Technology Diary (9/12)

I also wanted to discuss some of the issues that riddle the video gamer subculture like Pranitha. Being a woman and being accepted in the geek culture is like a Catch 22. You’re one of two tropes; you’re either good-looking and seeking male attention or you’re unattractive and completely shamed for not looking like a comic book heroine. Either way, you’re not a true fan. The subculture is just so blatantly and unapologetically sexist in the way that women are hostilely interrogated to prove their knowledge of a fandom. Why can’t women be accepted as fans instead of having to prove it? Men are automatically assumed to be genuinely interested and accepted.

This issue is also rooted in how gendered the gaming industry is and has always been. From a young age, toy retailers advertise video games heavily as a masculine hobby. The outrageous violence and themes of war and car chases and explosions are deemed “masculine” things than make boys into men. Mostly all the women portrayed in video games are scantily clothed and used as sex objects. In Grand Theft Auto, a player gets points for raping a woman on the street! Not only does this tell young boys that it’s okay to dehumanize women and they’ll be rewarded for it, but it also speaks to the kind of power and hyper-masculinity that characterizes the male gender.

Fans are not the only ones that suffer from sexism in this subculture; designers face a sexist industry as well. Jean-Max Morris, video game developer, faced this problem when he tried to get a company to sell his game, Remember Me. Remember Me is a video game with a strong female protagonist dressed appropriately for her missions as she tries to regain her lost memories by hacking others’ and remixing them. His game was rejected on the premise that having a female protagonist wouldn’t sell and that Nilin, the main character, would have to be gendered as a male. The reasoning that men are the only ones who should be playing video games, and these men only want to play as other men completely ignore and reject all the female gamers. Not surprisingly, women are not properly represented in this industry simply because games targeting them are already considered dead on arrival when really they’re not even given the chance to be funded and released.

It speaks volumes how an 18-25 male market is considered the prime target audience when an all women market is still considered niche.

If you’re a female gamer or just want to watch a funny girl’s spin on the sexist industry, I recommend this!