Sights and Sounds Story

Harassment and Tropes: Women in the World of Gaming

Mayeesa Mitchell 

Photo: Mayeesa Mitchell
Anita Sarkeesian speaking to HPU students,
 faculty and staff on April 3, 2014

Girls have been shut out of the mystical world of video games since the invention of the earliest consoles, while boys used these games to explore new worlds behind closed doors marked  "No Girls Allowed."

As gaming has evolved into a multi-million dollar industry, this sentiment remains. Video games are marketed toward men, and many females are harassed for trying to enter the boys-only club. 

"Even though I was playing these games, I didn't consider myself a gamer," Anita Sarkeesian told a large, attentive audience at High Point University on Thursday.

Sarkeesian, a media critic and video blogger, sat behind a large lectern in Francis Auditorium as some 100 HPU students, faculty and staff listened to her present on the topic "Tropes V. Women in Video Games." This presentation was one of the many events hosted by the Nido R. Qubein School of Communication during the second annual Communication Week. 

"As female fans, we typically don't get to love our games unconditionally," Sarkeesian said . "We have a different relationship with the media because we have to balance the 'Oh my gosh, that was so awesome but it also treated women terribly.'"

Sarkeesian went on to talk about her own experience of being ostracized from the gaming community when she began a Kickstarter campaign in 2011 to fund "Tropes V. Women in Video Games," a five-part video series that would explore the popular patterns of women in video games.

The attacks on her social media profiles, even her Kickstarter campaign, included racist and sexists slurs, threats of murder and rape, links to porn sites and pornographic images with her head photoshopped on them.

"This online harassment is very common," she said, "to defend the status quo of gaming as a male dominated space."

The second phase of the harassment campaign included others impersonating Sarkeesian; creating social media accounts as if they were her so that they could post claims as if she had said them.

"As soon as [these claims] get out into the world, I started to receive a new wave of harassment," Sarkeesian said. 

Sarkeesian also elaborated on the tropes that she has uncover in the research for her web series.

"A trope is a recurring pattern or a recognizable attribute of the character or story that quickly conveys information to the audience," Sarkeesian said. "A  very easy example is the woman  in distress."

The topes she covered during the presentation were the damsel in distress, women placed in an area where they cannot save themselves, the Smurfette principle, the one female amongst a group of men whose personality is to be the woman.

"The trope that stood out to me was the casting of women of color as tribal," Amber Williamson, an HPU senior who attended the event, said.

Other tropes like women as reward and woman as fighting [sex] toys portray women as objects of sex rather than characters with realistic body shapes and personalities.  

"Sexist stories is not the problem here," Sarkeesian said. "In these games, sex is what defines these characters. Because these women are basically walking sex, there's not room for authentic explorations of these characters."  

Sarkeesian's research also led her to games such as "Portal", "Beyond Good and Evil "and "Gone Home" that have good, realistic portrayals of women.

All of these games have interesting innovative game mechanics, they all have female protagonists and I think they are really good case studies as games who are doing it right," Sarkeesian said.

Spencer Pennington, a senior at N.C. State University, enjoyed the presentation.

"She used very creative terms that caught your attention," he said. "Even as a male, I feel that she presented her findings in a reasonable way."

The goal of Sarkeesian's presentation was to encourage individuals to think critically about the media and end the myth that gaming is a boys-only club.

During the short Q-and-A session following her presentation, Sarkeesian outlined what she hopes to see from game designers in the future.

"The games themselves need to be better and have more engagement," Sarkeesian said."They need women who are the stars of their own games, characters who are full human beings and games that tell authentic, genuine stories about women."