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.