Video Games And Its Effects On The World Of The Gaming...

The major publishing and development houses in video games seem to be running out of ideas – at least, in the eyes of the gaming community (Community.us.playstation.com 2014). Every year, the market gets more and more saturated with sequels for games. (IGN 2015) These can be relatively innocent games, like those in the Mario franchise (or, indeed, much of the Nintendo universe); they can be more problematic games, like the Call of Duty franchise, infamous for having players much younger than the ESRB rating of Mature would recommend; and they can be expansions on previous games, like World of Warcraft or Hearthstone.(Hewitt, 2015)(Kotzer, 2014) The reason behind this is largely economic – most video game companies want to ‘play it safe,’†¦show more content†¦This reinforces stereotyped images assigned to gender roles instead of presenting realistic human combative proportions, to the detriment of women’s self-esteem and comfort in video gam e communities. (Behm-Morawitz and Mastro, 2009) (McGrath and Chananie-Hill, 2009) In first-person shooting games such as the oft-cited Call of Duty or Battlefield series of games, there is rarely if ever any female representation, and often there is a sense of hypermasculinity through aggression, both on-screen and off-screen and from demographics far younger than the age category would recommend. The imagery is so graphic that lawmakers in Britain had to intervene, barring children under the recommended rating from playing the game.(Hewitt, 2015) There are exceptions to these rules: the Borderlands series of first-person shooting games parodies the hypermasculinity in its genre compatriots and works hard to include diversity in terms of racial, gender, and sexual representation – importantly, without making those characteristics the entirety of the character. (Emertainment Monthly, 2015) There is a growing trend among the more successful game developers to include more, more diverse, and better-written female characters. Games from Bioware also tend to have a great deal of inclusivity, with homosexual and bisexual romance options in all of their