5 Myths About Women In Gaming
2. Sexualisation Of Women Isn't That Common
Do you guys remember when you beat Metroid in under an hour and Samus is revealed to be an attractive young female in a bikini? Good times, right? Well, things like that are ultimately what inspired women to speak out against hypersexualisation, and look how the industry and community responded to that.
A study published in the Journal of Communication in mid-2016, initiated by four female doctorate students at Indiana University, looked at 571 different playable female characters released over a 31 year period. What the researchers were looking for was a pattern in representation of females within these games. What they found was that the popularity of big-breasted, half-naked females peaked in the mid-90s. Unfortunately, however, that peak became more of a plateau as there was very little (if any) genuine improvement in the representation of female characters in the following last 20 years.
The study also showed that females are far more likely to be cast in secondary (or tertiary) roles, and chances are those roles will be hypersexualised. Unfortunately, the study concluded that the lack of female protagonists does not signify any chance of things improving soon.
The head of the International Game Developer's Association, Kate Edwards (a game developer in her 50s who worked on Halo), bluntly stated that ,“Gaming culture has been pretty misogynistic for a long time now. There’s ample evidence of that over and over again."