Feminism in Gaming

Princes Peach and Daisy, the stereotypical 'damsels in distress'

Feminism is a wide and powerful thing. In the words of bell hooks from her book ‘Feminism is for everybody’, she says that 'Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression'. It changes the course of history, for example the whole ‘Votes for Women’ process back in the 1860s where women protested about their denied rights to vote, thus making them more equal to men. There is also the example of the equal pay protests still running to this day, where women want to earn the same amount of pay for the same amount of work as men in the workplace. The bottom line of it is equality between both sexes.

So, for my blog I wanted to explore into something I enjoy, which is gaming. Like Ellen has stated in her blog on Anime and Manga, ‘The world of Anime and Manga [much like gaming] is a large one, split into many genres and sub-genres, catering to hundreds of different types of people with varying tastes.’ The same can be said when it comes to the gaming community. There is always a game for everyone, be it something as simple as Tetris or as complex as Pokemon (It is a lot more difficult then it seems when you get into the stats of it).

I’ve never really looked at games from a feminist point of view before, so picking a couple was an issue, but I settled with Mario for its stereotypical ‘damsel in distress’ Princess Peach and Tomb Raider, because it’s almost the opposite with a skimpy clothed main character. The reason I picked these two games out of all the other games out there is because of the different types of feminism they both represent, Princess Peach showing the sexist half and Lara Croft emphasising the female hero, her appearance being something of a fan service to men and bringing out the male gaze.

A female night elf 'stripper'

Finally, I want to do a part on online gaming, so I’ve picked World of Warcraft for my example. I chose this because of the constant sexism in the game and the gender issues that go along with it. There is a lot of misogyny in this game, especially when it comes to girls playing it. Sometimes it’s hard for men to comprehend that there is, in fact, a woman playing on the internet.

Mario is a simple platform game where you play a red overall wearing plumber who happens to love a princess. You kill enemies by jumping on them or shooting them with fireballs from an upgrade called a fire flower. That’s the basics of it, there are other ways to kill enemies but that isn’t what this blog is about so I won’t go into it. The whole concept of the game is ‘save the princess from the big mean Bowser’. So just from the get go, there is already chivalry in there, that the princess is a defenceless woman that needs saving by a big strong man. There is also a hint of ‘the gaze’ here, Marios’ desire for the princess spurring him on throughout the land.

Tomb Raider is a game that I don’t know much about, so I had to look up some information on it. Luckily, a blog titled ‘A feminist look at Lara Croft: Tomb Raider’ was on hand to assist me.

"The video game turned movie, Lara Croft Tomb Raider, is filled with things to pick apart from a feminist perspective, yet it has an appeal that cannot be denied because of the power and strength that Lara Croft displays"

Basically it’s about a skimpy clothed woman hunting for artefacts and treasures. She gets into a lot of trouble but always makes it out alive. She’s like a female version of Indiana Jones, except she wears less clothing as shown in the picture below.

Lara Croft in Tomb Raider , note the shorts and overly proportioned boobs that seem to get bigger in every game.

Tomb Raider has also been turned into a movie, but I won’t be elaborating on this because my blog is about the games, not the movies.

Finally, World of Warcraft. It is the world’s largest online MMORPG [Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game] with millions of players joining and paying £8.99 a month to keep their characters going. The game has an in-game chat feature, which, I have experienced myself, does get a lot of sexist remarks. The whole social construct by most players is basically ‘girls do not play games on the internet’ and ‘girls do not exist on the internet’. Being on the receiving end of this a few times I could rant on it forever, but I have two other games to cover so I’ll try to keep my personal remarks to myself.

WoW [The typical abbreviation of World of Warcraft] has an avatar system where you can pick male and female characters, but most of the females you see running around are blood / night elves, and three quarters of the time they’re guys. Most do it to look at the avatars boobs, others do it for the joy of exhibitionism, other people thinking they’re female gets them attention. Part of an interview by socialists investigating BDSM in games such as WoW and Second Life explains a bit of this exhibitionism.

 "Originally, the guy... was talking to me a lot," wrote one man, "but I didn't realize that he was a guy, cause his avatar was a girl... It's a big joke with us really, because his girlfriend/fiancée thought I was hitting on him…"

Ok, back to Mario. The main thing that is noticeable in Mario is the fact that both the protagonist and antagonist are guys, so from the start it’s two men fighting over the princess. Mario goes to great lengths to save the princess’s life, half the time coming up empty handed [Sorry Mario but your princess is in another castle!] but in the end managing to retrieve what he sees as his. Mario really helps with the meaning of the quote ‘Men makes meaning, women bears the meaning’ (I wish I could find the owner of this quote), Mario is the strong man and Peach is the weak woman. Possession is a big thing here, because one would ask themselves if Mario see’s Peach as a life partner or as an object of desire.

Relating this to Tomb Raider, Lara Croft to many gamers is an object of desire. She is their fan service, I have heard many stories of men buying the Tomb Raider games for the simple fact that ‘if you angle the camera properly, you get a nice close up view of her tits’. It is no wonder why Tomb Raider is one of the bestselling games of all time, up there with James Bond (both of them selling 30 million units). I could sit here comparing those two games for ages, but I’ve started on this now and I really don’t want to start again.

Anyway I’ve gone off topic. Peach and Lara are both two sides of a coin, Peach being someone who has to be rescued whilst Lara rescues herself. The male characters in Tomb Raider are all minor, such as her butler, whilst in Mario they are the main characters; Mario, Bowser, Luigi and Toad just to name a few. Van Zoonen said in her book Feminist Media Studies that women are, in media "depicted as wife, mother, daughter, girlfriend; as working in traditionally female jobs (secretary, nurse, receptionist); or as sex-object." and in this case, the woman is depicted as a princess, soon to be wife of a plumber. Dominic Strinati adds to this by saying that "Women are either absent, or represented (and we have to remember that popular culture's concern with women is often devoted entirely to their representation, how they look) by stereotypes based upon sexual attractiveness and the performance of domestic labour.".

He then goes on to say that "Cultural representations of women in the mass media, it is argued, support and perpetuate the prevailing sexual division of labour and orthodox conceptions of femininity and masculinity." This leads me to my final point with the World of Warcraft community. The phrase ‘Get back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich’ attitude that most men have on such games. I did a blog not too long ago on World of Warcraft and how people can loose their identity whilst playing, taking on the forms of others. Well the game also makes you question your identity, especially when boys do not believe you when you tell them you’re a girl. The first thing that is normally demanded by men is pictures, as if you have to ‘prove your womanhood’.

Written here by a female blogger on a popular game critic website called ‘The Escapist’, a World of Warcraft player explains about how she was playing with a group of boys, then revealed she was a girl. She starts off with this in the entry;

"I've been watching and observing the internet for quite some time now. It's like a science project with the usual control and variables. The control is: I am a girl. The variables are the medium through which this fact is expressed. The results all point to the same paradoxical conclusion: I am a girl, but girls do not exist on the internet."

Then later on continues after showing an example of a typical chat on WoW she has had many times, where guys learn she’s a girl then demand pictures, but when she refuses to give said pictures they immediately assume she is a guy pretending to be a girl to get attention.

"I'm a girl, I play games and I exist on the internet. Or so you think. Time after time, I get told I'm not a girl and that I don't exist. It's happened so much that I'm beginning to think that it's true.

So, I spend some time getting to know them. Who are these mysterious creatures called girls if they don't exist on the internet? What does this mean for the men of the internet?"

She ends this introduction after showing another short line of people asking for pictures of her with this, showing her gender confusion after basically being told that she is not a girl. Throughout this entry, she uses the quote ‘girls do not exist on the internet’ a lot to emphasise what she is being told she is.

"It becomes more apparent to me that this is a real issue. Why is it I cannot be a girl if I don't show my picture? As time goes on, I get more confused." "I live in a bubble where the internet does not exist and am invisible in places pertaining to the web. I do not know what PvP is and I've never touched a first person shooter before. Why must I be treated like I am ignorant to gaming and the internet? The answer is simply that girls do not exist on the internet."

To summarise (because according to my word count I’ve been rambling for too long), these three games all show a different version of feminism and sexism. Mario showing it in the way the characters have been created, with a stereotypical princess in peril setting having to be saved, Tomb Raider showing it with a fanservice extremist duel wielding pistols and wearing incredibly short clothing and World of Warcraft, with its sexist male audience and the quote ‘Girls don’t exist on the internet’.

Bibliography

hooks, B., 2000. Feminism is for Everybody. 1st ed. London: Pluto Press.

Strinati, D.S, 2005. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

Zoonen, L.V, 1994. Feminist Media Studies. 1st ed. London: SAGE Publications.

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