Leveling Up Representation:
– “As technology advanced, Black and other characters of colour became more prevalent, even if most often confined to the fighting genre. And stereotypes were not limited to African Americans; Latinx characters have often been portrayed as gangbangers and drug dealers.”
– “Developers need to consider not only showcasing meaningful diversity in terms of people of colour, but also including people from other marginalized communities, such as the LGBTQIA+ community and the disabled community, in ways that don’t dehumanize them or try to “fix” them.”

Why Diversity Matters:
– “The industry traditionally projects an image that is young, white, straight and male, but there is growing understanding that – if only for the sake of releasing more interesting products – this has to change.”
– “The argument that it’s not the gender, ethnicity or physical abilities of a character that are important, but whether they’re written well and fun to play, is easier to make if you’re already being comfortably represented.”

• 

“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”

MEDIA FORMS	CHARACTERISTICS	EXAMPLE
1	Television	repetitive informative common	This Morning
2	Advertising	promotional targeted consistent	Billboard
3	Radio	not visual wide spread simple	Radio 1
4	Film	immersive formal differential	Avatar
5	Social Media	very common interactive free	Instagram
6	Newspaper	completely visual specific to the area generic	Daily Mail
7	Magazine	diverse no set format attractive	National Geographic
8	Music video	audio and video intertextual referencing genre specific	Daily Duppy
9	Video Games	entertainment for profit immersive	FIFA

Feminist Frequency website

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

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

Levelling up article 

“If you do not see yourself on Netflix, on Instagram, in games, in forums, where are you?”

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

Laura Mulvey’s academic paper

“There is pleasure in being looked at”

“The cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego”

Diversity Matters article

“Most games feature white protagonists”

“Persons who genuinely see themselves as good people end up justifying turning a blind eye to overt racism and violence”

What Is the Male Gaze?

The male gaze describes a way of portraying and looking at women that empowers men while sexualizing and diminishing women. While biologically, from early adolescence on, we are driven to look at and evaluate each other as potential mates, the male gaze twists this natural urge, turning the women into passive items to possess and use as props.

Laura Mulvey-

British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey described the concept of the “male gaze” in her 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which was published in 1975 in the film theory magazine Screen.⁴ In the article, Mulvey, who is a professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London, explained the way that mainstream media objectifies women, showing the female body through a heterosexual male lens as a passive non-actor secondary to the active male characters.

john berger-

John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to the BBC series of the same name, is often used as a university text. He lived in France for over fifty years.

In this essay I am going to analyse and evaluate the relationship between the two CSP game covers(Tomb Raider and Metroid). To do this I’m going to apply my knowledge and understanding of semiotics to aid my arguments and counterpoints.

I will be arguing the point that the over-sexualisation of women which can be seen to be directed to Lara Croft, the main protagonist in Tomb Raider, is exploited by game companies to appeal to their target demographic of straight males. Furthermore I will further explore this idea of the male gaze by using other examples from articles and feminist influences and point of views. I will go onto the game ‘Metroid’ and elaborate on the radical approach the game creators took with the narrative, this approach being the fact that the game left it open whether or not the main protagonist was female or male. The game did this by not revealing who was under the armour, that armour being seen as something that would be worn as a male, but that would be expected from the stereotypical and reactionary gaming demographic. For each of the CSP’s I will display a counterpoint to each of my original arguments.

On the Tomb Raider front cover the dominant signifier is clearly represented as the main protagonist Lara Croft, this means she is going to act as the focal point to the consumer. So of course, to appeal to the large majority of the gaming demographic, the game companies oversexualised Lara Croft, this can be seen with the posture used which emphasises her body. This iconic sign on the denotation of the cover creates a code, to the most likely straight male consumer, a code which implies to that consumer what the game is about. It could be said that the game companies, at least in some instances, rely on the male gaze