Astarte of Utopian Hell and XX has an awesome post on the nature of women and video games, drawing a correlation between the ways women are handled when seen as a demographic target for tech developers and the way women are drawn in the world of politics.
I’ve been doing a great deal of research within the last few months on women and video games. I’ve printed off about a dozen articles and studies, and made bookmarks to sites dedicated to nothing but this sort of research. Over the weekend, I received in the mail used copies of two of the only textbooks on the issue, and while reading through the first one, I started to realize how closely the plight of women in video games lines up with the plight of women in politics.
The two genres hold a variety of often frightening similarities. Politicians claim that they have fewer female politicians because women simply choose not to go in that direction with their time. Video Game Makers claim that they have few to no female game buyers and players because fewer women choose to purchase the video games, though if you corner them, they’ll tell you that women are not the target market of most video games. The same has gone on in the world of politics and political punditry. Again and again we’re told that we are not the ‘target market’.
Why aren’t we the target market? It’s easy and hopeful to think that women /can/ have access to this wonderful market, this beautiful piece of the pie – whether that pie be a great video game console game or a part in American politics. It’s nice to try and assume that we needn’t change anything. Women who want a part of it, get it; the vast majority simply don’t want it. Easy, but ultimately untrue.
Dr. B. weighs in as well:
I’d like to draw a further connection and say that they same is true of representations of folks of color and LGBT folks in video games. Black folk are portrayed as “Step N’ Fetchit” type characters in video games, who are acted upon more often than being active, just because that is “the way that they are” and black folks need G-Dubya to do what’s best for them because they can’t choose for themselves. While nothing more has been heard of GW’s promise to guarantee home loans to first time home buyers of color he has made it clear that Social Security changes are being done for the benefit of these same black folk (against many of our own wishes) because we won’t live to collect it at the current rate. Hmmmmm, why not just do something about health care, crime, or other issues that shorten the life span of black folks. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather live longer than collect Social Security earlier!
As Astarte says, “After all, we’re not asking for you to cut your penises off. We’re asking you to join the human race.”