Research Plan
Primary Media
Grand Theft Auto 5
Secondary Media
Male:
Sleeping Dogs
Far Cry
Saints Row: The Third
Kane & Lynch 3
The Godfather 3
Mafia 3
Watch Dogs
Female:
Quantum Break
Laura Croft - Rise of the Tomb Raider
Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris
Dead Island 2
Alien: Isolation
inFamous: First Light - DLC added content after release of game
Kim Kardashian: Hollywood
The Last of Us
Heavy Rain
Documentaries
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7JU0BoX0nQ - GTA 5 Cast Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfQSoKgr2jY - Gender Stereotypes in Video Games
- What were your favourite video games growing up?
My favourite video games were ofcourse super mario, crash banicoot a little bit of tomb raider ofcorse pokemon and erm batman games.
- Today in the year 2012, what would you say the most popular video games sell? The violence or would it be the sex appeal that they give off?
I don't think its the violence because if you see today Halo 4, Call of Duty all violence and those are the most popular games. The only games we see on commercials are like 20 games have the sex appeal so its moreso the violence.
- How do you feel about how women are portrayed in video games?
"Usually im proud because usually they're a fighter or very strong but still attractive, but then other games women are portrayed very weak" Tatiana - Female Gamer
- As a female gamer how do you feel about games with only male characters in them?
"It can be disheartening because in those games women have such small roles, but in grand theft auto they only play as prostitutes" Tatiana - Female Gamer
- Female characters usually play damsel along distress and are prized for their overly masculine male character
- Lara Phenomenon - Heroic female characters are portrayed as crime fighting strong women
Are video games sexist?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MxqSwzFy5w -
- ''Great that the world of games is expanding and there are more women creating and playing games''
- ''65 percent of girls but fewer than 19 percent of boys said they played no video games at all in a typical week''
- ''Among hardcore gamers who play more than 20 hours a week, the ratio of boys to girls is 7 to 1''
- ''This huge gender gap has persisted since the researchers first started asking about video games in the mid-1990s''
- ''I discovered that gamers make a lot of people nervous''
- ''Gamers have long faced disapproval from moms and teachers and above all researchers and politicians concernocrats both liberal and conservative''
- ''For years, games such as Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty were said to cause violence, even though no one was able to establish a clear correlation''
- ''Video games have surged in popularity and youth crime has plummeted''
- ''Critics are concerned that gaming is a largely hetero-patriachal capitalist pursuit''
- ''The world of gaming has become more inclusive''
- ''Male gamers, as a group, do evince a strong a preference for games with male heroes and sexy women''
- ''No evidence that these games are making males racist, misogynist, or homophobic''
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i_RPr9DwMA - Women as Background Decoration.
Media Articles/Texts
Gender stereotypes must be confronted
- ''It is through stereotypes that we trivialise and misjudge lived daily experiences such as if people believe men cannot control themselves and women do not often mean what they saw''
- ''The implications are that stereotypes often go unquestioned and are normalised in culture, professional environments and the law''
- ''Gender stereotypes perpetuate body image disorder and impose unrealistic perceptions on relationships''
- ''History or a long-lived paradigm that informs our current view of gender roles, but this does not make it morally justifiable or eternal'
- ''Bullies of the games industry, do insist that your efforts to totally ruin a woman’s life and career are founded in transparency, ethics and integrity''
- ''The endgame is to frighten all women out of the video games industry''
- ''When harassing brave women, be sure to maintain that your campaign isn’t about gender''
- Undermine her credibility and devalue her work by hardly discussing it – and maybe discussing her full sexual history instead.
Nick Clegg warns of 'corrosive effect' of Grand Theft Auto
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/20/nick-clegg-warns-of-corrosive-effect-of-grand-theft-auto
- ''These games can have an incredibly powerful effect, and I expect in some cases a corrosive effect, on someone's behaviour'' - Nick Clegg
- ''They occupy a hermetically sealed world of their own and that can have a very detrimental effect'' - Nick Clegg
- ''Violent video game play is a causal risk factor for aggressive behavior; the scientific literature has effectively and clearly shown the answer to be yes''
- ''A number of methodological flaws that all appear likely to inflate effect size estimates''
Sex, Lies, and Gender Games
http://reason.com/archives/2014/10/12/gamergate-part-i-sex-lies-and-gender-gam
- ''Conservatives and right-leaning libertarians, it's a welcome pushback against left-wing cultural diktat, particularly in the area of gender politics''
- ''Reality is more complex than any of these narratives''
- ''Feminism GamerGate rebels against is not simply about equality or diversity; it is an authoritarian, far-left brand of gender politics that views everything through the lens of patriarchal oppression and tolerates no dissent''
- ''Attacking such ideological deviations as liking a heterosexual love interest for a character perceived as gay, liking or disliking a character on the wrong side of race-and-gender identity politics''
Conservative Group to Video Game Gender Critics
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/conservative-group-to-video-game-gender-critics-st/1100-6422381/
- "I have spent the last few weeks looking into the gamer culture, talking to gamers, looking at the data. I don't see pathology or imminent death. What I see is a lively, smart, creative sub-culture consisting mostly of tech-savvy guys from all over the world. But also including a small, but distinct group of very cool women. If you love games, they don't really care about your age, your race, your ethnicity, your gender, your sexual preference. They just want to game. My suggestion to their critics--stand down."
- I disagree with probably 80 percent of Anita's claims, although I'm sympathetic to her point of view. She's definitely extreme and dogmatic. She picked apart last of us and beyond two souls, really stretching to "prove" they aren't any better than conventional male lead protagonists.
- Debate surrounding these controversial topics is superficial, created by "gender police" who don't have much of a real argument.
- "Now gamers are dealing with a new army of critics: gender activists and, I don't know, hipsters with degrees in cultural studies," she says. "And these critics are concerned that gaming is largely a hetero-patriarchal capitalist pursuit. Why, they ask, isn't it more inclusive? Why must there always be male heroes? Why are females portrayed either as damsels in distress or sex objects?"
Lindsay Lohan's Grand Theft Auto V Lawsuit
Gender GT5 negatives both sides - 8 Reasons Why It’s Blatantly Misogynous
http://whatculture.com/gaming/gta-v-8-reasons-blatantly-misogynous.php
- "Grand Theft Auto and controversy are hardly strange bedfellows"
- "Banned in five different countries, including Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates"
- " Long-running series, earning criticisms for its perceived sexism and misogynistic attitudes toward women"
- "Expose injustices created by gender stereotypes"
- "The game was misogynistic in its attitudes toward women" - Carolyn Petit
- "Crammed full of horrible gender stereotypes, with no strong female characters to root for, and radio shows advising us to treat women like urinals."
- "Barely any, if any at all female antagonists during missions"
- "Huge proportion of the villains you plough through with your machine gun are male"
- "Are we expected to believe that women can’t be villainous"
- "Females also have poor representation in the emergency services as well as the criminal underworld"
- "Female paramedics, you ask? Nope. Female ambulance drivers at least? Nope. Female fire-fighters? Not a single one. Talk about sexual discrimination in the workplace."
- "Billboard in game parodying Chanel perfume, with a message urging potential buyers to “Smell like a bitch”
- The perfume in the GTA universe is called ‘Le Chien’, which is French for dog
- "Ads that equate manhood with sleek sports cars and voices on the radio encouraging listeners to “use women like urinals”"
- "The reason men talk over women is because you yammer on"
- “I’d much rather be…. mistreating women” as well as recommending underground clubs where “you can finger groupies"
- "The women in GTA V are shown to make very ill-informed decisions"
- Amanda – a former stripper/prostitute – running off to have an affair with the tennis coach
- "Amanda is frequently depicted as a free-loading sponger without any sort of identity, career hopes or personality."
- "Both are portrayed as powerless, naive and spiteful individuals who gamers are made to ‘hate’ due to their selfish actions, whereas instead, we should be lamenting Rockstar for not creating a strong female role"
- If women in Rockstar’s fictitious worlds aren’t being depicted as spoilt, selfish, vindictive brats, they’re being portrayed as prostitutes.
- "GTA V has little room for women except to portray them as strippers, prostitutes, long-suffering wives, humourless girlfriends and goofy, new-age feminists we’re meant to laugh at."
- We see scantily-clad women on street corners after dark, who can be interacted with and propositioned into sexual situations for money.
- Rockstars is a dark, dark world where women are depicted – and treated – abominably
- Rockstar have crossed a line with their strip clubs in GTA V, now, they’re fully-graphic, almost fully-nude women of whom you can interact and supposedly sleep with.
- Occasionally you find women stripping off their bras and wandering around topless, all for our amusement and perversion.
Why does sexism persist in the video games industry?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27824701
- The latest instalment of Ubisoft hit Assassin's Creed would not feature any playable female characters because it would have "doubled the work".
- The percentage of female characters in video games has remained steady at around 15%.
- "It's amazing how little has changed" - Yasmin Kafai . University of Pennsylvania professor
- 4% of the main characters in the top 25 selling videogames of 2013 were female.
- Even when female characters do exist, their representation is generally skewed.
- Since men were the primary consumers of video games, the gender balance was lamentable but not surprising if firms were simply designing games with their target audience in mind.
- Dynamics of who is gaming has steadily changed in the last five years, as women increasingly flock to video games
- "The industry as a culture feels less sexist than it used to," Dmitri Williams - University of Southern California professor
- "Video game industry realised they were leaving a lot of money on the table by alienating women," - Dmitri Williams
- 60% of popular smartphone game Temple Run's players are female (although that game does allow one to play as a female character).
- "Gender ratio of players of so-called hardcore games, like first-person shooter games such as Halo, is generally disproportionately men" - Prof Williams
- "I think we're starting to see in some cases at least in some genres an even larger gap in the types of players" - Prof Downs
- The need to constantly refresh successful franchises to boost console sales has also put pressure on developers to churn out games at ever faster speeds.
- "Time crunch is a problem because most developers are men." - Katherine Isbister - New York University professor and game designer
- "Developers tend to create things that are similar to things they're seeing and playing so there's a feedback loop"
- "Are women not playing hardcore games because they don't like them? Or because they feel alienated?" - Prof Williams.
- "Everyone I know when given the option will play as female characters including some men"
- Reduction of both hypersexualised female and male characters.
- "The more we're normalised and shown as protagonists, the more women are going to want to play games"
Why does the games industry have such a problem with female protagonists?
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2013/jun/12/games-industry-problem-female-protagonists
- "Thanks #XboxOne #E3 press conference for revealing to us exactly zero games featuring a female protagonist for the next generation." Via Twitter @Anita Sarkeesian
- "Games with female protagonist don't sell"
- "If you look at the first three months with the smaller quantity of female-led games, they did not sell as well," - Geoffrey Zatkin of EEDAR
- "The ones that were male-only sold better"
- Games with a female-only protagonist received only 40% of the marketing budget of male-led games
- "Games industry marketing that is sexist in its own right"
- "The creation of great and complex female characters in video games is an involved process, but ultimately developers are going to have to take some risks and step outside of the expected or established conventions"
- "Publishers suggesting that the audience is male and therefore doesn't relate to female characters is ludicrous and short-sighted"
- "It's not really about taking risks, it's about catering better for the existing audience"
- More than half of the women we questioned play video games and that three-quarters of women who game think the hobby no longer has anything to do with gender. Female gamers are not a minority, and female protagonists shouldn't be either.
- "Women are every bit as much a part of the gaming ecosystem as men and yet they receive only a small fraction of the leading roles" - Craig Stern
Yes, it's misogynistic and violent, but I still admire Grand Theft Auto
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/21/grand-theft-auto-5-women-misogynistic-violent
- I think that's why its problematic elements rankle – not because I'm 'offended', but because it seems lazy, repetitious. I'm not 'offended' that I can't play as a woman; I'm disappointed at the missed opportunity." - Leigh Alexander
Female NPC Failing to exit carpark
- It’s true that GTA V isn't particularly female-friendly - there has never been a female protagonist and women are relegated to the roles of sex objects
- There are unsavoury stereotypes at every turn, which the game franchise is trying to make fun of, with varying degrees of success.
- The Grand Theft Auto franchise isn't known for being politically correct. It’s all gangs, guns, drugs, strippers and prostitutes
- All the trademark violence, sexism and callous dark humour you expect by definition from the title
GTA designed deliberately to degrade women
- Grand Theft Auto V is relentlessly misanthropic, holding up a skewed mirror to our entertainment and industries and asking us to peer into the ugly reflection
- The women characters are often leered at or cast as nags
- The idea of a mini-game that effectively asks you to grope a stripper repels me, I began to feel suffocated by a testosterone-addled life of deviancy.
- Nearly all the women portrayed are shallow and sidelined, and the men front-and-centre are heartless, psyThe video games industry is one that struggles deeply with the treatment of women.chotic, money-obsessed, philandering bastards.
- ''This is a growing community and one that has greatly expanded from its humble roots into a burgeoning industry worth billions''
- ''It takes really thick skin to be a prominent member of this community, which can produce just as much noise as political debates''
- ''In Grand Theft Auto V there are several instances of violence against women seen in “random encounters” where the player character can choose to stop or not'' - Sarkeesian
- ''Endemic of videogames using women as mere set-pieces or window dressing''
- ''The idea that this media can subconsciously influence our thought processes akin to brainwashing is ludicrously false''
- ''There is an impact from playing video games that can transfer to real life''
Anita Sarkeesian bravely confronts sexist video gaming culture
http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-ra-a-feminist-critic-video-game-culture-20141016-column.html#page=1
- ''Feminist critics who are raising their voices against the sexist depiction of women in video games are being harassed and threatened by cosmically immature male gamers who seem to view rational, thoughtful critiques as an existential threat''
- “Threats of violence and harassment are wrong''
- ''They have to stop. There is no place in the video game community or our societyfor personal attacks and threats.”
- ''56% of parents said video games are a “positive part of their child’s life.''
- ''Gaming is probably never going to return to "normal"
- ''There’s a massive paradigm shift”
- “Gaming is becoming more diverse and inclusive.”
Violence, Sexuality, and Gender Stereotyping - Media Effects + All theory
http://www.scripps.ohiou.edu/wjmcr/vol13/13-b.html
MM40 - Media Magazine The Play April 2012
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B0i5diL3vrEiSGxRNHIyZmM4Ums&usp=sharing
- The social taboo of taking pleasure in violence could go some way to explain why computer games have been problematic.
- It is frequently argued that games such as GTA encourage consequence-free violence for its own sake through the narrative of the game.
- Players in these types of games can immerse themselves in the narratives; and the game-play means that they identify with the violent protagonists and receive rewards for violent actions.
- The violence in games is largely perceived as ‘unjustified’ and presented as fun or just a way to pass the time; it is therefore more likely to be seen as morally reprehensible.
- "Gaming has changed beyond all recognition"
- Early versions had been interesting but technically conventional; however in GTA 3 they produced a game changer. They pioneered open world gaming with the creation of an L.A. around which your gangster avatar could roam at will.
- Manhunt 2 became the subject of a high-profile legal dispute with the British Board of Film Classification, the organisation currently responsible for age classifying games.
- The protagonist is a misogynistic gangster, and the game became notorious for scenes in which the anti-hero could hire a prostitute, have sex with her and kill her to get his money back.
- Reinventing a dormant movie genre for a gaming audience to whom it would seem fresh and new. Film Noir,with its striking black and white cinematography, loner anti-heroes with a past, and glamorous and dangerous female characters known as femmes fatales.
- Gaming used to be seen very much as a children’s domain. Yet adults also play – and it may be that digital media are allowing them new opportunities to do so.
- The games industry is fond of claiming that the average age of computer gamers is rising all the time: it’s now around 30
- Women are depicted as conservative and reactionary, out of touch with current youth/gaming culture
- The violence of computer/console gameshas led to bans, restriction of sales through classification, censorship and hundreds and thousands of panicked articles on the negative influence games have on their audience.
Computer Games as Educational Tool - PDF
- Playing games is an important part of our social and mental development
- Students rated game elements such as logic, memory, visualisation and problem solving as the most important game elements
- The average age was 19 with most of them having very little computer experience or exposure to playing computer games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOMN11_rhFY&list=UUvHtEkC1NPbdC7c1eCupsnQ
EDU
Facts
- 54% Female 46 % Male audience
Source: http://www.theesa.com/facts/gameplayer.asp
- 31 The average age of today’s gamer.
29% under 18 years
32% 18-35 years
39% 36+ years
- 14 The average number of years gamers have been playing.
- 71% of gamers are age 18 or older.
- 48% of gamers are female.
- 62% of gamers play games with others, either in-person or online.
- 53% of gamers play games on their smartphones.
- 41% of gamers play on their wireless device.
- Parents of Gamers
- 91% of parents are present when games are purchased or rented.
- 88% of parents feel that the Entertainment Software Rating Board rating system is helpful in choosing games for their children.
- 87% of parents believe that the parental controls available in all new video game consoles are useful.
- 68% of parents believe game play provides mental stimulation or education.
- 55% of parents believe game play helps the family to spend to time together.
Source: http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2014.pdf
- 59% of Americans play video games
- Smartphone and wireless device use increased by 22% and 37%, respectively, over 2012
