Description
The literature on videogames and representations continues to discuss games through a gendered binary in which women are seen as remaining marginalised to secondary roles and/or as hyper-sexualised. Whilst such examples do exist, this paper explores the importance of the growth of action-centred games which challenge such depictions, including those in which the player is placed in the role of a woman (i.e. you ‘have to’ play as a woman character (e.g. Horizon Zero Dawn, Control, Gears 5)), those in which you can ‘choose’ to play as a man or woman (e.g. Assassins Creed Valhalla), and those in which you can design your own character (so often breaking out of a gender binary). The paper argues that such trends are far from marginal and are in fact increasingly widespread. Some of the reactions of ‘gamers’ to such changes have been violent and hateful: seen, for example, in the case of The Last of Us Part 2 and the forthcoming GTA 6 on the basis that you have to play as a woman. Such examples occupy considerable media and academic commentary but this paper argues that they are atypical: most games do not excite such reactions. In fact, most such changes have been met with minimal comment by players and/or journalists, so amounting to an ‘unpolitics’ of gender (which masks some very real change). This paper argues that these changes in the games industry have been largely ignored by academics, who still remain fixated on either emphasising a lack of change in relation to representations and/or focused on high-profile atypical cases of extreme responses by players to change that has occurred.
