Gender and Games

Representations of gender in games and ideas about gender in game audiences are interesting for a couple of reasons. Discussion in yesterdays lecture showed that there is a major bias both in current game audiences, in the way games are marketed and in the content of a lot of games towards a male demographic. I would argue that the nature of games is inherently geared towards the male in the first place, even if we shed the gender representations in games and male oriented marketing campaigns.
During the lecture I recalled a debate from a sociology paper I took awhile back in which the lecturer talked about how he had given boys toys (trucks, GI Joes etc) to his daughter to play with along with girls toys when she was very young and found that although she had no experience playing with any toys that were gender specific she immediately gravitated towards the toys that were intended for girls. What can be gathered from this is that although gender is something which is (at least mostly) socially constructed there may be some natural lean in boys towards the things that have come to be associated with male gendering. I think more physical (and perhaps more destructive) ideas hold some non-constructed, inherent appeal to guys ie. Vehicles, superheroes with crazy physical abilities and guns, whereas girls obviously go for kind of constructive things like dolls that can be dressed up etc.
So, I believe the very nature of videogames is inherently more male. The interactivity of games, I believe, stems from a desire to complete a trivial action and to see a extraordinary result. The visual interface means that something visually spectacular, ie. A representation of an extraordinary physical action, is necessary to satisfy this desire and therefore most games are inherently geared towards the car driving, blowing shit up end of the spectrum simply because they naturally work well with the platforms of gaming.
So I believe that games hold some kind of natural appeal for those with a slightly heftier dose of testosterone in their systems.
This is not to say that I think sexist marketing campaigns and representations of women are okay, I think they are retarded and potentially harmful but I do think it may offer some reasoning as to why these things exist.