We don’t have yoga sims and baking eSports or tycoons about running a hair salon, not even really in the vastly more diverse indie game space. And broadly speaking, while there will always be plenty of exceptions, the themes, subjects and even game mechanics that people generally think of as “for women” are underrepresented in the gaming industry. But broadly speaking, society genders these things. It is always important to point out that of course, neither guns nor cars nor make-up are actually something only for men or women to like, and the idea that the AAA gaming industry should make more “girly” games has infinite room for a bad and sexist approach. Male-connotated hobbies like football, basketball and car racing have several yearly releases in the AAA gaming space, while female-connotated interests are relegated to the low budget and indie spaces, if they get acknowledged at all. Even very basic principles of human interaction end up being gendered: care and nurture are perceived as feminine, aggression, destruction and violence as masculine.Īnd although we start to see more diversity in the gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity of protagonists of our AAA games, the mainstream gaming world largely keeps clinging to mechanics and themes that end up implicitly excluding the feminine.Įvery year, we get dozens of high budget games that are focused on combat. Cars and guns and football for boys, fashion, dancing and cooking for girls. There is a wide variety of toys, themes, hobbies and interests that our society generally associates with one gender and not the other, even though there is no real reason for it beyond “that’s how it is”. And I believe this imbalance is a significant factor in the utter scarcity of well-made games about horses. What remains – and is rarely discussed as far as I can tell – is an imbalance between how our industry tackles subject matters and activities that have a gendered connotation. We have also started accepting that discrepancies in player demographics are often due to how games are made and marketed, and the notion that women just don’t play games as much is fortunately on its way out the door, slow as that process may be.
That the female characters in our games should be more than damsels in distress or flawlessly sexy action babes is becoming more and more common knowledge in the video game industry, and games of various genres are starting to make an effort in terms of gender diversity.
On the other hand, there has been a significant amount of progress in recent years. People have very strong opinions on how we should talk about sexism and gender in video games and characters, and unfortunately sometimes the loudest of those opinions is just “don’t”. Talking about Gender and Gaming is always a bit of a Pandora’s box.
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