In this essay, I will be defining the terms youth, youth culture, gender and social constructs. I will discuss the video gaming industry and its importance within the UK, both socially and financially. I will then show how gender, particularly female, within youth culture is represented in the video games industry and what effect this can have on the young gamer's concept of gender.
The United Nations, for statistical purposes, defines youth as ‘those persons between the ages of 15 and 24 years, without prejudice to other definitions by the Member States’. It is this definition that I will be using throughout the essay.
The term culture ‘refers to the processes by which the symbiotic systems characteristically shared by a group of people are maintained and transformed across time it is a dynamic historical process. Youth culture refers to those processes and symbiotic systems that young people share that are to some degree distinctive from those of their parents and the other adults in their community.’ Austin says youth cultures have not always been a part of society and appear most frequently where social autonomy realms for young people has become a regular and expected feature of the socialization process. Most scholars agree that after the formation of modern nation-states and industrialization in the 19th century, creating more routine in the form of the human life course, led to many areas where young people are separated from adults. There are various reasons for this including religious instruction, training, education, work and even punishment, it is in these locations that youth cultures developed. Youth cultures have been clearly evident in the 20th century, particularly after World War II. Prior to this the circumstances required to create a separate youth culture were prevented by things such as children being sent into apprentices and working from a much younger age than present-day. This meant the opportunity to have freedoms whilst still being semi-reliant on family was limited to the rich and middle classes and almost exclusively white races. In the early 1900s, there were a variety of smaller youth subcultures with more young people, from professional parents such as doctors, extending their education to attend colleges and universities. These college students created new rituals and customs and many of the new forms of urban popular culture such as film and music explicitly catered to these young people. In the early 1940s, the word teenager came into common usage with young people meeting in groups to experience new films, books, rock ‘n’roll music and the like also by the ‘50s and early ’60s the existence of mass youth culture was widely recognized. By now youth cultures were adopting unusual and spectacular clothing and hairstyles such as the Teds in Great Britain the Beats in the United and the 1950s also saw the emergence of the car which allowed suburban and rural youths to travel into cities and also created a portable private space in which to carry out some of the customs e.g. courtship listen to music drinking. Since then, youth cultures have developed and diversified and gone through many changes, in the '60s there were hippies followed by mods and rockers in the UK, in the '70s skinheads. Young people also started to participate in mass protests in a desire to have their voices recognized as separate from their parents. In recent years technologies such as the mobile phone and the Internet have allowed new youth cultures to emerge and allow for a much more expanded idea of cybercultures that are detached from everyday off-line identities. The Internet is more or less an un-patrolled wilderness that allows new cultural affiliations to formed between much more diverse sources.
Gender can be defined as ‘the attitudes, behaviors, norms, and roles that a society or culture associates with an individual's sex, thus the social differences between female and male; the meanings attached to being feminine or masculine’. (Bell,2013). The terms gender and sex are often used interchangeably but they are not the same and within sociology, the range of arguments, debates, points and counter-points have been made often and continue to be so. The simplest distinction between gender and sex is that gender is socially constructed and sex is biological. These are two simplified definitions of a complex continuum of social and cultural practices and embodied knowledge, but it is a starting point and the definitions I shall be using throughout this essay. The term gender expression is an outward display of gender, such as dress behavior. The term agender refers to a nonbinary gender status, in which an individual identifies as gender-neutral or without gender. Agender is also called Gender Neutrois; gender-neutral; and genderless. (Bell, 2013)
'Social constructs are entities whose meaning is based on the agreement by members of a given society' for example the value of a specific currency, race, gender and the expected roles of men and women are all social constructs. A street gang knows that the local sheriff is someone who was given their role by the law but the exact requirements vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and country to country, what sheriff means varies greatly whether you are in the UK or the USA and each given society defines what a sheriff is. Any two societies that differ over the same social construct are both right, therefore, if gender is a social construct, then what it is can vary from society to society with each being right about its definition of gender. For example, if the social construct of gender in Nigeria is identical to biological sex then the Nigerians are right no matter how much we may disagree with them. Gender being a social construct also means that every species or kind of gender is socially constructed, however, they are only relative to the society in which they exist, using the Nigerian example where transgender is not considered to be a distinct gender then transgenderism does not exist in their society. Many people who support the transgender movement feel that gender is innate and unchangeable but social constructs are not and so if gender is a social construct, then it must change over time relative to society, which means the definitions of gender over time can be varied and even contradictory as societies develop and change. This tells us that gender being a social construct means that gender is culturally relative and any definitions are correct in the society they exist.
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Video game history started in 1940 when Edward Condon designed a computer game called NIM which could be played by a computer with one person, in 1972 space Odyssey was the first home video game to be created and in 1993 the release of Mortal Kombat resulted in a rating system being developed for video games based on their violence. (Kondrat(2015) From here progress was made in leaps and bounds and now the UK is the leading video game market in Europe and the sixth-largest gaming market worldwide. Over the past few decades, video games have not only become an increasingly popular pastime among players of all ages, but the gaming industry has also evolved into the UK's most lucrative entertainment sector. One of the main drivers of market growth in the UK and many other parts of the world was the gaming industry's digital transformation. Thanks to new technologies, digital innovation, and a wave of highly-anticipated online and mobile releases, digital games revenue in the UK reached a record £3.6 billion in 2020. That year, revenues spiked at an unprecedented speed following the nationwide lockdown.
Between 2019 and 2020, the number of video game users in the UK jumped from 33 million to over 36 million. With over 50 percent of the population embracing gaming as a form of fun, entertainment, or distraction amidst the pandemic, the UK's video game market has come to be valued at £5.3 billion and in 2020 contributed over £2.9 billion to the total UK GDP. Digital and online games account for the largest share of consumer spending on video games in the UK, as users have gradually traded physical videogame formats for digital purchases. Another sector that has seen considerable growth in recent years is mobile gaming and thanks to rapid smartphone adoption throughout the UK and an ever-expanding selection of affordable gaming app content, mobile gaming engagement is now higher than ever and it is this sector that has the highest percentage of female gamers. (Statistica 2021)
In 1998 Dietz analyzed 33 Sega games and found that 80% contained violence 20% of which was directed towards women and you also determined that most of the female characters in these games were portrayed as damsels in distress they had unimportant roles and were often stereotyped by being dressed in tight provocative clothing along with large breasts and long legs. She states in her research that ‘the representation is harmful to children of both sexes since they will internalize these expectations and accept the idea that women are to be viewed as weak as victims and as sex objects’. This stereotyping is one of the biggest criticism of videogames and much research is being done to show how mass media affects the perception of the real world and its standards by providing us with unreal beauty and moral rules and girls and boys who play videogames use this stereotypical body image for females are more likely to feel that this is how females should look. Dmitry Williams found that ‘at the same time as games were drawing the ire of conservative society they were also used as a means of reinforcing social norms and power relations’ This is reflected in the fact that it was not until 1996 that a female protagonist appeared in the form of Lara Croft in Tomb Raider and the game became one of the most popular in history, around this time the Sims came into existence and was quickly the most popular game amongst female players. Videogames now allow children and teenagers to discover new worlds where they can do anything they want to including things that are not possible in the real world and they can sometimes influence a person's perception of things such as violence and sexuality. The video gaming industry is quite commonly described as male-dominated with only 22% of people working in the games industry being women however the number of winning playing videogames is now almost equal to men. Despite this in many videogames if a female character is introduced there is a high probability that she is going to be highly sexualized, this is because despite the target audience becoming more diverse the perception of the female gender by video game companies remains the same because it is based on the established social norms. Fortunately, some videogame companies are starting to understand the importance of integrating the female gender into video games and are creating games that are attractive to both genders. More female heroines are being introduced into fighting games and characters such as Lara Croft who is independent, strong, smart, wealthy, good looking and the sort of model girls want to be like and boys want to be with, this is becoming more frequent.
Research carried out by Kondrat in 2015 showed that although the most popular way of stereotyping females in video games is by creating female characters who are sexually provocative and scantily dressed and there is a lack of strong independent female protagonists, this is changing. More games are trying to have equally represented females and males along with female protagonists and so the negative stereotypes are slowly changing for the better. It appears that video games are representing the female gender in a far better way than the games from the 80s and 90s, characters are far more diverse.
It can be argued that this progress has been slow due to several reasons: some videogame players are still feeding into the idea that sex sells best and buying the games where the female characters have large breasts small hips big eyes et cetera and therefore the marketing companies use this to attract these players, fortunately, more players are choosing a style of videogame that does not count contain these stereotyped characters however even when a female character is created in an equal way to a male one e.g. mass effect the marketing campaign does not use the female character. The lack of female game developers is also thought to contribute and this disparity has been attributed to several factors such as girls being discouraged to pursue a career in video games, a poor uptake of science Tech engineering, and maths subjects by young girls, and sexism. The recent Gamergate controversy highlighted the issue where female game developers were harassed online for speaking about sexism in games, there is hope to bring more women into the industry with companies such as Microsoft and Sony launching mentoring programs. (Jacobs 2015) (Kondrat 2015)
In conclusion, there has been a tendency to stereotype genders, particularly with females, making them non-essential to the game, targets of violence, visually sexualized and scantily clad. This was especially true in the early days of video games, however, with more female game players resulting in a demand for a stronger, more independent, attractive and less of sexual visualization the developers of video games are adding more female protagonists that have these features and are essential to the gameplay. The slow increase in the number of females entering to video game workplaces is also contributing to this as well as the advancement of mobile gaming which is far more popular amongst female players. The traditional male portrayal in video games of all action muscle man is also being reduced with more traditional personas being portrayed. The sexy female and muscly male can of course still be chosen as an option in most games but it is no longer the standard, and for the mental health and self-esteem of the youth of today this can only be a positive move.
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