protagonist, Yeah, and she also interacts with
her best friend Riley, but she still has to do
(35:15):
a lot of really tough things. And Laura Hudson wrote
about left Behind recently in Wired magazine and it was
headlined something along the lines of left Behind was the
first video game that really made me feel like proud
to be a woman, and she writes, we don't just
need more women in video games, we need more women
(35:35):
who don't fit in boxes. And she talks about how
left Behind isn't remarkable just because it meets a quota,
but because Ellie and her best friend Riley are people.
They're fully realized, they're quirky, they're funny, and they're dangerous.
And she says that Ellie is there because she's herself
and for once, that's reason enough. She's not there to
(35:55):
just titillate and motivate. Players are like, oh, you know,
Ellie has been beaten, so go go kill somebody. Yeah,
it's all about her. And like we said in episode
number one. Uh, Call of Duty Ghosts, for instance, is
going to have a female playable character in its multiplayer component. Yeah.
(36:16):
BioWare's Mass Effect three has implemented changes that allow for
gay romance. I mean, diversity beyond just women is something
that we didn't even have time to talk about in
a two part series on video games. Um So, LGBT
acceptance and visibility in games is something too that needs
to be strongly addressed. Me. A lot of what we
(36:38):
see is is very headeronormative violence against women or just
headteronormative romances, and it's like, hey, uh, I'm over here,
I'm an LGBT player. I exist too, And not to
mention two racial diversity as well, overwhelmingly male or female,
the protagonists are going to be white. A lot of
(36:58):
the industry itself is very white. Um So, there's a
lot of room for improvement. And the thing is a
lot of gamers sometimes get up in arms about the
possibility of changes. You get attached to a game. You
love a game, if you're spending, like if you're a
hardcore gamer nineteen plus hours a week with a game,
it's understandable that you might be a little resistant to change.
(37:20):
But it's only going to make things better, yeah, you know,
and it's gonna make things better for you know, not
just the games, but for the people who play them
as well. And shouldn't that be the the ultimate goal? No?
Not for No, people want to people want to just
shoot things on a screen, right, Yeah, that's what it is.
Crush candies. I don't know the answer, Caroline. This is
(37:43):
this is why I really want to hear from listeners
on this issue. What is it like to be a gamer,
especially if you are a woman out there? I mean,
do you deal with issues of having to prove your credibility? Um?
Are you harassed or are you immune to all of
this stuff? Do you find this kind of these kinds
of issues sensationalized? We want to hear from everybody. What
(38:04):
are your thoughts on this? Mom Stuff at Discovery dot
com is where you can email us or you can
tweet us at Mom's Stuff podcast, And we've got a
couple of messages to share with you right now. Well,
I've got a message here from Christopher about our men
Scaping episode, and he said, I'd like to make a
(38:25):
statement of opposition in regard to your comments about male
body hair still being socially acceptable in the US. As
a twenty two year old guy with body hair, I
get ridiculed and laughed at on a nearly daily basis
by my peers and coworkers, and I'm often told that
if I want to get a girlfriend, quote, you need
to not be an abominable snowman bro. Maybe this is
(38:47):
just East Coast college town culture, but my experience here
and in Houston were about the same. As a side note,
I've tried manscaping in the past, both with near and
traditional methods, but removing all that hair is an arduous
task that rewards me within her own hair and a
sensation of sandpaper taped to the backside of all my shirts.
I can only hope that I find a lady who
doesn't mind my body hair if any exists, and Christopher,
(39:11):
they absolutely exist. Yeah, I'm pointing at myself right here,
because my question to you about these people who are
like trying to humiliate you, are they all dudes? Because
there are plenty of ladies out there who don't mind
it or do like it. My my gentleman caller does
have quite a bit of hair in places, and he's
(39:36):
very handsome. Yeah, yeah, I say, don't don't listen. Don't
listen to the hair haters. And this is also an
example too of why we wanted to talk about this issue,
because you're experiencing the same and so many other guys
i'm sure are experiencing the same kind of body hair shame.
There's usually just been targeted on women. But Christopher, don't worry.
(39:56):
There are plenty of women who don't mind, and might
even a hairy bag. Yeah, because if you're getting a
bunch of that flak from fellow dudes, all that means
is that they're buying into the junk that like those
men's magazines are selling them, and they're probably voicing some insecurity. Okay,
I have a letter here from es may Um, also
about our grooming episode. She says, for as long as
(40:18):
I can remember, as a woman, I have been very
aware of this expectation to remove almost all body hair,
and personally, it's never really sat right with me. I
was brought up with role models like Patty Smith, who
not only grew out their body hair, but we're not
afraid to show it off. The cover to Patti Smith's
album Easter is a perfect example of this. But as
a woman in her early to mid twenties. I've never
come across someone who shares the beauty in body hair.
(40:41):
I'm more than happy with every other aspect of my body,
but hate having to shave for other people. I found
it interesting when you spoke of the anxiety that some
men and women feel when not shaving, and I think
I feel the opposite. I prefer how I look when
I let my body do its thing, and I wish
that wasn't seen as such a disgusting choice. So thank you, Esme,
and thank you for sending that picture of Patti Smith's cover,
(41:03):
and thanks to everybody who's written into us. Mom Stuff
at Discovery dot com is where you can send your emails.
If you want to reach out to us on social media,
check out this podcast with all the links to all
of our sources, watch our videos, read our blogs. There's
one place to go, and that's Stuff I've Never Told
You dot com. For more on this and thousands of
(41:28):
other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com
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