Uncharted Space: Feminism in Video Games
This one is a different post as it will be from my Master’s program learning about popular culture. This will be the fourth of five posts that I’ll make while studying the effects of pop culture on society.
In the video game world, there is one certainty: boys play video games. There erupted in the early 2010s a culture war in the gaming world. It was discovered that girls play video games and didn’t like how women characters were portrayed in games. The scantily clothed women who had unusual physical proportions seemed to be the reason girls wanted some things to change in the gaming world. Showing actual women who were based on reality instead of the imaginations of boys. It seemed that gamers had to take sides and really couldn’t ignore the issue. This was even true for the developers. One that decided to take a stand against the sexualized video game women characters was Naughty Dog. During the heated debate happening online, Naughty Dog was working on their final Uncharted game for the series. They didn’t change their story but it appears that including women more prominently and showing that they were just as capable as the men. I plan to do an analysis of this for a deeper dive in a future paper.
However, one thing that I really wanted to point out right now is how after several developers started listening to female gamer concerns, they started releasing video games taking those concerns into consideration. The culture war in the gaming world started to fizzle out. This seems to be the third wave of feminism to create equality in a fairly new sphere of influence. That is not to say that all game developers have done this but since the major ones have, most other developers have listened to all gamers.
The third wave of feminism also should include other things in video games. What are those things that we can see changing in future games? What other games have you noticed change because of the culture war?