Chapter VII: Games & Representation

In addition to watching television shows, I also enjoy playing copious amounts of video games. For this blog post, I’ll take a momentary detour from my usual topic and focus on video games.

Since it first came out, I’ve put in a shocking amount of hours into Fallout 3, and to a lesser extent, its successor Fallout: New Vegas. I’ve spent thousands of hours roaming the post-apocalyptic landscapes of Washington D.C. and the Mojave Desert. Both games allow for the player to create their own character, selecting their gender, race, physical appearance and, in New Vegas, their age. This lets the player enjoy the experience of the game as whatever kind of character they wish.

(Source: Bethblog)

However, a game does not automatically have excellent representation just because the player can create their own avatar. In fact, once the gaming community can get involved with the creation of new content thanks to ‘mods’, representation can severely deteriorate.

Some of the first mods to come out for these games were various nude mods, sex mods, and various underwear mods. Unfortunately, the majority of the images used to promote and show off such mods were through the use of female characters.

I have an oppositional reading to the one being presented by the modders (Hall 1973, p. 60, Raessens 2005, p. 375). While they see the game as a chance to express their fantasies in a virtual world, their exploitative nature of the female characters is in contrast to that of my own values.

The original games themselves, without the modded content, are not excusable either. There are many female characters that act as prostitutes and sex slaves, whilst there are far less male characters in the same circumstance, suggesting that perhaps women are less capable of surviving on their own in a lawless wasteland.

(Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun)

What’s intriguing though is that the modders instantly went to bring more adult content into the game once it was released. Does this reflect society more aptly perhaps? That given some form of anonymity, those in the gaming community seek to marginalise females?

Ultimately it’s a complex issue that is constantly discussed, too much for a single blog post, but it’s definitely a conversation we should be having.

Sources: Hall, S 1973, Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, Birmingham, pp. 507-17

Raessens, J 2005, ‘Computer games as participatory media culture’, Handbook of Computer Game Studies, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, pp. 373-388