The Female Gamer Stereotype (blog 1)

I recently watched a video on YouTube called "The Truth About Girl Gamers" (here is the link: http://youtu.be/6IH_BUIjPaw). Ms. Hikroka is a female gamer commenting on the reason there are not as many females video-gamers. A primary reason there are not as many female gamers and males is because females are not marketed to by the video game companies to the same degree and boys and young men. She specifically states when this occurred with the release of Pac-Man in 1980. Although Pac-Man is a male in title the game was not marketed for just for male players. Pac-Man is actually shaped specifically after a pizza and all of the enemies are globs of ice cream, as well as, bonus points marked as fruits. Mr. Iwatani, the game's designer initially was thought of as a
progressive thinker for asking women at cafe's what they enjoyed talking about which happened to be food. All of that changed upon the release of Ms. Pac-Man the following year forever placing women back into their subservient role in the video game world. By releasing Ms. Pac-Man the video game producers were telling females that this is the way they were supposed to look and these were the types of games they should only like. Ms. Pac-Man is overly-sexualized in appearance seen in her make-up, red high heel shoes, and subservient body positioning of Ms. Pac-Man displayed on the arcade style game system. This has lead to the idea that female gamers will only play games that have bright colors like in Barbie video games. Games intended for females also tend to have to do with tending to stereotypical nurturing qualities creating current games like "Kinectimals" where the player selects an animal to take care. Other female stereotypes intended for female gamers include games that include other subservient acts like cooking or other kitchen related duties seen in Fruit Ninja available on Apple products like iPhones. Fitness games involved with motion gaming, as well as, dancing games and Disney sing-a-longs telling women to either that they fall in line with what the boys and young men like or, play overly stereotypical feminine games relating back to stereotypical roles of servitude and/or objectify the female sex. Ms. Hikroka is asking that there be more variety for a growing market that is female gamers. She states that, "if there was a more games marketed to a general audience there would not be this idea that video games are only for a male audience." There have been a few games to break the mold, but they are few and far between and there are many more games that are geared toward the a male audience when the amount of players are almost equally spread. There is hope for the video game market to change for the better, since the electronic video game market is relatively young having only become mainstream in the late 1970s to early 1980s and hopefully more people speak up for female gamers and make their voices heard to help the trend along.