All posts by Honor Wade

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8 quotes

“Only solutions to kill the damsel to protect her”

”Young, white, straight male”

“The Damsel in Distress predates the invention of video games by several thousand years”

“As a girl growing up playing games I was always like, why do I have to play as a boy?”

“Most games feature white protagonists”

”Make them exude sexuality for the entertainment of the presumed straight male player.”

“Only solutions to kill the damsel to protect her”

“The gruesome death of women for shock value is especially prevalent in modern gaming”

Key terms respresentation

  1. Male gaze– the perspective of a notionally typical man considered as the intended audience for films and other visual media, characterized by a tendency to objectify or sexualize women.
  2. Voyeurism– the practice of gaining sexual pleasure from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity.
  3. Patriarchy– a system of society, family or government in which the eldest male is head of the family and the head is passed on to the next male, never the female.
  4. Positive and negative stereotypes – The positive, socially accepted and negative, frowned upon aspects of different stereotypes. Positive examples could be men being good at sport and women being caring, whereas negative examples could be most Muslims being thought of as terrorists when in fact that is absolutely not the case.
  5. Counter-types – An idea that challenges a traditional stereotype, for example a princess saving a prince.
  6. Misrepresentation – False claims or ideas about how certain people of things that are not made by the people themselves. This can give others the wrong impressions and ideas about people.
  7. Selective representation– the action or offence of giving a false or misleading account of the nature of something.
  8. Dominant ideology– the attitudes, beliefs, values, and morals shared by the majority of the people in a given society.
  9. Hegemony– leadership or dominance, especially by one state or social group over others.
  10. Audience positioning– refers to the techniques used by the creator of a text to try to get the audience to understand the ideology of the text.
  11. Constructed reality – The term social construction of reality refers to the theory that the way we present ourselves to other people is shaped partly by our interactions with others, as well as by our life experiences.
  12. Negotiated identity–  refers to the processes through which perceivers come to agreements regarding the identities that targets are to assume in the interaction.
  13. Collective identity– refers to all the affective aspects deriving from belonging to certain groups with which adolescents identify themselves and which place them within certain social categories such as ethnicity, nationality, or gender.
  14. Fluidity of identity– Having a fluid identity means having the ability to change how you see yourself, the world, and your actions.
  15. Constructed identity– individuals’ sense of belonging to a group.

Statement of intent

For my video game cover I want a bold background it will include the brands logo along with the company of the gaming manufacturer. I will include the PS4 logo along the top above the initial background which will include a desert with a orange sky and a pyramid in the background, this is because I would like my game to consist of a set difficult highly skilled tasks for the levels based inside of the pyramid that need completing to move higher up in the game. I will be using a female character dressed in clothing that does not sexualise her and she will be able to do the tasks efficiently, I want to do this to go against the sexist stereotype that women get from the gaming industry from being sexualised and them being seen as weaker than male characters.

Representation

How women are sexualised in video games, it largely remains unclear whether sexualized video games can have an impact on attitudes toward women. Often game designers change the camera angles to sexualise the female characters body shape and extenuate their walk to show off their purposefully widened hips. They also advertise the game covers with the female characters contorted in ways which can show off their whole body, they do this to appeal to men which entices them to buy the game. Laura was the women who came up with the idea about the male gaze as they were many issues with gender in film and other media. She is a feminist and says that films are made in the view of a heterosexual men trying to sexualise a woman by camera angles, zoom-ins or other strategies. John Berger devised the theory called “Ways of seeing” suggesting that the way woman are seen by men and the way they are taught to see themselves is wrong and creates a bad relationship between the two genders.