Many teenage boys are tired of the sexualised depiction of women in video games, according to the finding of a new survey.
In the study of about 1,400 US youths, 47% of middle-school boys and 61% of high school boys agreed that women are treated as sex objects too often in games.
The findings, gathered by education consultant Rosalind Wiseman and games writer Ashley Burch, counter familiar assumptions that boys will voraciously consume media images of scantily clad women without a second thought.
“The video game industry seems to base much of its game and character design on a few assumptions, among them that girls don’t play big action games, boys won’t play games with strong female characters, and male players like the sexual objectification of female characters.”
According to her findings, 70% of girls and 78% of boys said it does not matter what gender the lead character is. Indeed, the lasting popularity of characters like Lara Croft, Samus Aran and Bayonetta should perhaps have hinted in this direction. And yet female protagonists remain in a minority.
“Interestingly, boys care less about playing as a male character as they age and girls care more about playing as a female one,” writes Wiseman.
Maybe it’s that, as girls get older and realise that there’s a representational imbalance in games, they seek out relatable characters in protest. Or perhaps it symbolises much deeper issues around young women, representation and identity.
The title of Wiseman’s article is “Everything you know about boys and video games is wrong”. That’s not quite true given there are enough boys – and men – who fight any suggestion of objectification in games to seemingly counter Wiseman’s survey base a hundred times.
Representation is a complex issue, though, especially within games. Here, a defensive fanbase feels as though it is constantly under attack from the wider media, which has spent the past 20 years dipping into gamer culture whenever it wants to shock readers with some technophobic tittle-tattle.
The objectification argument that will roll on and on, as it has done in regard to movies, music and comics. Wherever you have people who define themselves by the culture they consume, you have people angered by suggestions that the culture in question may not be perfect.
Source
What kind of age range are middle to high school boys in America? I couldn't find a link to the actual study but it's always worth looking at how these questions are worded. I'm suspicious of the term "agreed with"
That said I suppose this is encouraging? Though the sample group they used was still relativity small
It makes me hope the whole Gamergate thing was really a small number of people with loud voices, rather than a significant percentage of the gaming population, either way I hope those kind of views are not carried forward with the youth of today