Zoë Quinn's The Fine Young Capitalists

A more in-depth study may look at video games from a Marxist point of view, characterizing the games as a modern day “opiate of the masses” with multi-billion dollar corporations publishing the games to keep the proletariat occupied and oblivious to their plights. A feminist may cite the standard role of female video game characters as being the “damsel in distress” and even strong female characters usually being relegated to sex symbol status.

When playing a game against someone elsewhere in the world, have you ever wondered who exactly you are playing with? Most people might say yes, but people don’t always know the facts behind gaming. Approximately 45% of gamers are female, yet many of them choose not to reveal their gender due to negative stereotypes and harassment from male gamers. However, I am not part of those who choose to hide what they are passionate about due to fear and disrespect. I’m the type of person who continues to play for hours after my parents say lights out and still keep up with team practices and academics. My gaming tendencies have shaped who I am today and given me the confidence I never had before. I intend on using the skills and confidence I’ve earned from gaming to be a successful STEM student.

One of the first studies found that more than 40% of games did not contain any female characters in any form, and when games did feature females they were positioned as sex objects or victims (Dietz, 1998). The studies that followed found, and have continued to report, male characters were overrepresented, predominately portrayed as Caucasian heterosexual leaders and heroes, while females were underrepresented, objectified, sexualised, and relegated to helpless or provocative background characters requiring to be rescued by, or serve as titillation and reward for, the male player. These researchers have concluded that, due to these gender representations, gaming was an unwelcoming environment for females (Subrahmanyam & Greenfield, 2000, p. 59; Beasley & Standley, 2002; Kennedy, 2002; Dunlop, 2007; Dill, & Thill, 2007; Dickerman et al, 2008; Downs and Smith, 2010; Sarkeesian,

Mariah Burton Nelson’s article “I Won; I’m Sorry” discusses the complex and controversial topics of the roles and attitudes of successful female athletes She provides examples such as, Venus Williams and John Macenroe. Both were great tennis players in their day and both were known for having a short temper. Both athletes had different treatments because of gender stereotypes. This type of inequality is what drives Mariah in her article and the woman sports report. Just by looking at the first page of the website I can tell that this is a website that is empowering toward women. The colors, cloths, and almost all of the article if not all articles are all focused on women sports. Through the pictures that are presented on the website one can

Conference coordinator Samantha Jo Dato said, “It’s about honoring what the trans movement was, what it looked like, where it came from. We’re here to remember that we are all in a marginalized situation and these are our roots.”

There were many signs equating gender justice with racial justice. Costumes designed to look like vaginas were proudly displayed. But does equating vaginas with feminism really represent gender equality? What about the transgender people who were in attendance supporting the cause? Do these costumes accurately represent

In the reading “Gendering Social Capital: Bowling in Women’s Leagues?” by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, they suggest women and men are segregated by gender in social organizations causing a gap in the social capitol of men and women, furthering the inequality of women. They look at 50 societies worldwide

5 Charts That Show Sexism Is Still Alive and Well in Gaming This text is published by a media company called Mic. Their target audience is young people and they cover a wide variety of subjects such as News, Arts, and Technology (Mic /about). The author of this article is Sophie Kleeman, who, according to her profile on Mic.com, covers the “intersection of tech and culture” (Mic /profiles/152573/sophie-kleeman)

Gender disparity in video games is a topic that both scholars and major gaming icons have discussed before. However, the topic recently resurfaced with the upsurging population of female gamers. The integration of females was a spectacle that caused a massive culture shock. Many members of the gaming community were unsure how to handle the change and took to discriminating females. While discrimination may seem unimportant, many scholars and icons believe it is a prominent factor of gender disparity: an environment which typically favors males, a hostile or “toxic” atmosphere, and repeated stereotypes all manifest certain behaviors of both genders that can cause a disparity to grow. Although some sources claim gender disparity is evident in gaming as a whole, others insist the novelty of female discrimination in video games is less prominent due to a more leveled percentage of male-to-females in gaming. However, both agreed that the competitive gaming community is a different story. Time and time again the competitive gaming community was mentioned for its exclusion of women due to biased and misogynistic members who sexualize and degrade females. These members believe women are inferiors that encroach on their territory with unskilled and seductive natures. Therefore, for the females in the gaming community, their actions will shape the future of women in the competitive gaming community. The change in female treatment is detrimental to gender disparity. Not only because

The next aspect we’ll be looking at, is the advertisement point of view of gender equality within sports and sporting events. Women's sports never receive as much advertisement as men’s athlete teams do. You can use sports such as worms soccer for an example, along with UFC for an example of this and college and professional females basketball teams. 
For an example of this in a larger aspect, just imagine that someone offered for you to go to the NRG Stadium in Houston Texas where the stadium that had over 70,000 fans watching the 2016 D1 men’s NCCA championship basketball game for March Madness was taking place. It was a crazy game, with what you thought a crazy come from behind win was about to take place for North Carolina, and to make

Imagine this. You 're in the middle of a really intense, stressful, and energetic game where it 's you against four other people. You are all alone and struggling to survive and as you 're getting shot at all you hear is some ignorant teenage boy from the other team say “you won 't win... get back into the kitchen and make me a sandwich.” Now I know you might be wondering where this is heading, but this is one of the few examples that women, when playing video games, have to deal with. What many do not realize, is how sexist many can be and how rude or hurtful the things they say can be. They also do not realize that many of these problems come from teenage boys who are not allowing any female to have a chance to show how good they could potentially be or how beneficial they could be to the team or game. Sexism is a big problem in the gaming community that needs to be changed. There have been many problems involving both men and women and it 's all because of how sexist games can be or just based on how sexist people are behind their anonymous alias. On one side of the debate, many, including those who cause the sexism, say these things are said and done because they believe it will increase sales and it will get more attention to their company or game, they believe that these type of games are what gamers want or what they believe is best for their fans, and they believe that these sexist comments are just jokes and messing around. Although some could believe these things

Author A.B. Harris declares a call to action in his article “Average Gamers Please Step Forward” published in 2012 as he talks about the how gamers shouldn’t settle for how the Entertainment Software Association put the average gamer into a box, Harris (2017) declares that the average gamers are far

Sadly, the gaming industry has been criticized for lacking complex characterization, especially when it comes to female characters. While this complaint is valid, and it cannot be denied that there is a surplus of overly sexualized one dimensional female characters in gaming, the industry has begun moving away from

In response from all these criticisms, many gaming companies published fourteen different articles on their official website to write about the shift in demographic in the gaming community: The death of the "gamer.” Eventually, a significant amount of gamers started to boycott on theses gaming sites, and contracting their advertisers. Next, this situation brought in the Feminists side, who argued that gamers were mad for all the different reasons. Many well known feminists, like Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and Zoe Quinn, argued that gamers were sexist, and it was reasonable position to take. GamersGate started with one woman’s personal life leaked out on the internet, and escalated to men on the internet slut shaming Zoe Quinn. An enmourse backlash was received after many feminists who spoke out for GamerGate were hacked, doxed, cyber bullied, and received death threats from anonymous trolls. This incident led to the third spectrum of GamerGate. Many people believe that Gamergate is nothing but women hating on

Sexist portrayals of female characters in video games The portrayal of men and women in video games, as in other media, is a subject of research in gender studies. This topics is discuss in terms of sexism in video gaming. Especially, women are underrepresented or use as objectification in mainstream games. Women in video games are generally, as a rule of thumb, killed, raped, abused or rescued by the male heroes. This is extremely sad to see because the role of women in society is changing compare to ten years ago. Women has been proven themselves to be stronger and tough in different fields such as sports, politics, education but the representation hasn’t change.