Analysis

 So I have continued my analysis. Of course, my main focus will be the LGBT community in the gaming industry, but I do plan on touching on other minorities as well, this time, I focused my attention on the portrayal of women in the gaming industry.

Off the bat, before I even started my research, I knew there was a problem with the portrayal of women in gaming. I, myself, even find it fascinating and unusual when a game has a sole female protagonist. The games I can think of that have female protagonists are games where there are multiple protagonists and the females are outnumbered by the males, or it's a game where you can chose the gender of your character. This is all stuff I knew even before I started my in-dept analysis.

Going into my research I found a paper that details the portrayal of women in gaming. While I probably not reference this one in my essay, as it is from 2006, it does bring up some important notes that I have noticed in the gaming industry. The main one being women depicted at mere sex objects. While some 'traditional gamers' might not see this as a problem, this is because the 'traditional gamer' is seen as a young white heterosexual male, who would like seeing women like that. I, myself identify as asexual, so I see the problem of portraying women and I can even see, particular young gamers, coming to see all women as mere sex objects for them to enjoy, if they keep seeing women portrayed like that. This paper did a study about it the results do show that how this an actual problem

Now, the first woman in the gaming industry who was not sexualized like that, at least not in her first game, was Samus from Metroid, not only that she was a strong character, able to defend herself from alien lifeforms. This was a step in the right direction for a more appropriate approach to portrayal of women, the only problem is that the developers made Samus's gender really vague to the point were some people thought she was male. I think it was to avoid upsetting conservative gamers. More women have been portrayed like Samus, being able to defend themselves and not being sexualized. One of my favorite video game characters is an example of this, Chell from the Portal Series. I won't go into too much detail, but Chell is an example of a strong female character and she defeats a rogue A.I. that's trying to kill her, to the point where the A.I. at the end admits it's easier to let her go than to kill her.

One problem with women's portrayal in the gaming industry comes complains of the 'traditional gamers'. I remember reading somewhere a while ago about how females playing games like Call of Duty, then to keep their mic muted or use a user name that doesn't reveal their gender so that the male gamers don't harass them with sexist remarks, or creepily flirt with them. I believe this stems from the fact that there are not enough women being portrayed realistically in games and so these gamers think that sort of behavior is acceptable.

Overall, the portrayal of women in video games has come a long way, but there is still a long way to go. I just hope developers start coping on to this and stop sexualising women so much and even give them the stoplight as the protagonist. Anyway, next time I want to go a bit research into the portrayal of black people and other racial minorities, I'll see you then.

Bye