Wednesday, April 8, 2009

women in video games!


For the last view days friends of mine and me have been playing way to many video games. One of them being Soul Calibur 4. The premise of this game is to fight against each other with characters the game supplies or characters you make yourself.
Many people already have a problem with this since it portraits violence, however, I have no problem with the violence. My problem resides with the clothing that the women in this game are allowed to wear. For example the most popular character is Ivy. She is wearing basically nothing at all. Again just like in my blog about the super heroes, women are not allowed to wear heavy armor. The one character that does wear heavy armor in this game is Hildegard. She is a well protected and clothed character and somehow nobody has the desire to play as her, because she looks "boring".
I am not writing this blog to complain about the game makers I am writing this to complain about the players (including myself). The industry only produces what is sellable, only what is sellable is being bought which means that the buyers (us) have the power to change the sexist world of video games, if we where to chose so.
Unfortunately just like everywhere else, sex sells! It sells in the video game industry just as much as it does anywhere else. So what could we change about this? We could stop buying games with half naked women. We could protest game makers and buy none of their products.
The problem with the above stated ideas is that nobody could motivate a 16-25 year old male to protest nudity in video games. Why should they? This country is so prude and sex education is such a taboo topic for many parents and schools, therefore video games are they only source a lot of these kids have to learn about the opposite sex. Maybe if we talked to our children more then the nudity would go away over time by it self. Or at least it would be more respectful.

1 comment: