The gratuitous sexualization of women in video games is declining, but women are still rarely the main character
Fact: Around half of all people who regularly play video games are women.
And yet, it's no secret that the games industry has historically marketed its wares to heterosexual men.
Overly sexualized women have often acted as selling points for games, both in advertising and in the games themselves. According to a new study from Indiana University, this treatment of women in video games may be trending downward, at least on one metric. Researchers Teresa Lynch, Jessica E. Tompkins, Irene I. van Driel and Niki Fritz found that gratuitous sexualization of playable women in games has actually declined in recent years.
The researchers developed a fairly complex grading system to judge precisely how sexualized female video game characters are, with bodily proportions, outfits and anatomical movement all being taken into account. The study found that sexualization of women in games peaked in the 1990s and has diminished since 2007.
One very important thing to note about this study is it only included games with playable women released between 1983 and 2014. That means background characters (such as sex workers in "Grand Theft Auto") were not analyzed during the research portion of the study. In total, 571 games were analyzed by watching YouTube clips of each game in action.
The most important takeaway is obviously that video game heroines are slowly becoming less sexualized over time, but there are some other intriguing trends to note. Namely, the findings suggest that the likelihood of a woman having a primary role in a game (as the main focus of the story) has stayed the same since 1998. This is supported by the fact that an overwhelming majority of the games showcased at E3 (the biggest gaming show in the world) this year starred men. Women are more likely to have secondary roles in games, and women in secondary roles are more likely to be sexualized.
The study also broke down the findings by genre, with sexualized women appearing the most in fighting games like "Street Fighter," and the least in shooters, RPGs and platformers. This study isn't the first to notice the trend in fighting games; ESPN asked the runner-up in a big "Street Fighter V" championship last weekend to use an alternate costume for the character R. Mika, with the default costume deemed too revealing to be televised.
In an industry that has been widely criticized for its poor representation of women, it's encouraging on some level to see overt sexualization of female protagonists becoming slightly less common. Still, there's plenty of work to be done, as the aforementioned "Street Fighter V" story shows.