Branden Wetsel

Professor Cancio

Comm 1500

Midterm Paper

Topic: Should game makers be more aware of Misogyny (hatred of women) in their games?

Ahh video games, a mans escape from reality. Right? Wrong. Research shows that actually

women represent about 53.6 percent of all gamers across PC gaming platforms. 42 percent of

Xbox One owners are female and 48 percent owning a Ps4. So again, I ask if video games are

strictly for men, of course not. Nothing is strictly for men, people need to start realizing this. “In

2015 49% of Americans reported playing video games and 10 percent of them identify as

“gamers”” (Cunningham 2018) That’s 32,484,175 people who are regularly playing video

games.

If 53.6 percent of that is women, why are game makers unaware of the level of misogyny or

hatred of women in their games. Games like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption are

prime examples of this hatred. You literally can beat a woman to death in both of these games

because you feel like it and that’s the least bad of the options.

Now not only do we have games like that but there are games that don’t include women at all,

there are no female characters. Games like Call of Duty and Battlefield had no female characters

until recent years. The early Mortal Kombat days did not include women. (Tomkinson, Harper

2015) Now it is possible game-makers had no idea that there were that many female gamers

playing their games, but I find that unlikely. Businesses know just about everything about their
customers in order to remain successful. Video game businesses are very successful but they

could be even more so. According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), women

constitute 45 percent of the US gamers out there. (Cunningham 2015) Video game companies

are literally losing out on so many more customers by making games that are harmful to women.

Not to mention that over 37 percent of video games made are action/shooter. There needs to be a

stronger or at least more balanced approach to getting females into the games.

Now let’s step outside of the US for a minute to look at other areas of the world. It was reported

in 2013 that 65 percent of Australia’s population identifies as gamers and 47 percent of that

number are female. (Tomkinson, Harper 2015) So, again I ask why are games so marketed to

men? There are so many female players out there in the world that have only a select few options

of games to play.

So, I ask should video game makers be more aware of the level of misogyny in their games? The

answer is yes. Imagine how many female gamers stopped playing games because of how

mistreated they felt when they saw certain things in games. Such as, murder, rape, and

sexualization of women in the games they play. Game-makers are literally hurting their own

credibility by making these types of games. Their argument is that they want the games to be as

close as possible to real as they can. These issues persist in the world we live in now, so they’re

being realistic. That just isn’t right in my opinion.

The other thing is, are games like this creating violence in the real world. Teaching people that is

okay to act that way because it is in a video game? Most people with common sense know that it

is a video game and none of what they are doing is real or okay to do. But there is that select

group of people without common sense that believe they can do what they want because they did

it in a game. Unfortunately, those people cannot be helped. If the game makers never put these
things in the games then those select few people would never have been exposed to the ideas. It

is certainly not helping anyone’s cause to have angry teenage boys and the dangerous adults out

there to have access to games like this. Game-makers are smart and still rate their games to show

what is involved in these games and that to me is to cover their own rear ends. They cannot be

sued by the parents of a 16-year-old for influencing their child into bad things if they were

playing a rated M game. The parents would have had to buy their child that game so game

makers can switch fault back onto the parents.

Not only are the games that are being made misogynistic towards women but the men who play

the games are as well. Now a days with games like Call of Duty and Battlefield having female

characters in them, those game developers are seeing an increase in females playing their games.

This is fantastic news for the developers, but unfortunately it hasn’t been all it’s cut out to be for

the female gamers playing these games. Call of Duty and Battlefield are games that require

communication and teamwork to truly be good at them and have fun. The issue is female gamers

are afraid to use microphones when playing these games because of the level of disrespect they

receive from men as soon as they talk.

I have experienced this first hand playing a game of Call of Duty with some friends and the

teams are randomized we ended up on a team with two other players and were using open chat.

One player was a very rude and disrespectful male, he was even disrespectful to me and my

friends, although we had not really said a word to him. The other was a silent partner. Call of

Duty has a thing where you can tell if the people on your team have a microphone plugged into

their system. This other player had a microphone but was not speaking, they were a very good

player and my friends and I kept trying to get them to talk by giving them compliments and

telling them how good of a player they actually were. The rude man chimed in a few times
saying “They’re not that good” or “they play like a bi***” and those are very small comments

from what actually happened. After the game I received a message from this player saying

“Hello, thank you and your friends for being so kind to me. My name is **** and I am a girl. I

love playing Call of Duty and do have a microphone, I am just afraid to use it because of what

people like that guy may say to me.” I responded saying “Wow. You are very good at the game,

how about you squad up with me and my friends and we will back you up if anyone like that guy

happens to show again.” She joined us and we played for over 6 hours. We we’re laughing and

having a wonderful time.

To conclude, the world is a harmful and rude place for a lot of people and that is not right. Why

shouldn’t everyone have the ability to game and get away from life’s issues in a virtual world.

Female gamers deserve every right to get online and play a game to escape for a few hours, but

there are too many of them that are afraid of doing so due to the people out there and how they

are treated. It is only worse when they experience bullying and hardship in the real world and try

to get away from it only to run into more of it on the internet. Imagine being a female gamer and

getting on a game and being told you shouldn’t be playing a game because you’re a woman. That

is not fair to them. Imagine being a female gamer and getting on a game only to watch a female

character get brutalized in a game. It absolutely has to make them sick. I do believe that if game

developers put more focus into the levels of misogyny in their games, they could eradicate some

of these domestic violence issues that happen over the game in the form of emotional bullying

and issues in the world because the players wouldn’t get these horrid, crazy ideas to hurt people.

The facts are there, more female gamers are rising up and saying it should be okay for women to

want to play games online, and I 100 percent agree with that. Being an avid gamer myself, I hope
that developers can realize issues in their games and correct them to make gaming a truly

enjoyable experience for everyone.

Works Cited

 Chalk, Andy. “Researchers Find That Female PC Gamers Outnumber Males.” Pcgamer,

PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES, 29 Oct. 2014,

www.pcgamer.com/researchers-find-that-female-pc-gamers-outnumber-males/.

 Tomkinson, Sian, and Tauel Harper. “The Position of Women in Video Game Culture:

Perez and Day’s Twitter Incident.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol.

29, no. 4, Aug. 2015, pp. 617–634. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/10304312.2015.1025362.

 Cunningham, Carolyn M. “Unbeatable? Debates and Divides in Gender and Video Game

Research.” Communication Research Trends, vol. 37, no. 3, Sept. 2018, pp. 4–29.

EBSCOhost,

libprox1.slcc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh

&AN=131900407&site=eds-live.