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Astrid Diaz
Professor Ditch
English 113 A
19 October 2014
Video Games and the Impact on Gender Construction
According to Bonnie Miller Rubin article, Young people spend 7 hours, 38 minutes a
day on TV, video games, computer from Los Angeles Times; children at the age of 8 to 18
spend 53 hours a week on the media. Video games are one of the greatest factors that influence
our western society nowadays. People are influenced to perform in a correct way according to
what our gender expectations are. Society expects women to be weak, powerless, and dependent
of their partner, whereas men are expected to be strong and independent individuals. In video
games, man and women are portrayed in ways that they meet their gender role expectations. I
found an image on the Mario Bros official webpage, where the main characters which are Mario
and Princess Peach are performing the way society wants both genders to perform. This can be
limiting on the way each gender perform, and can lead to lowering their self esteem. Video
games categorize each gender by giving them labels based on what their sex is.
Mario Bros is an old video game that was created and published on 1983. In this video
game, Mario is portrayed as very strong character, along with his brother Luigi, they both have to
fight and defeat different creatures that came from New York City. However, this idea of
defeating creatures was changed when the New Super Mario 64 was produced in 1996 to the idea
of Mario having to rescue his loved one Princess Peach. In this new version of Mario Bros,
Mario is projected as a very strong and protective male, as for Princess Peach is projected as very
fragile, delicate, and powerless individual. Mario has to go through a lot of obstacles to rescue

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Princess Peach from the evil turtle, King Koopa. In this game, it becomes evident that traditional
gender rules are being performed.
In the New Super Mario, Mario is pictured as an unstoppable, strong, and mostly as a
super hero that is capable of doing anything to reach his goals, and Peach as a fragile and
dependent women. These qualities presented on both figures are just the same qualities that
society has given to both genders. Throughout the years society has established the image of both
sexes with different unique qualities. In one hand men have to be strong to help their female
partner in any type of situation, men are pictured with a mustache or for the most part as a hairy
individual just as Mario is portrayed on the video games. On the other hand females are pictured
with long hair and in this case with the traditional pink dress demonstrating the female side
which is also how Princess Peach is portrayed. Marios performance is projected just as what any
other typical man would do on society, which is protect his partner, which are the qualities that
women typically look for in their male partner. They act this way because they see that women
being attracted to these types of qualities. When a man or a woman acts in a abnormal way, they
become criticized which develops a significant drop in their self esteem.
Mario Bros is a game mostly played by children. In this developing stage for children
they are convinced that they are members of their gender grouping. According to Becoming
Members of Society: the Social Meaning of Gender, by Aaron Devor, Children begin to settle
into a gender identity between ages of eighteen months and two years. (Devor pp.35) Childhood
is an essential period that shapes who we are and how we act. Children begin to be influenced at
an early age by media and that eventually shapes our gender preferences as we begin to grow up
into young adults. Where I am from, it is tradition for men to be dominant in a relationship
because it is what they have been taught by the media.

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Men grow up thinking that because they are the dominants, they have control over their
partner. While some women are just waiting for the man to always protect them, substain them,
and give them everything they desired. The ideal of the male being dominant and the female
being inoffensive, goes back to the idea of the game where Mario, the male partner, being the
one that always has to rescue and always protects his partner that is Princess Peach and her by
always waiting to be rescued and saved by the man. Video games teach people that the ideal man
has to be strong and the ideal woman has to be very delicate. However when a person is not
seemed as the ideal female or male, it leads to criticism and lowers their self esteem. This also
limits their gender performance; meaning that in society, it is seemed to be inadequate for a
female or a male to perform differently from what it is expected for them to do.
Some people may argue that there are other video games where there are strong female
characters. Although that might be true, some of the video games, where the main character is a
strong woman, emphasize women as sexual objects. For example, on the video game Tomb
Raider, Lara Croft is being identified as a strong female. Even though she is portrayed as a strong
female, she is also being sexually objectified. She is wearing a mini shirt that barely covers her
breast. She shows the ideal body a woman has to have in order to be considered sexy. In video
games where men are the main characters, it is not normal to see males being sexually
objectified. There is a big difference between male and female performance. Women are often
the victims, and men are the strong heroes on video games. When a male or female does not
behave based on what he or she is expected they become targets of criticism. For example, it is
often said that a man that cries is not a man, he or she gets criticized and picked on, which leads
to limiting themselves and lowering their self esteem.

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According to the article, The Effects of the Sexualization of Female Video Game
Characters on Gender Stereotyping and Female Self-Concept. Behm-Morawitz, Elizabeth and
Mastro, Dana have found out by doing researches that, the vast majority of female characters
have been found to be non-playable, meaning that they cannot be played by the gamer--thus
underscoring their secondary and exiguous status. When playable female characters do appear in
video games, they are typically overtly sexualized and portrayed wearing promiscuous dress and
engaging in seductive acts. (Morawitz pp.809) This means that on video games women are
either portrayed as weak or as sexual objects. However, the majority of games are male leads.
Males are always looked as strong and they are never objectified. Video games show the way
that the ideal female and male has to look like. In society, people think that because the media
through video games is telling them how they should look, they tend to degrade themselves
because they think that they are not meeting their expectations. Males and females tend to have
limits by not accepting and loving themselves as whom they are, meaning that both sexes always
want to mimic what media has taught them.
Researcher Christopher E Near, a graduate student from the Department of Sociology at
the University of Michigan, in the article, Selling Gender: Associations of Box Art
Representation of Female Characters With Sales for Teen- and Mature-rated Video Games
states, Studies completed on video games sold in the US have shown that female characters are
not given representation equal to male characters on video games and are often created from a
male perspective that is less than realistic, exaggerating their sexual or feminine traits. (Near
pp.252) This means that females are not giving the same importance in video games like males
are. Usually, males are the creators of these games, so they tend to go overboard on the way that

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they physically and sexually portray women. Gamers tend to follow the roles that video games
portrayed on the character.
Both genders act according to the expectations that the media has established on video
games. Females are constantly seemed as a vulnerable as for males being categorized with
muscular characteristics. Some of them are pressured by society and these tend to limit their
performance in society. A wake up call needs to be initiated in order to stop media-based gender
construction.

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Work Cited
Behm-Morawitz, Elizabeth, and Dana Mastro. "The Effects Of The Sexualization Of Female
Video Game Characters On Gender Stereotyping And Female Self-Concept." Sex Roles
61.11/12 (2009): 808-823. Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 5 Nov. 2014.
Devor, Aaron. Becoming Members of Society: The Social Meanings of Gender. Gender
Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality. 1989: 35-43. Print.
Near, Christopher. "Selling Gender: Associations Of Box Art Representation Of Female
Characters With Sales For Teen- And Mature-Rated Video Games." Sex Roles 68.3/4
(2013): 252-269. Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 5 Nov. 2014.