10 Images That Encapsulate Gaming's Biggest Problems

8. Portrayals Of Women, Sexism And Misogyny

Hand-in-hand with the violence debate is that of sexism, and the general feeling that women in the games industry are not treated as fairly as men. It's definitely a huge talking point at the minute, spurned back into the mainstream train of thought when last month Assassin's Creed developer Ubisoft stated that having a female character in their game would have been "too much work." Older than that was the Twitter campaign in 2012 where many women in the industry took to using the hashtag '1ReasonWhy' to describe the many things that contribute to why there aren't more females working in games in the first place. The responses were suitably shocking, and more akin to the sorts of things you'd reconcile to thinking "But people would never actually think like that, right?". Turns out yes, they would.

More recently we've seen a spate of more respectable lead characters taking up the mantle and fronting some brilliant games, but for every one girl you could imagine actually having a conversation with, there's a few hundred elephantine-chested man-killers padding out everything else. The sexism door does swing both ways, as we saw when covering offensive portrayals of both men and women, but due to the history of gaming's core demographics over the years this'll remain a hot-button topic for quite some time.