(left) and Faith Connors from Mirror's Edge'' (right)
portrayed at
IgroMir 2011
As player characters Prevalence A 2006 study from
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University found playable female characters appear less frequently than males in reviews of popular games. A 2007 study by Melinda C. R. Burgess et al. found men are featured much more often than women on console video game covers. In a 2012 sample of 669 action, shooter, and role-playing games selected by EEDAR, 300 (45%) provided the option to play as a female, but only 24 (4%) had an exclusively female protagonist. EEDAR found in 2010 that 10% of games had a protagonist with an indiscernible gender. According to Madeline Messer in
The Washington Post in 2015, among the top 50
endless running mobile games, 98% of those with gender-identifiable characters featured male protagonists, 90% of which were free to play. 46% offered female characters, and only 15% for free. Playing as a girl required, on average, an additional $7.53 purchase, much more than the games themselves cost.
Evolution Namco's
arcade video game Pac-Man (1980), while starring a male protagonist, was "the first commercial video game to involve large numbers of women" as players. The game's popularity among women led
Midway Games, its North American distributor, to develop
Ms. Pac-Man (1982) starring a female protagonist as their "way of thanking all those lady arcaders who have played and enjoyed
Pac-Man." The earlier arcade game
Score (1977) by
Exidy represented female characters, but no screenshots are known to be available.
Samus Aran, the heroine of
Metroid (1986) and its
successors, is often cited as "the first playable human female character in a mainstream video game". There were several earlier, less-popular video games with playable human female characters, including Billie Sue from
Wabbit (1982), Becky from
Otenba Becky no Daibouken (1983), Lilly from
Lilly Adventure (1983),
Barbie (1984), 's ''
(1984), Papri from Girl's Garden (1984), Kurumi-Hime from Ninja Princess (1985), Flashgal (1985), Alexandra from Lode Runner's Rescue (1985), Chris from Alpha (1986), Ki from The Return of Ishtar (1986), In 1983, professor Sara Kiesler et al. published a study in Psychology Today'' finding that female characters appeared in video games at a frequency of 1 game in 7. In 1994, Australian
Hyper magazine writer Virginia Barratt accused the
video game industry of being
sexist for its lack of female representation, stating that video games "are made by boys for boys who play with other boys" and that girls "rarely get a look in, unless of course there's a victim who needs to be rescued or someone needs to wear a bikini to cheer the macho men on." She also said that many female players, despite enjoying popular arcade games such as
Street Fighter II and
Mortal Kombat, were discouraged from visiting arcades due to their status as male-dominated spaces.
Lara Croft, the protagonist of
Tomb Raider (1996), is among the best-known strong, fictional women in a variety of media. Since her introduction in 1996, the character of Croft has been criticized for her "unrealistic" breast size; Lara was claimed to personify "an ongoing culture clash over gender, sexuality, empowerment, and objectification." In a 2008
Tomb Raider title, Croft was depicted in "
hot pants and midriffs" and was said to look like she was "dressed by a male". However, the game's creators maintain that she was not designed with marketing in mind, and have claimed to be rather surprised at her pinup-style adoration. In
Tomb Raider: Legend, Lara underwent a radical redesign, ostensibly to make her less sexualized.
April Ryan from
The Longest Journey (1999) has been compared to Lara Croft, as she shows less prominent physical feminine attributes than Lara but more feminine psychological traits, as contrasted with Lara's masculine connotations like
aggressiveness and force. Contrarily,
Jade, the protagonist of
Beyond Good & Evil (2003), was widely recognized as a strong and confident female character lacking any overt sexualization. The year 2013 featured women in leading roles in a number of award-winning games such as
The Last of Us (2013),
BioShock Infinite (2013), the rebooted
Tomb Raider (2013), and
Beyond: Two Souls (2013). A study of these games found that although the leading female characters in these games were able to subvert predominant gender stereotypes, women were still limited by men in the narratives, in particular through
benevolent sexism. In 2014, the developers' choice to omit playable women in the latest iterations of the top-tier gaming franchises ''
Assassin's Creed and Far Cry'' became a focus of discussions in gaming media. This indicated, according to game industry professionals cited by
Polygon, a shift in the industry's attention towards issues of diversity in gaming, in conjunction with video games as a whole growing beyond their former core audience of younger men. The announcement trailer for
Battlefield V in 2018 was met with backlash from some fans of the
series, who took issue with the potential portrayal of women in the game. Their main point of contention was with the British woman featured in the trailer, citing the character's presence as unrealistic due to
women on the British side never participating in frontline combat during
World War II and being mostly relegated to supporting roles.
As supporting characters Female characters are often cast in the role of the
damsel in distress, with their rescue being the objective of the game.
Princess Zelda in the early
The Legend of Zelda series, the Sultan's daughter in
Prince of Persia, and
Princess Peach through much of the
Mario series are
paradigmatic examples. By 2013, Peach appeared in 14 of the main
Super Mario games and was kidnapped in 13 of them. The only main games that Peach was not kidnapped in were in the North America release of
Super Mario Bros. 2,
Super Mario 3D World, and
Super Mario Bros. Wonder, but she was a character that can be played. Zelda became playable in some later games of
The Legend of Zelda series or had the pattern altered. Shanon Sherman described how the illustrations on video game covers portrayed women in need of rescue. She wrote that these covers reinforce the existing gender stereotypes and sexual discrimination against women. According to some critics, the quest is
transmisogynist, involving purchasing clothes from an exaggerated
stereotype of a trans woman, whose face Link cringes at, before employing another transphobic stereotype: a man (Link) disguising himself as a woman to enter a woman-only space. The women there mainly discuss how attracted they are to men, which some say appeals to a presumed cis, straight male player. In 1998, Michigan State University analyzed 33 popular games for the
Nintendo and
Sega Genesis consoles. Collected data shows that only 15% of games had a female role as a protagonist or an active character. In 41% of games, there were simply no female characters, and in the rest they were assigned the role of victims or
sexual objects. Jeroen Jannsz and Raynel G. Martis conducted research on the representation of gender within video games; the 12 games examined included 22 characters. Two games did not have a second or supporting character in the intro
cutscene:
Splinter Cell focused exclusively on protagonist
Sam Fisher, and
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness focused exclusively on Lara Croft. The analysis showed a dominance of male characters in the games.
SHODAN, an artificial intelligence with a female voice and a female face, was the main villain of the game
System Shock (1994), praised as one of the most recognizable female characters in gaming. Another prominent classic female villain is
Ultimecia, the main antagonist in
Final Fantasy VIII (1999). Similarly,
GLaDOS from
Portal (2007), a megalomaniacal computer with a female voice, was praised by critics as one of the best new characters of the 2000s.
Sexualization , here portrayed by
Alison Carroll, is often used as an example of the
sexual objectification of women in games. The portrayal of women in video games has been the subject of academic study and controversy since the early 1980s. Recurring themes in articles and discussions on the topic include the
sexual objectification and
sexualization of female characters, done to appeal to a presumed male audience, Research on exposure to sexualized media representations of women in television and magazines has asked whether it reduces male compassion toward women, and reduces women's perceptions of their desire and suitability for various vocations.
Prevalence In their 2005 study, Karen E. Dill and K. P. Thill distinguish three major stereotypical depictions of women in gaming: (1) sexualized, (2) scantily clad, and (3) a vision of beauty. The study revealed that over 80% of women in video games represented one of these depictions. More than one quarter of female characters embodied all of the three stereotypical categories at once. Dill and Thill also note that another prevalent theme in the depiction of women was a combination of aggression and sex, referred to as "eroticized aggression". According to sociology professor and researcher Tracy Dietz, women are often depicted in stereotypical roles that typically pertain to sexuality in which the woman focuses upon beauty/physical attractiveness. A study of 225 video game covers found that both male and female character's physiques were overexaggerated, but women were more "physically altered" (especially in the bust) than their male counterparts, and even more so if the female was the main character of the game. A 2011 study regarding
gender identity and representation in Digital
RPGs found that hyper-sexuality, which is often associated with female avatars, tends to negatively affect numerous types of
gamers, who deeply identify with their
avatar. The study found that this issue reifies the idea that "a woman's power, in-game or out, comes entirely from her sexuality". A 2016 study of 571 games released between 1984 and 2014 found action games to be the highest ranked by genre, based on considerations of pronounced physics, unrealistic proportions, and revealing clothing. Adventure games followed in second place, followed by fighting games. Shooters, platformers, and RPG games ranked lowest in terms of character sexualization. However, this sexualization of female characters was at its height between 1990 and 2005 and then began to decline significantly. The study also determined that there was no significant difference in sexualization between games rated as "Teen" (for ages 13 and up) and "Mature" (17 and up) by the
ESRB, Female video game characters have been criticized as having a tendency to be objects of the "
male gaze". A print ad for the fighting game
Soulcalibur V received some controversy for simply being a close up of female character
Ivy Valentine's breasts with a tagline. In two sequels of fighting games
Soulcalibur and
Tekken, set several years after the original, recurring male characters had all aged, but all female characters were kept the same age or were replaced by their daughters. Many games, particularly
fighting games, also feature pronounced "
breast physics", which make the breasts of female characters bounce or jiggle in a sometimes exaggerated manner. A recurrent representation of
women in fantasy settings, originating in the 1960s, is the
female warrior dressed in scanty armor. They feature armor designs which have been described by such terms as "
chainmail bikinis", largely consisting of small decorative plaques that reveal large portions of the body to the weather and expose vital organs, making them ineffective as protection. Such depictions are an instance of the general sexualization of women in
geek culture, including in video games, comic and movies. compiles depictions of women fighters wearing "realistic" armor. In a similar vein,
memes have depicted men in the scanty armor typical of female characters.
Violence against women Video games have been criticized for depicting
violence against women. For example, the 2013 game
Dead Island: Riptide generated controversy when the special "zombie bait" edition of the game included a statue of a torso of a busty, dismembered woman in a skimpy bikini. Much of the
Grand Theft Auto franchise features violence against women, especially
Grand Theft Auto V, so much so that
Target Australia withdrew the game from sale in response to criticism. The 1982 adult game ''
Custer's Revenge'' portrayed the rape of a Native American woman by the player's character of
General Custer.
Kotaku described the 2013 reboot of
Tomb Raider as using rape for Lara Croft's character development; the developers denied that the scene at issue depicted an attempted rape.
The portrayal of women as victims One prevalent form of violence against women in video games is the portrayal of female characters as helpless victims. This often involves scenarios where women are in need of rescue or protection by male protagonists. Such narratives reinforce gender power dynamics and perpetuate the idea that women are passive and dependent on men. An example of this portrayal can be found in the
Resident Evil series, where female characters, such as Jill Valentine or Claire Redfield, often find themselves in vulnerable situations, relying on male characters to save them. These portrayals can reinforce the notion of women as weak and in constant need of male intervention, limiting their agency and perpetuating harmful stereotypes (the "damsel in distress" myth referred to above).
Sexualized violence Another concerning aspect is the depiction of sexualized violence against women in video games. This includes explicit scenes or storylines where female characters are subjected to sexual assault, harassment, or objectification. Such portrayals contribute to a culture that normalizes and trivializes violence against women. The game
Tomb Raider faced criticism for its early iterations, where the protagonist, Lara Croft, was often subjected to sexualized violence. The marketing and advertising of the game emphasized Lara's physical appearance, objectifying her as a sexual icon rather than focusing on her agency and capabilities as an adventurer. While the series has evolved to present a more nuanced portrayal of Lara, early iterations contributed to the objectification and commodification of women.
Stereotypical portrayals and reinforcement of gender roles Many video games reinforce traditional gender roles and stereotypes, depicting women as submissive, sexual objects or as prizes to be won. These portrayals not only contribute to the objectification of women but also perpetuate harmful notions of gender roles and expectations. The
Grand Theft Auto series has faced criticism for its depiction of women as sexual objects and targets of violence. Female characters are often marginalized, serving as background decoration or engaging in stereotypical roles such as
sex workers or damsels in distress. Such portrayals reinforce harmful gender stereotypes and contribute to a culture that devalues and objectifies women. ==Portrayal of men==