“Pretty good for a girl”:A feminist content analysis of female video game characters,and interviews with female gamers
Year: 2018
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Feminist media scholars have long sought to understand the representations of women \nin the media, in which women are consistently depicted as secondary to men, which \nthey have used to highlight issues of gender relations. \nMy research involved the analysis of representations of female characters in games \nand explored how female gamers make sense of them, providing a more in-depth look \nat women in the media, whilst also addressing issues of gender such as leisure time. \nThe gendering of leisure is important as it provides a wider basis for my more nuanced \narguments about video games and those who play them. \nThroughout my research I endeavoured to study not only how women are represented \nin video games, but also the experiences of female gamers and how they continue to \ninteract with the gaming community. \nDrawing widely from existing feminist media research, I studied the common \nrepresentations of women in video games, and what female gamers thought of them. I \nalso researched their experiences as female gamers within the gaming community – \nhow they had been treated as “gamers”, but also how they continued to engage and \ninteract with the gaming community. \nIn order to gather this information, I utilised Content Analysis to gather and analyse \ngame content through further Visual Analysis. This provided me with a range of \ninsights into common patterns in the representations of women across a wide range of \ncurrently popular games, such as the role of healer. As for the experiences and \nengagement of gamers, I utilised interviews to gather information from individuals and \ntracked patterns across their experiences as a whole. Most notable are the issues of \nabuse and harassment, but also how women continue to engage with gaming and \ncreate their own “safe spaces” within the community both for themselves and others.
Author: Elizabeth Munday
Language: English
Topic: Digital Games and Media
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Arcadia Fund
OpenAlex ID: W2969495070