The influence of comics in video games is certainly a concerning matter. Obviously batman is ripped and no where near resembling the average man's build. Yet the male superheroes get to stand in heroic poses, or full page spreads with their fists punching a guy just in time to save the world.
Where female superhero's get to stick their gluttons out, or climb on top of someone just in time to stick their chest out.
Or if you're catwoman on issue #0 - break their spine in order to make both their rear and brassiere viewable. This seams to suggest female super heroes aren't actually heroes at all, but rather just kinky sidekicks. Often times female characters are decorative backgrounds, damsels in distress, sidekicks, spin offs, or weaker than their male counter parts. This was exceptionally frustrating when
Batgirl (one of the strongest female roles in batman) ended up breaking her back to become permanently paralyzed simply for a male characters plot device (her father).
The Killing Joke was downright sadistic and considering Batgirl was created to represent a severely unrepresented population in comics at the time (women) it was clearly a slap in the face. When writer Len Wein asked if it was OK to permanently injure a beloved hero the response from Dick Giordano was
Yeah, okay, cripple the bitch.' The opportunity in this is that now Oracle has provided a way to represent a disabled hero. Then you have harlequin who is supposedly a psychologist and yet she is portrayed as a naive bimbo.
There have been countless feminist books written on superheroes - and so when these stories are implemented into games it becomes a major concern for the influence on the game industry. The sentimentality of these titles often persuade many to ignore their discrepancies.
Advertising in general has had many negative impacts on gender identity. A long term marketing strategy often implemented by the entertainment industry is to hook young boys and keep them interested in a franchise to re-boot every so many years. This is why many big blockbuster movies are remakes of cartoon shows once highly popular among adolescents. Action heroes from movies were much more commonly geared towards boys and had been for decades. It's mind numbing repetition that seems to allow young boys less and less individuality. Gender portrayal is warped for both genders, and causes a major crisis among men who often feel the need to choose
to ignore any gender issues in favor of idolizing the franchises they grew up with. Because identity is often so closely related to the entertainment an individual watches, a criticism of a beloved franchise can feel like criticism of the individual. Yet a franchise doesn't have to be lost in order to address the issues at hand, and in fact
both Batman and Catwoman have made a lot of progress.