Advertising and Gaming: Equality is Subjective

Video games have made a lot of progress in the last few decades. 8-bit and side scrolling have evolved in to huge open world adventures. This large amount of progress in a short amount of time, however, has left the gaming industry with a lot of flaws it still needs to address. Gender inequality in gaming has gained some notice thanks to the work of advocates such as Anita Sarkeesian, but there still remains a lot to be done. Even though game designers have implemented in-game features such as character customization to break away from stereotypes, they can still reinforce assigned gender roles through their advertising.

In one particular kind of game, the role playing game (Rpg), players take on the role of a specific made up character, and attempt to overcome the challenges facing said character. In older Rpgs, players would make progress by completing challenges one by one to progress through the game. By unlocking parts of the game at a time, game designers kept the games as linear and simple as possible. However, with computers able to handle larger amounts of data, non-linear story telling and player choice have become integral parts of the genre. Examples of player choice such as character customization and in game decision making actively change the course of the game and allow the player more control. 

Male Commander Shepard

For example, Mass Effect III is an Rpg that allows for both male and female character options and allows player choice to alter the course of the game. The playable character has both a male and female version with their story lines being almost identical. The only difference between the two are the romance options available to each. Despite making all of the content accessible to both female and male characters, Mass Effect developers Bioware inadvertently alienated their female audience. In Sarkeesian's video “Ms. Male Character – Tropes vs Women”,http://www.feministfrequency.com/2013/11/ms-male-character-tropes-vs-women/, she examines the male and female versions of Mass Effect's hero, Commander Shepard. Although equal in the game, Bioware used the male version of Commander Shepard almost exclusively for advertisements and promotions of the game. By portraying the male Shepard in all their advertisements, Bioware made the male the standard version with the female as an alternative. All of the work to give the player control over the game is lost when the company tells the players which character is the more correct one. Women are not secondary to men, and moreover it should be up to the player to chose a character rather than for Bioware to dictate one. There is nothing wrong with playing male Shepard, but the tall guy with the buzz cut is exactly what people think of when they hear the word soldier. Through their advertising, Bioware implied that women should not be in, or are not as good at, military combat. It is spit in the face to have a female soldier character that does not receive the same recognition as the male simply because she does not fit in people's schema of "solider". While Bioware did go a long way to make this game equal, its advertising fell short and forced a stereotype upon its players.

Final Box Art

Much like Mass Effect, survival Rpg The Last of Us ran into similar problems with its advertising. When planning the 2013 game, Naughty Dog gaming hit a snag with its proposed front cover art. The cover featured characters Joel and Ellie making their way through post apocalyptic America together. The difference between them is that Ellie had to fight for her place on the cover while Joel did not. Originally, the front was to feature both characters, but the game's marketing department thought it would be better to push Ellie to the back cover. In an interview with VG247, Ellie's voice actor Ashely Johnson, Johnson claimed “[Gaming companies] don't put women on the covers because they're afraid that it won't sell” (Cook). Johnson was in part right. The marketing at Naughty Dog made the same assumption, as many other developers in the industry, that female characters don't attract as large an audience as male ones. While it is true that games featuring non-sexualized women on their box art have sold less than those featuring men, the sales data is not conclusive. A game's sales reflects all of its parts not just one, and so to attribute bad sales to box art without taking plot, graphics, and character development into account would be confusing correlation and causation. The games revised cover art would make the game look like just another shooter on the shelves, and be an insult to Ellie and other women. The game is about survival in a post-apocalyptic world. In the game, falling behind means certainly dying, yet pushing Ellie behind Joel on the art is somehow appropriate. The alternate art makes Ellie's part in the game less important, and it implies that a woman could not handle herself as well as a man could in the same situation. Luckily the employees at Naughty Dog recognized that changing their artwork would make their game look like just another shooter and marginalize a portion of their audience. In choosing the original art, designers supported their story and maintained neutrality.

Eliminating gender roles from gaming is a hard task. Even when game developers make an effort towards equality, it is rarely enough. In addition to their games, designers must also be weary of their advertising and all extra game content. Everything that the developers release is up to public scrutiny and so they must be extra cautious. With the lines between what is sexist and what is not being so difficult to determine, it can be hard to imagine a truly gender equal industry. Despite this, game developers are thinking of new ways to open their games up to all people. The new era of gaming looks promising with customizable characters and interactive stories, but there is still progress to be made.

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Naughty Dog. "The Last of Us." Wallpapers Wide. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 July 2014.
<http://wallpaperswide.com/the_last_of_us_6-wallpapers.html>. Used for Image

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