Currently In the 21st century most likely at some point you have played some kind of video game. Whether it be some god forsaken freemium game on your phone, some console game that you paid upwards of 60 dollars for (not including DLC of course, but that’s another story), or some game you got on sale on your computer at a reasonable price it has probably somehow affected your life in a decent way. However if you are reading this and identify yourself as a “gamer” statistically it is believed that you are most likely a boy, that if you enjoy video games your chromosomes must have been XY and your gender identity is male. Have you ever wondered why it is common belief that gaming is a mans world, was it some grand design from the beginning? No, ultimately it was a really weird marketing decision that has not left the industry as it became more of a mainstream phenomenon that ingrained a sort of sexist identity to the gaming world despite many women having the capacity to enjoy games, much to a number of game designers surprise. How did this marketing decision come about, well to answer that it requires an explanation of the North American video game crash. In the 70s and Early 80s there was a flood of horrible games flooding the market of the North American gaming industry, this spawned such classics as the ET Atari game which literally had thousands of copies buried in the desert. The flood of poor cash grab games caused a decline, and the gaming market became very unstable to sell any sort of games as video games to make a profit. So, if you were still intending to be a video game producer, with limited resources to revive an industry, what were you to do? The answer, while sexist, was ultimately a pragmatic one, to sell video games on the boy toy aisle in stores! Action figures, gi joes, and the NES, the Nintendo entertainment system lined the stores shelves after Nintendo (yes THAT Nintendo is to thank for the belief that video games are for boys) decided to market the NES system for boys. The result of this resulted in a Total Market shift. Before the industry crash games were really nothing gender specific, a lot of shapes destroying other shapes, maybe you had a ship destroying meteors or maybe you had two lines passing a dot around from each other. After the crash with the NES the games were marketed to boys, with ads focusing on boys playing video games, women scantily clad to advertise gaming to boys as a boys experience. The games themselves now became much more male dominated, instead of shapes you had a hero on a quest to save a princess, there are plenty of examples of sexism in game design but ultimately the culture of gaming itself became sexist from the belief it was meant for boys. This is shown through the cluster of a mess that is Gamergate. Gamergate is essentially an online movement that occurred throughout the internet/gaming culture a few years ago bemoaning the influence of feminism in gaming. The influence? Wanting equal representation in a media product, essentially. The movement started because an ex boyfriend of a game developer accused her of sleeping of a critic for better reviews, and once that went viral a ton of men started just attacking women after women of the internet defended the developer. The movement was based on a ton of unfounded conspiracies, and no central message just really the hatred of women. This mentality of harassing women for just wanting to be represented in the games that they ALSO play is ultimately from the decision to market to boys. A number of gamers don’t believe that women can enjoy games from years of marketing, and ultimately that marketing still hurts the culture of today and will probably continue for a while. Women can enjoy games and should be included in the games that they are represented in.
