Literature Review: The Gendering of Computer gaming

The Gendering of Computer Gaming Literature Review

This article argues that the lack of female gamers in the public is the because of two main factors: men and leisure constraints. The latter plays a much more minor role as it states the most common leisure constraints are gender, race, income, class, and health status. However if you are a female then they are expanded to include time, marital status, and parental status. They use this point to transition into the belief that men are primarily to blame. Within the gaming community, men and women are proven to enjoy different genre of games. However, the majority of games are designed by men for men making this author argue that they are deliberate in making an uninteresting themes for women. They claim that men gender games in a way to make them uninterested or outright offensive to women in several ways. They tend to be looked down upon by women because in many actions games, you are rewarded for gratuitous violence and this reward is either in points or in the case of many games, by looking at stereotypical woman. This brings us to the second point. In many games there is an outright lack of females characters for them to relate to or the females present are stereotypical and hyper sexualized. This is the reason he argues that there are more women who participate in MMORPG's because there tends to be less gender discrimination since who is on the other side of the character is never known. He explains that this is the reason that female gamers tend to be more private and casual about how they game instead of competitive and outspoken