Greetings summoner. I mean student. If you didn’t know, gg,wp is good game, well played. And if you haven’t already guessed by our usage of summoner, (in reference to League of Legends), we did a collaborative paper on video games! Wait, video games? Isn’t that too general? How does that relate to myth America? Those are the same exact questions we asked ourselves. At first, this topic seemed perfect to write about, however because video games is a large topic, we narrowed it down to how female gender roles/sexualization has changed since the inception of video games. Now, that may seem specific but after writing this research paper, we highly recommend narrowing the topic down even further. In our essay, we examined multiple factors that may have contributed to the increase of sexualization of women to current video games. For example, we examined how other factors, such as societal expectations and funding influenced video games to represent women in a certain way. There are many ways to explore this topic, not just capping it off at funding. It’s an interesting topic and the only advice we offer is to narrow your topic down even further so it’s easier to look at sources and pick out the information you need to support your argument, rather than just checking out random books and hoping to formulate even more arguments (Heh, we didn’t do that at all).
Speaking of sources! You’ll be glad to know that there are plentiful online articles on the debate of gender roles in video games. Also, you can really utilize the library’s database to find articles about feminism. It may seem like an easy paper to write with all the online sources, but we can’t forget about our good friends the books. Initially, we thought we would be able to find books concerning media in the 70’s (around the inception of video games) to be helpful, but rather than talking about women’s roles, a lot of the books explained women in the media as lesbians. So, we recommend finding books about feminism starting from the 70’s-2000’s to identify the change in feminism over time, which reflects how women were representative in video games in their respective time frames. Oh, and don’t forget to utilize your office hours with Jenny! She’ll straight up tell you if you’re on the right track and help you find some sources. (That’s how we found Miss Representation). GL, HF. (good luck, have fun!)
Sources:
1. Miss Representation. Dir. Jennifer S. Newsom. Prod. Julie Costanzo. By Jessica Congdon, Claire Dietrich, and Jenny Raskin. Oprah Winfrey Network, 2011. DVD.
2. Brenick, Alaina, UC Berkley, Michael Collins, University of Maryland, Alexandra Henning, Melanie Killen, and Alexander O'Connor. "Social Evaluations of Stereotypic Images in Video Games." Youth & Society 38.4 (2007): n. pag. SAGE Journals. Youth & Society, June 2007. Web. 7 Mar. 2015.
3. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gender+role+stereotyping+in+video+games&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=emEGVfr1FIzsoASC14LABA&ved=0CBsQgQMwAA (Google Scholar links for on-going debate about gender roles in video games)
4. Matthews, Glenna. Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.
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