The Rhetoric of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games and Video Game Communities: How Representation and Reception Can Change the Way Players See Their and Others’ Identities
Video games are one of the most popular forms of media in the twenty first century, and yet the diversity -- if it can be called that -- of the characters in video games is “highly unrepresentative of the actual population” (Williams), and even of just the people who play games. It is impossible to “truly understand fantasy, violence … and the like without examining race, racism, and/or racial stratification” (Leonard). Video games both “model and shape” (Higgin) the culture we live in, and as this happens, there is a growing danger that video games are functioning as “stewards of White masculine hegemony” (Higgin). Black video game characters, especially those characterized by racist stereotypes, do not “evolve in a cultural vacuum” (Malkowski p.117). One need only look at an example like the viral video of a World of Warcraft character. In this video, the black character Leeroy Jenkins’ voice is performed by a white man, and is “an exaggerated version of the deep and stumbling voices associated with characters from minstrel shows or their legacy in radio, television, and film” (Higgin). Leeroy Jenkins is seen trying to assimilate into the main group of characters, but instead ends up “proving his idiocy” (Higgin). However, the solution to this problem of stereotyping is not, as a surprisingly large amount of people seem to believe, excluding discussions of race entirely, or even excluding race from video games.
Games that omit black characters and masquerade as “progressively engaged through a strategy of colorblindness, function as hegemonic fantasy by filtering the racial imagery that threatens the safety and political coherence of White dominance” (Higgin). The omission of black characters from the gaming discourse reinforces the notion that black people are incapable of being functional members of society, and also the fact that they simply do not belong in those spaces (Higgin). Without a set black race in games, blackness disappears almost completely and cybertypes, or stereotypes, are generated and circulated much more easily. What’s more, the visual absence of black representation serves to maintain an “optic white and depoliticized environment that depends on racial exclusion” (Higgin). Because of this, players are left to assume that blackness holds no importance or value in the social heroic fantasy of MMORPGs. Black heroes do not fit the needs or desires of the white hegemony and are thus removed from circulation. The few times that blackness is shown, it is in specific and calculated moments that enact the desires of the assumed dominant audience: white people. A noticeable example of the erasure of representation is seen in the whitewashing of video game characters.
Whitewashing is the act of lightening or whitening a character’s skin and facial features; in video games it is unfortunately fairly common. Dragon Age character Isabela’s skin tone was extremely lightened, her lips made thinner, and her nose made smaller and more button-like from her appearance in Dragon Age: Origins (below, far left) to Dragon Age II (below, left) to the iOS and Android game Heroes of Dragon Age (below, right), and to the Dragon Age: Inquisition multiplayer (below, far right).
When comparing the first and last images, Isabela is almost unrecognizable in how much her skin has been whitened. Another character from the Dragon Age universe, Briala, was also whitewashed, albeit in a less public way. Briala was first mentioned in The Masked Empire, a book that takes place before the events of Dragon Age: Inquisition. She is described in contrast to the character Celene, who is very pale. Briala’s skin is described as “darker than Celene’s, though she spent most of her days inside and showed no tan lines at the bare skin around her eyes.” (Weekes, p. 45), and “dark against the creamy white satin of her nightshirt.” (Weekes, p. 98). Yet when she is seen in Dragon Age: Inquisition (below, left), her skin barely stands out against her light dress.
Compared to her appearance in the book, which was published around seven months before the game came out, Briala looks tan at best. The image above on the right shows a fan’s mod of Briala that alters her appearance so it is closer to the book’s description of her. Similar to how Briala’s appearance was changed from her book description, many developers and fans of video games whitewash characters with the excuse of artistic liberty. Another commonly used defense for whitewashing is that characters in video games do not have races.
Saying that characters in video games do not have races “devalues the political importance of gamespace and is ignorant of its allegorical relationship” (Higgin) with the real world. It is dangerous to accept video game creations as harmless, since fantasy worlds are populated by re-imagined stereotypes that have meaning beyond what they represent in video games (Higgin). Stereotypes in video games can be perpetuated not only by the developers of games, but also by the people who play them, since with the ability to create unique characters comes the ability to create and spread racist stereotypes, as seen with the character Leeroy Jenkins. The “words, images, and actions gamers use to create an identity can be, and are, racialized” (Nielsen).
This trend of stereotypical representation can also be seen on a larger scale; many games that feature humans alongside other fantasy races such as elves or orcs feature a race of humans that is European coded, while other real world cultures are seen ‘represented’ as explicitly other than human. In World of Warcraft, the Horde races have been seen as “appropriating various forms of ethnicity or blackness” (Higgin). The Trolls possess “unquestionable Jamaican accents,” and the Tauren are “a tribal culture with Native American architecture and dress” (Higgin). The more controversial aspect of this is the fact that many World of Warcraft players consider the Horde races the more evil faction in the game, in contrast with the Alliance races. The Alliance races include one human race, modeled on medieval Europeans.
The game EverQuest features multiple playable human races, including one black human race, the Erudites. However, eleven out of twelve of the playable races in the game had starting areas on one of the two large continents of the in game world. Gamers who chose to play as a Erudite started on their own continent, a “substantially smaller and less appealing collection of areas that were far less populated in response” (Higgin). This separation of the Erudite race from the other eleven was a “practical discouragement of Erudite players” (Higgin), and an exoticization of blackness.
As a contrast, the game Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion included many races such as Nords, Bretons, or Imperials, which “can be colorized” (Higgin), as well as an “entirely Black and Brown race named Redguard” (Higgin). The result is a game world that “creates a unique realm of fantasy while maintaining meaningful connections to to the diversity of the physical world” (Higgin).
Still though, MMORPGs continue to privilege whiteness, and present it as the default choice. When humans are present in a video game, their culture is typically European based, with non-European real world cultures presented as ‘other’ and very clearly not human (Higgin). In character customization, for example, white characters are give many more customization options than non-white characters. The options that do exist for non-white characters are frequently disappointing when compared to options given to white characters. The result of this is that blackness is only produced in game worlds as an “exterior painting of the body equivalent to an aesthetic choice” (Higgin), or, when the desired result of creating a character is to have a character who looks black in both skin tone and other features, while the actual result is a character whose skin tone is darker but whose features remain extremely similar to those of a stereotypical white character.
Another way in which game developers perpetuate the stereotype that black characters are lesser than white characters is “sacrificial blackness” (Malkowski p.113). This is seen in The Last of Us, and in the game’s expansion pack Left Behind. In The Last of Us, the four black main characters all die or are killed by the protagonist to further the story, and preserve and progress the development of the relationship between the two white main characters: Ellie and Joel.
Riley is a character from The Last of Us: Left Behind, in which part of the plot features a love story between her and Ellie. Their relationship is essential for the development of Ellie’s character, but has “uneven consequences for Riley” (Malkowski p.112). Ellie needs Riley to teach her to how to be “more confident, exploratory, and politically subversive” (Malkowski p.112), but the consequence for the pair’s adventure is that both are bitten by zombies, and infected. Ellie learns that she is immune to the infection, but Riley “succumbs to the dehumanizing effects of the fatal bites” (Malkowski p.112). Henry and Sam are characters from The Last of Us; their relationship parallels Joel and Ellie’s. However, as the four travel together, Sam is infected and later attacks Ellie. Joel kills Sam, after which Henry becomes distraught and kills himself. This moment is meant to teach Joel and Ellie to value their relationship more (Malkowski), but it does so with the sacrifice of two of the four black characters in the entire game. Marlene is the most significant black character in The Last of Us; she functions as an “important sign of liberation and resistance” (Malkowski p.113), but is also portrayed as the game’s central antagonist. Her goal is to manufacture a cure for the infection using Ellie’s brain. In the game’s climax, Joel murders Marlene, refusing “to sacrifice Ellie for the greater good of humanity” (Malkowski p.113). Joel’s actions demonstrate that “attachment and empathy between white characters must be protected and prioritized at all costs, even at the expense of finding a cure” (Malkowski p.113).
The question we need to ask game developers and players is why they create and depict race as though it has no impact on the outside world. Why, when the characterization of Leeroy Jenkins depends on racist stereotypes, is he one of the most well-known representations of a black World of Warcraft character? Why are characters whitewashed when they become more popular, or when they are presented to a wider audience? Questions such as these are “buried beneath claims of comedy and the insignificance of race in the game world” (Higgin). Non-human races in games represent offline racial tensions (Nielsen); this becomes a circular event, as players’ experiences within the games they play “change their preconceptions” (Nielsen) of the real world. Stereotypes in games do not just reflect ignorance, but “dominant ideas about race” (Leonard), ideas that act as a compass for “both daily and institutional relations” (Leonard). The cost of such stereotypes in games is not just a reification of those stereotypes, but also suggestions for how we should think of ourselves, and of others who are different from us.
Under-representation and stereotypes are also present in discussions of gender. The exclusion of women from video games, and gaming communities, is reflected in the games these communities enjoy (Salter). Women are often presented as secondary to male characters. They are placed in background roles, “supporting a man’s heroic quest” (Salter) or existing as objects for men’s pleasure, enemies, or simply not portrayed at all (Salter). The stereotyping of women in video games has ramifications outside the games, such as differing opinions on sexual harassment, with people who experience negative portrayals of women more likely to tolerate sexual harassment (Kuznekoff). The limited portrayals of women in video games “may lead to prescriptive norms for how women should behave” (Kuznekoff). These norms affect both women and others; women see how others think they ought to behave and look, and perhaps feel pressure to uphold these norms. Others see how female characters in video games are treated and how they behave and look, and may come to expect women to behave like this. People who already believe that women should conform to stereotypical and sexist norms see stereotypical portrayals as a confirmation of those beliefs.
Aside from negative stereotypes and portrayals within video games, women also experience more negative communication than men when playing multiplayer games and interacting with communities, as seen in the following examples of the 2010 Penny Arcade controversy, and a study done on online multiplayer.
In 2010, Penny Arcade published a comic about rape which started a controversy within the community. The comic made fun of game mechanics that had the player ignore “the plight of virtual characters” (Salter), but it did so by turning an “act of willful dismissal into the punch line of a rape joke” (Salter) where characters were “raped to sleep by the Dickwolves,” imaginary beasts with “phalli instead of limbs” (Salter). After it became clear that the comic had incited anger in their fans the two creators issued an apology. The apology was, however, a “hostile mockery of the readers’ right to be offended” (Salter). The creators then announced that a Dickwolves shirt would be sold in the Penny Arcade store. Courtney Stanton, a video game project manager and blogger, suggested that the intention behind this action was “in part to create an atmosphere of hostility at the upcoming Penny Arcade Expo” (Salter). The shirt “seemed to offer… endorsement of rape as a joke, if not as an outright action” (Salter). One of the creators also planned on wearing his Dickwolves shirt to PAX. This gave the large movement of people who supported the joke a “clear authority figure to rally around” (Salter), and offered “endorsement of an act now embedded with implicit rhetorical hostility” (Salter).
Another instance of negative communication based around gender was discussed in a study done that measured “how gamers reacted to different gender voices (i.e. male and female)” (Kuznekoff) in Halo 3 online multiplayer. Three different accounts were made, all with extremely similar gamertags. A list of phrases to be played during matches was recorded by a male voice and a female voice, with the third account having no voice. There was a “clear pattern of negative comments associated with the female condition” (Kuznekoff); the female-voiced account regularly met with comments like ‘shut up you whore,’ ‘stupid slut,’ and ‘bitch.’ Even though the male and female conditions had around the same percentage of wins, “gamers reacted differently to the female condition than to the male or control condition” (Kuznekoff). The female condition also received more messages and friend requests from other players.
These examples show how pervasive the exclusion of women is in gaming communities. The Halo 3 experiment proved how differently women gamers are treated in online gaming, while the Dickwolves controversy excluded women by morphing an event meant to be inclusive into a hypermasculine-dominated space.
Hypermasculinity is a “psychological term coined to describe the exaggeration of masculine cultural stereotypes” (Salter). The term applies to an overemphasis on masculine-coded physical traits and behavioral patterns, especially “dismissal or hostility towards feminine displays” (Salter), and is seen in gaming communities and games themselves. The “rules of most video games require players to carry out ‘masculine’ actions of aggression” when players might prefer to relate and cooperate with others (Condis). Hypermasculine discourse “encourages the overt privileging of masculinity over femininity and discourages women from engaging in gendered discourse within the community” (Salter).
Many RPGs do not provide an environment which is friendly to feminism (Nielsen), and even when players can chose their character’s gender, they are stuck with masculine-coded titles like Fable’s ‘Hero,’ Dragon Age Origins’ ‘Grey Warden’ (Nielsen), Fallout 2’s ‘Chosen One,’ and most interestingly, Dragon Age: Inquisition’s ‘Herald of Andraste’ and ‘Inquisitor.’ In the latter example, the player character starts off being called ‘Herald of Andraste’ but, as the story progresses and the player gains more power, they gain the title ‘Inquisitor,’ more masculine-coded than the first. This switch enforces the idea that male characters generally have more power in video games. Because of this, gamers are “often assumed to be men unless proven otherwise” (Kafai p.93). This can prevent those who do not identify as men from feeling connected to the game, and from feeling represented and valued within the game.
Those who identify as women can also feel alienated from games when the only representation shown of women is accompanied by bringing specific attention to “their bodies, particularly their breasts” (Kuznekoff), enforcing the male gaze. The term ‘male gaze’ was coined by film critic Laura Mulvey in 1975, and refers to “the tendency for the visual arts to assume, and be structured around, a presumed masculine viewer” (Sarkeesian). The male gaze manifests when the camera lingers on a woman’s body, or when the camera rests so that a character’s “butt or breasts or both are centerline” (Sarkeesian). This can be enforced in either a ‘positive’ way -- when the majority of women in the game are sexy and appealing to a male audience, or in a ‘negative’ way -- when the majority of women in the game are villains, and either sexualized or demonized through the male gaze. Either way, the female characters are demeaned and hypersexualized, but the first is meant to be pleasing to a straight male viewer while the second is meant to be either horrifying or otherwise marked as ‘evil.’
In the game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, based on the book series by Andrzej Sapkowski, the vast majority of the female characters are highly sexualized, with excessive cleavage, hourglass-shaped bodies, and full makeup even in battle. Ciri, one of the main characters in The Witcher 3, wears noticeable makeup throughout the game, even when on the run. At one point in the game, the camera focuses on Ciri’s chest as she falls after being exhausted in battle; it lingers there long enough to become uncomfortable, especially since in the game you play as Ciri’s father figure. The character Triss is also subjected to the male gaze. In the books, her chest and neck are badly burned, and she states that she will “‘never wear a plunging neckline again’” (Sapkowski, 135), even though she was healed. In the game though, this is completely ignored and never explained. Triss wears a tight-fitting shirt with a neckline that goes down to the middle of her chest (below, left), and there is an option for the player to choose a different, even skimpier outfit for her (below, right).
In the game The Evil Within 2, the protagonist Sebastian comes across roughly eight main enemies he must defeat. Only two of those are male, while five are female. The male villains are non-white-coded, and three of the five female villains are topless or completely nude, and extremely grotesque. Unlike the female characters in The Witcher 3, who are hypersexualized to arouse straight male viewers, the female villains in The Evil Within 2 -- especially Obscura (below, left) and Myra (below, right) -- are sexualized in a way meant to provoke horror and disgust, and to make them seem less human.
Both Triss and Myra are extensively hypersexualized, but because Triss helps the male protagonist, she is portrayed as beautiful and young. Myra actively works against the male protagonist, and in the final battle against her she transforms into a terrifying giant covered in warts and lesions.
In addition to how the female villains look, the female characters Sebastian meets in the game are shown as passive characters, and secondary to him, while the male characters are shown as active and equals. Of the four women, only one survives to the end of the game, and this is because of another woman’s death and not through her own actions. The other three women willingly sacrifice themselves for Sebastian. In contrast, the man that dies is killed by a male villain, and the man that survives does so because of Sebastian’s help. These events show men as active characters able to decide their own fate, while women are passive and do everything they can, even die, to further the story of the main character.
Women often function as secondary characters, or even simply background decoration in the video games they appear in, their “sexually objectified” bodies functioning as “environmental texture while titillating presumed straight male players” (Sarkeesian). An example of the male gaze in this sense are the advertisements for the 2006 game Hitman: Blood Money. In these advertisements, murdered women were posed provocatively (below, left) in a way designed to sexually arouse straight male viewers. However, the men shown in these advertisements (below, right) were not sexualized in any way (Sarkeesian).
The body language of characters is just as telling as the way they are dressed, or their role within the game. For example, although the male and female avatars in Destiny have many similarities, including armor design, the way the female avatar sits (below, left) makes her seem “like a delicate flower” or like “Ariel from The Little Mermaid” (Sarkeesian).
The way the male avatar sits (above, right) though, is “simple. It suggests confidence” (Sarkeesian). Another way in which the body language of female and male characters differ is how they move around the game world. Or, more specifically, how female characters tend to move. A female character’s movement is often used to “make them exude sexuality for the entertainment of the presumed straight male player” (Sarkeesian) More often than not, when a female character walks it is with an exaggerated sway of the hips. This is the case in Destiny, even though the female avatars aren’t sexualized through their clothing. In Saints Row: The Third, the player is able to change their character’s gender at any time. But, when swapping from a male to a female, the character gains a “newly sexualized walking animation” (Sarkeesian). Even in the relatively new game Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, the character Evie Frye -- who avoids many of the “sexualizing traps” (Sarkeesian) other female player characters fall into -- walks with an exaggerated hip sway. Male characters do not fall into the same traps of sexualization that female characters do. When comparing the male and female avatars in Elder Scrolls Online, the costume and armor design for each is highly similar, with almost no visible differences. Females characters and NPCs are treated the same as male characters and NPCs in the game world. However, when looking at the walking and running animations, female characters have a very visible hip sway that occurs when both walking and running. Male characters are allowed to move normally, but even in a game that seems to promote equality, female characters are still designed to have sexualized walking and running animations that the player cannot choose to opt out of.
Hypermasculinity and the male gaze also enforce stereotypes about sexuality, both in video games and in the people who play them. When the studio BioWare included the option for players to have their avatar “engage in same-sex relationships” (Nielsen), some players were outraged. One particular player, Bastal, “believed game designers should better cater to him and other “straight male gamers” because they are the “main demographic” of RPGs like Dragon Age 2” (Nielsen). Many other people expressed their ire with BioWare for “being willing to, as they saw it, dilute the influence of their ‘core demographic’ of straight male gamers by producing more inclusive games” (Condis). Bastal argued that the “mere inclusion of the option to partake in queer content is an affront to him as a straight male gamer” (Condis), and actually called for an option which would allow him to completely remove all homosexual romance options from the game so that “his personal version of the fantasy setting of Thedas is free from the incursion of queerness” (Condis). Although video game writer David Gaider disagreed with Bastal, and stated so publicly, the fact remains that Bastal felt comfortable expressing such a view, and that he felt comfortable in the assumption his argument would be seen as reasonable by a large number of people.
Gamers like Bastal and the many others who objected to the inclusion of queer content are “dedicated to the idea of a virtual world as a space apart… that is set aside for experiences of play free from real-world consequences” (Condis), and see attempts to bridge the game world with the real world as a “threat to their play” (Condis). This attitude is present when people refuse to think of video game characters as having a race, and when characters are whitewashed, perhaps to make those with this attitude more comfortable and secure in the game’s setting, and when hypermasculine rhetoric pushes female and non-male gamers out of the community. These kinds of gamers are firm in their belief that “there is no place for progressive political activism, or, indeed, any overtly political speech in a space that has been set aside for play” (Condis).
The “rallying cry of ‘no politics in gaming’ actually has huge political consequences within the gamer community” (Condis). True gamers or fans are often assumed to be straight (Condis), even though a study conducted in 2006 with over 10,000 responses found that only 28% of gamers identified as completely heterosexual, while 23.4% identified as homosexual, and 45% as bisexual (Nielsen). Although years have passed since the study, it is difficult to believe these numbers have changed that radically.
Furthermore, though politics in gaming is frowned upon by gamers such as Bastal, words and insults that are politically charged are still widely used. The word ‘gay’ is used throughout the gaming community to describe “anything unmasculine, non-normative, or uncool” (Condis). This also serves to reinforce the “heteronormative ideology” that “disguises itself as the rational default position of loyal gamers” (Condis). ‘Ideology’ and ‘politics’ is “always the label given to what someone else cares about. People think of their own concerns as rational and logical and assume that it is only others who are motivated by politics or tricked by ideology” (Condis). Erasing queer representation does not eliminate political concerns, but rather injects a “politics of privilege and hierarchy” (Condis) into video games. The “disappearance of queerness would simply reinforce the assumption of universal straightness among gamers” (Condis). People try to protect their privileged positions within the culture, and many hold the fear that any attempt by media producers to broaden their fan base will “dilute their power” (Condis), even though the community is already full of diversity that people simply refuse to acknowledge.
The video game market continues to generate more and more revenue, and is “increasingly focused on audience reception” (Higgin), but even so, the “demographics of gamers have diversified faster than the industry itself has” (Nielsen). Games are deeply informed by “American culture and its history” (Higgin), and the industry, however much effort is made, still caters to the heterosexual male demographic (Nielsen). Many people imagine the stereotypical gamer to be “straight, male, probably white” (Nielsen), because these types of gamers typically will play as an avatar that represents them “both physically and sexually” (Nielsen). This kind of player is protective of the gaming environment as it exists now, and uses their identity to defend that environment (Nielsen). Video games are “a space about and for males” and “equally a White-centered space” (Leonard).
Games are more than simple entertainment; they are “cultural projects saturated with racialized, gendered, sexualized, and national meaning” (Leonard). In video games, people feel more freedom to express themselves without worrying about the consequences of their actions (Nielsen). This is both good and bad; gamers are free to perpetuate stereotypes and discrimination, but are also free to express themselves in ways they might not yet feel comfortable with in real life, and to learn from experiences within video games and gaming culture. If a person sees their identity being misrepresented, mocked, or outright hated, they will absorb that, and thus feel less comfortable with themselves in the video game setting and perhaps in real life. When people who participate in mocking or stereotyping identities which are different from their own see others doing the same, they become more secure in their views, and thus feed the cycle of pushing away players whose identities do not match their own.
Video games are reflections of the views that exist in the real world; “measuring the imbalances that exist on the screen can tell us what imbalances exist in social identity formation, social power and policy formation in daily life” (Williams). Discussing the rhetoric surrounding games and gaming culture means we will be better able to see the reasons behind design choices and choices players make when given the opportunity. The stereotypes reinforced by the gaming community reflect the stereotypes that people hold outside of video games, and although this is changing for the better, there are still many instances of hateful and stereotype-based remarks directed towards those who do not fit the ‘norm’. Video games can change our perceptions of the real world, other people, and of identity -- both others’ and our own. By understanding video games as complex forms of media that are able to influence players’ ideas of identity, both developers and players can begin to work towards using this medium to better represent diversity, and instead of attempting to preserve exclusivity, promote inclusivity.
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Megan Medo is a junior pursuing a Baccalaureate of Arts in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Linguistics.
