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Knowledge I gained from information taught within my modules helped me massively with the curation of my presentation. The main inspiration for my presentation was derived from looking into the history of technology and discovering that women were at the forefront of its development and success. Barbara Canright was the first female ‘human computer’, when she joined California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1939. Her job was to calculate anything from how many rockets were needed to make a plane airborne to what kind of rocket propellants were needed to propel a spacecraft. (B, Holland. 2018)  I found this intriguing, as if women were behind the first ever computers and at the forefront of technology, why is it not reflected in its success? If you look at the five top corporations within technology which is Apple, Facebook (Meta), Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, all the people who are the face of those corporations were, and still are male. I think that this is a huge determining factor that assigns how women are represented within video games, especially if you now consider that these massive corporations all have involvement in the gaming industry now. For example, Microsoft has Xbox and Google has Stadia. With this in mind, I discovered that only “25 percent of employees at the five “Big Tech” companies (GAFAM) are female” (C, Hutto. 2020) which is a concerning statistic. The lack of women being employed by these tech companies is going to massively affect how female characters are represented to an adequate level within the media as a whole, and specifically in video games. This statistic of inequality within female employability within industry is a huge deciding factor of why misogyny, oversexualisation and objectification of females is highly prevalent within video gaming. It could be suggested that it is due to the ‘male gaze’ (L, Mulvey, 1999) which is why female characters are depicted the way they are within video games, while women are merely a form of visual pleasure for men to be entertained by. All women in the media are positioned to be sexual objects to be observed for gratification purposes by males. Game producers and developers enable this through the use of dress codes & camera angles, as well as female positions within the game’s narrative. For example, within my group's video game presentation I proposed many examples of how female characters within numerous video games I studied were unacceptable revealing clothes, such as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider (2008) and many female characters in Grand Theft Auto (2013) such as Michael’s daughter were not only dressed inappropriately but in secondary roles and represented as submissive and stupid. Carolyn Petit addressed the apparent misogyny of GTA 5 in her review of the game which she stated “GTA 5 has little room for women except to portray them as strippers, prostitutes, long-suffering wives, humourless girlfriends and goofy, new-age feminists we’re meant to laugh at. 

When looking into women’s appearances within video games, I discovered that “most of the female characters within video games have hyper-real bodies and characters outfits are unfit for the game background and context” (Lui, A. 2019). It is massively important how women are represented within video games, as “video games train for a logical way of thinking, teach cooperation with other people - players, create and improve their imagination”.(Edery & Mollick 2009). Video games are a channel of communication and socializing between people. The application of this theory to our topic of representation raises the question of what detrimental impact is it having on women and girls who participate with these games? A study was carried out by Charles Taylor, (2014: 147) which focused on the impact video games would have on young women’s identities as they were developing from adolescence to adulthood. It was found that identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. This reiterates the cruciality of true representation of the female gender, and how objectification can be incredibly harmful to female development. 

For bibliography, see bottom of the page.