8 Ugly Problems About Gender Representation The Gaming Industry Won't Admit
7. Women Are Damselled At An Alarming Rate
This really isn't a surprise considering poor Princess Peach still has to wait for Mario to rescue her, but surely more dramatic titles should be doing away with this formula? Though I hate to harp on about Arkham Knight again, it was certainly a big offender when it came to taking typically strong female characters and placing them in a role amounting to little more than being the player's motivation for advancing the story. Incidentally, even Catwoman makes a self-aware quip regarding her role as acting as the player's motivation to take down Riddler - showing that even Rocksteady's writers are aware of her downgrade from Arkham City. Let's not try to pretend that there's a shortage of badass women in gaming - there isn't. But there's certainly a big problem with the industry when it comes to placing female characters in perilous situations solely to motivate the player. Fair enough that men also occupy a certain amount of screen time as the hostage, but developers are certainly no strangers to playing up femininity in the name of instilling a sense of vulnerability to the proceedings.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
