Whether you identify as a gamer or not, nearly everyone has heard of the controversy within the gaming community. The gaming culture consists of a fifty-six percent male majority, with fifty-nine percent of game purchases coming from men (Entertainment Software Association). With a dominating male presence, the gaming community has had its fair share of online storms regarding misogyny within, not only the games itself, but the faces behind the screen. However, these fingers are rightly placed as women face overt violent threats from the speakers of their headsets.
Before we jump into verbal harassment perpetuated from players, let’s begin with the nature of the games individuals interact with. Popping in any disc on any console from any era will propose a limited amount of female characters amongst a mass of male characters, each heavily sexualized to grasp more male audiences. Popular fighting games such as Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur are primary examples of this, with a limited number of female characters, including revealing costumes to entice male audiences. Below is an image of Mortal Kombat characters Jade, Kitana, Mileena, Sindel and Sonya:
What in the image is common between each character? Revealing costumes, limited creative differences, and hyper objectification of female anatomy. Each design is a carbon-copy of the next, showing little diversity in creativity and perspective. Male characters differ in size, ability, shape and design, whereas women remain cut-and-paste images of one another.
Not only do women look like this in Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur, women in popular games such as Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto, Assassin’s Creed, God of War, and Far Cry also represent this model. However, as these games are story-based, objectification comes in different forms than combat-based games. Excluding Final Fantasy and Assassin’s Creed, each of these games have playable sex sequences, prolonging objectification of women in gaming. All of these games primarily focused on male-driven protagonists and stories up until recently, harnessing women as merely motivation for the male lead. Not only in more recent games is this true, but also of timeless classics such as Mario, Mega-Man, The Legend of Zelda, Starfox, Ready to Rumble, Punch-Out and Donkey Kong.
Grand Theft Auto in particular is one game that objectifies women to a disgusting extent, allowing the player to pick up prostitutes, pay them for various acts, and then kill them in order to get your money back. In Grand Theft Auto V, on a particular mission, the player drives his car on a darkened road, and comes across a potential rape which the player can choose to ignore or intervene. This scene includes a woman and two men, one of which happens to be nude. This alone speaks of the obvious misogyny in Grand Theft Auto while not even mentioning the little importance women play in the game other than strippers and sex workers.
Now that we have discussed the nature of these popular games, including extremist misogynistic games such as Grand Theft Auto, we can now discuss the verbal harassment women face in the online community. Trash talk goes hand-in-hand with gaming as cream goes with coffee, however, violence towards women should not find itself anywhere within the sphere of the video gaming culture and industry. Gamer Brianna Wu describes the harassment as “hundreds of angry messages. Death threats still constantly roll in. I spend at least a day a week working with law enforcement at this point…I’ve been getting rape threats since I started my job” (Takahashi). GTFO, a film about women in gaming, provides an image of just a few threats women are given through the gaming community, comments coming from youtube Let’s Play videos, and tweets towards popular female gamers:
Aris Bakhtanians, Street Fighter tournament contestant, mentioned at Cross Assault (IGN reality show), “sexual harassment is part of [the] culture. And if you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community” (bitmob). Bakhtanians used this statement as defense for harassing a female team captain. This is one example of many in regards to female gamer harassment.
Collectively, things need to change in the gaming community. As a gamer myself, I can recount numerous times where prepubescent boys declared they would rape and murder me, as well as being called a whore and a slut. From the headset blaring Call of Duty to the single player in Grand Theft Auto, misogyny is rampant in gaming. No woman in the gaming community should ever feel ostracized or unable to enjoy a game made purely for entertainment due to an anti-female proscenia perpetuated from not only players, but games themselves. So let the online mobs and storm rage on until I, and various other female gamers, can feel comfortable with a headset on and a game to play.