Gender In Video Games

What started out small in 1961 soon made its breakthrough in the early 1980s: The rapid development of video games and video game culture was a technical and soci-ological phenomenon, which did not transpire without undergoing severe changes. Not only did they evolve from something social, uniting people in arcade halls to a leisure activity where social interaction mainly takes place within the cyberspace, but also did their target audience change significantly. Whereas arcade games had been designed to attract both, male and female players (Wolf 2001: 74), this was radically reshaped by the launch of video game home consoles. Male gamers became the target audience of the video game industry, in regards to marketing as well as game design …show more content…
Since gender constitutes the key aspect for this analysis, various approaches to determine the connection of gender and the technological domain, especially within the cyberspace of video games, will be provided. This is followed by a comparison of surveys conducted to reveal contemporary perceptions and cognitions of female gamers within video game culture. While most studies in this field focused on the stereotypical male gamer, research on the roles female gamers are ascribed to has gone relatively unheeded. However, especially scholars from the sociological, psychological, and feminist fields of study have conducted a number of research on this particular subject matter within the last …show more content…
In other words, he contends that gender behavior is not dependent on contexts or spaces, but on the cultural, hence also gendered script a person feels allied with. In contrast to this it has been argued that the behavior these two spaces elicit is based on a complex blending of contexts and situations (see Espaig & Rhi 2016: 2-3). Nevertheless, it is technology which facilitates the existence of cyberspace after all and, as several researchers affirm, technology is an intrinsically gendered domain. Kendall argues that computer competence is associated with masculinity, which results in women being " associated with lack of competence and an inability to fit into the dominant social norms’’ (2002: 96). Moreover, Royse et. al. believe that "gender and technology have a reciprocal relationship" (2007: 574) in a way that technology is gendered as well as that the identification with technology depends on gender. How certain technology is perceived resolves around the personal identification with it, but also hinges on several external factors like culture, marketing and society. Thus, gender scripts relating to the technological domain even find their way into homes, where, as a study suggests, females' access to technologies is widely marginalized (Schott and Horrell