Gender Stereotypes In World Of Warcraft

Video gaming, what was once a niche hobby generally only enjoyed and played by people who were seen as geeks has had a radical popularity. In 2016, the games industry has managed to become worth billions of dollars, the games themselves have become more mature and have appealed to wider audiences and communities of millions of people have formed around specific games. My personal experience with gaming comes from my time playing World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role playing game where anyone can create a character and work alongside others to achieve goals like killing certain monsters. What makes World of Warcraft unique is that rather than playing through a story on your own, a large part of the game includes interaction …show more content…
This can be seen when women are not allowed to join certain guilds or groups because they are automatically assumed to be casual players because of their gender. In World of Warcraft, it is assumed that women will always fall under certain stereotypes, these ranging from playing classes that focus on healing, something like a nurse, to only engaging in pet minigames. There is also the issue of gender representation in games, the amount of women playing games is similar to that of men, but women are underrepresented to an extreme level in games, and where they exist in games they are usually only used as sexual objects. The technology exists to craft elaborate stories with realistic characters, but instead of doing so for women in games, they are typically just thrown in as objects for cis males to enjoy as background objects. In cases where women are characters’ integral to the plot of a story, they are typically playing roles that reinforce gender roles and negative stereotypes, the most common female character is that of the persecuted maiden or damsel in