Perils of the Princess

Sharon R. Sherman conducted an interview with boys and girls and wrote about her findings in Perils of the Princess: Gender and Genre in Video Games. The goal was to see if male and female children were able to see and understand the sexist themes that could be present in the video games they play. This is an older study that was conducted in 1997. The hypothesis she made in the beginning of the study is that gender stereotyping will be present. Her reasoning behind this is that male gamers are already aware of the “male hero saving the damsel in distress” plot from films and literature. She watched and observed the children as they played the games and asked them questions before, after, and while they played.

The main game series that she focused on is the Super Mario series. Princess Peach was seen as the female counterpart of Mario because she is what he lacks. In Super Mario Bros. 2, the gamer has a choice of four characters (Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Princess Peach) to choose to play as. Every girl said that they would choose the Princess. The boys were split between Luigi and Toad. When asked about the option of playing as Princess Peach in Super Mario Bros. 2, the boys saw it as strange while the girls saw her as strong and a heroine. One boy even replied, “Now she’s helping you instead of creating the problems, sort of”. The only reason any of the boys used her is because she has the ability to float in the air.

Moving on to other games, Sherman asked the boys about why they didn't find Samus from Metroid “strange” and their response was that it might be the fact that she’s an alien. One boy said “I picture it as an it”. Girls on the other hand, thought that Samus was male because of the helmet and armor.

Another game she asked the children about was Double Dragon. The girls did not like this game because as one girl says, “It never interested me. It was two guys and they were just killing things”. Boys did like the game, but reinforced the theme of damsel in distress that was present, just like in the Super Mario games.

Sherman says that after looking over the research, she believes that children are conscious and aware of the sexist themes and messages. There was actually one boy who admitted that he saw the games as sexist. The reason the boy gives is that life used to be the same way the games portray. He goes on to say that men could do everything and women could only do certain things, which he calls traditional sexism. Girls were also well aware of sexism. At the end of the interview, one girl added that Game Boy could be seen as sexist because it’s called Game “Boy” even though girls enjoy it just as much, and that the commercials for the product, only show boys. I wonder if these games create sexist thoughts in the children’s head, or if they just see it as harmless, like in a movie or a book. I honestly don’t believe that any of these games made any of the children sexist, so the question that remains is if the sexism has any sort of impact.

Does Long-Term Exposure to Sexist Video Games Create Sexist Attitudes

S. Paul Stermer and Melissa Burkley conducted a study to see if male gamers long term exposure to sexist video games creates sexist attitudes toward women.  They wanted to see if male gamers who play games with sexist attributes over a long period of time, could contribute in changing the gamers attitude. When they say long term exposure they mean regular or repeated contact with the game over a long period of time, like months or years. The two types of sexism that they looked at are hostile and benevolent. Hostile sexism is when men have antipathy towards women and don’t want them to have the same power as themselves. Benevolent sexism is when men want to keep women in their “assigned” gender roles and want to protect their delicacy. This type of sexism isn't physically harsh towards women, but it does keep women in inferior roles and portrays them as too weak to have as much power as men.

The prediction that they made is that benevolent sexism would be more present than hostile sexism. The reason they predicted this is because of the “damsel in distress” idea present in many video games.  They also predicted that benevolent behavior and attitudes would be more present in male gamers than female gamers.

The participants for this experiment were 175 (61 male and 114 female) students from a university in the Mid-West. The age range was 18-27. The participants were given a questionnaire and asked what were the three games they played the most and rank each one on how much sexist content there was (1 being the least and 7 being the highest). The three scores were averaged to comprise a score for each person. They were also asked questions about women in both a hostile and benevolent way. An example was “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men”. They ranked each statement on how much they agreed on it from 1 (least) to 7 (most).

The most popular games between both sexes included The Sims, Mario Kart, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and other various sport games. According to the results, it was determined that men play games with more sexist content than women. There was no difference in benevolent sexism between men and women though men, who ranked their most played game as sexist, had a higher level of benevolent sexism. This could mean that the quality of the game is more important and has a bigger influence than the quantity of time spent playing the game. There were also higher levels of hostile sexism present in men than women.

Effects Avatars Have On Female Players

Jesse Fox, Jeremy N. Bailenson, and Liz Tricase have conducted an interesting study about avatars and the effect that hypersexualized avatars have on the player. The point of this study was to see how women’s attitude and self-perception changed after playing as these types of avatars. The two types of virtual humans are avatars and agents. Avatars are controlled by the player, and agents are controlled by the computer. This study focused solely on avatars because the point was to see the player’s attitudes based on the character they are playing as.

The four types of avatars they chose to look at are the ones that resemble the player, in both a sexualized and nonsexualized way, and ones that are don’t resemble the player, in both a sexualized and nonsexualized way. Players tend to relate closer to avatars that are similar to them. According to other studies referenced, players can suffer from both short term and long term effects from exposure to objectifying depictions of women, such as violence against women or rape myth acceptance, which is when the victim is falsely blamed in rape cases. A study conducted by Yao, Mahood, and Linz found that male gamers who play a game as a sexualized female character indicated a greater likelihood to sexually harass women. Behm-Morawitz and Mastro found that when female gamers played as sexualized female characters they started to have the belief that they could not achieve the goal.

The two goals of this study were to find if the Proteus effect was present when women played as sexualized characters and if self-resemblance of the avatar moderates the Proteus effect. The Proteus effect is a theory that states that the behavior of a person changes because of visuals aspects of their avatar. The experiment was conducted on women between the ages of 18-41 and of all nationalities and races. The participants were placed in the virtual world by a head-mounted display where they could see the virtual world. The participants were randomly assigned one of four types of avatars: sexualized self, sexualized other, nonsexualized self, and nonsexualized other. 

Here are examples of the avatars. The top two are the sexualized ones and the bottom two are the nonsexualized ones.

Months prior to the experiment, the participants’ pictures were taken and the developers used these faces to develop avatars that resemble the participant’s own face. When they were put into the virtual world they were told to turn and face a mirror in order to see their avatar. They were told to perform a series of motions so that they could see how their avatar acted. After the experiment, the participants were given a questionnaire. They were asked on a scale from one to five, how sexy the avatar they saw in the mirror was and how closely the avatar’s face represented their own face.

After the questionnaires were completed and reviewed, they found that the sexualized characters were the ones the participants said were sexy and the characters with similar faces to the participants are the ones they said resembled themselves. The study did end up supporting the Proteus effect and that there are effects present in sexualized avatars. Women who controlled sexualized avatars that resembled their face demonstrated greater rape myth acceptance. Women who controlled sexualized avatars had more thoughts about body-image than the women who controlled nonsexualized avatars. This shows the idea that sexualized characters promotes self-objectifiction. The question that arises is why women who’ve played as a sexualized character, have negative attitudes toward rape victims. It could have been self-defense, meaning that they did not want to imagine themselves in that situation. It also could have been that seeing themselves triggered thoughts about parents telling them that it’s their fault since they chose to dress that way. The two issues that I find with this study is that they should have also asked younger girls to participate since there are a lot of female gamers that are under the age of eighteen, and that they should have also given the players a choice after the experiment to see who they would have chosen to play as. Now I am curious about if these types of female avatars have any effects on men.

My Personal Opinion

Now that I have talked about examples of sexism present in video games, the question that arises is if these examples influence gamers to become sexist. My hypothesis is that this is not the case. I think that sexism in video games is the same as violence in video games, meaning that it is present, but the people carrying out violent acts in reality already had a violent state of mind and the games become their outlet. I don’t think there are many cases where video games turned someone to have misogynistic views. I think the only circumstance where this might be the case is if someone was raised playing just sexist video games. Still, I don’t think the child would become sexist on their own; they would need some outside force telling them this is the way they should be thinking. I think when a young child plays a video game they don’t see any sexist value in it because they don’t even realize it.

For me, I grew up pretty much strictly a Nintendo kid. My dad bought the NES and SNES for himself years before I was born. When I was born, my family continued the tradition by buying pretty much every Nintendo console since. I grew up playing Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, and Metroid, and I don’t ever recall ever thinking that a game or an aspect of a game was sexist. When I would save Princess Peach, I never thought of it as saving a weak woman in distress, but instead as saving someone who needed help. Years later, when I played Super Smash Bros. Melee and would use her as a fighter, I never thought of her as strong “for a woman”, I just thought of her as powerful fighter. Growing up, I don’t recall ever focusing on the gender of the characters. This is why I don’t think video games turn kids into sexist people. When I look back, I can see how female characters were misrepresented and how most female characters were sexualized, but as a kid you don’t think about these things, you just want to accomplish the goal of the game. I’ve been researching to see if I’m the only one who feels this and have found interesting studies that I will talk about in the next couple of blogs.    

#GamerGate

Within the past few years, women designers and programmers in the gaming world and critics of the gaming world have been verbally harassed by male gamers. These harassers are part of a social movement called #GamerGate.

#GamerGate began when a game programmer, Eron Gjoni wrote some blogs about his recently ended relationship with fellow game developer, Zoe Quinn. In the blogs, Gjoni accused Quinn of sleeping with Nathan Grayson, who was a video game journalist. He claims that the reason she slept with him was in order to get positive reviews of her newly released game Depression Quest. This caused gamers to want to harass Quinn. They spoke of her sexual history and even posted nude photos of her on websites. The big issue with this case is that Quinn was automatically made guilty without any sort of proof of evidence. Grayson did mention the game briefly in one of his reviews, but that was before the supposed relationship took place.

Around the same time of this event, another woman was beginning to be harassed. Anita Sarkeesian is a feminist video game critic who makes videos on YouTube, called “Feminist Frequency”, which talks about women’s role in both video games and the industry. Shortly after she posted a video about the sexualization of women in video games, people started to threaten her life. This caused Sarkeesian to have to move away from her home for her own protection. 

Last fall, Sarkeesian had to cancel a talk at Utah College because harassers said that they would kill her if the talk proceeded. The threat by the anonymous harasser said, “I have at my disposal a semi-automatic rifle, multiple pistols,and a collection of pipe bombs,” the email said. “She is going to die screaminglike the craven little whore that she is if you let her come to USU….I willwrite my manifesto in her spilled blood, and you will all bear witness to whatfeminist lies and poison have done to the men of America.”

The term itself was created by actor Adam Baldwin, who used it to show how the media is trying to “enforce arbitrary 'social justice' rules upon gamers & the culture”. The harassers adopted this hashtag as their own and continuing to harass both these women and others too.

Participants in #Gamergate argue that forcing feminist views of more female representation in gaming will lead to the death of the gamer. This is because these participants are male and young and don’t want other representation in their games except their own.  Another argument among these participants is that the video game industry and the journalists who report on it have become too close. They are trying to say that journalists are now trying to take control of the video game industry and force their views onto the games themselves.

Naturally, not every participant in this so called movement is anti-women or hold misogynistic views. There are also participants who do not harass anyone. Some think that it’s more about control and letting the gamer be a gamer without having other’s views forced upon them and their games. It would be interesting to find out what type of games these participants are into, especially the ones who harass and make death threats.