VIDEOGAMES: GIRLS KILL TOO
Eurídice Cabañes Martínez
Interview on Radio 3 – Minute 40
After interviewing more than 50 girls aged 12 to 35, we found that girls also enjoy killing in video games, although they differ from boys in the type of games they play and, therefore, in the way they kill. How do women kill in video games? What are the reasons behind these differences?
Introduction
The video game industry has realized that something serious is happening: half of the population are women, and they don’t consume video games as much as men. Of course, in many cases (such as the “Imagine being” game series, releasing pink console models, etc.), the video game industry is fumbling in the dark trying to attract a female audience, but they don’t even ask themselves: what happened? what are they doing wrong? why did girls stop playing?
The reverse progress
Analyzing the responses from the girls surveyed, I have observed that girls of my generation followed a reverse progression compared to boys. Many boys started playing in the now almost extinct arcades, and then moved on to owning their own console and playing at home. For girls, however, the process was reversed. For most of them, their first contact with the world of video games was at home, on the computer. Later, they started going to arcades, and many of them gradually stopped playing…
This reveals two things to us: first, that the social element is important—they preferred to play together in arcades, and the transition from arcades to personal consoles left many female gamers out. But this wasn’t the only reason. The fact that many girls played regularly in the early days of video games and then stopped playing is partly due to the graphical improvements of video games and the realism they currently present.
This might sound strange. Let me explain: low-quality graphics had a great advantage that has been underestimated: abstraction.
Abstraction as identification
Low-quality graphics = greater abstraction
Current characters: hyper-realistic and stereotyped
For many girls, it was easier to feel represented by a few pixels or a diamond shape than by graphically much more developed characters, which are, in most cases, men, and, in the few cases they are women, an incredible stereotype.
We’re not stupid: we realize that characters with big breasts and little clothing are not made for us to identify with, but for the enjoyment of boys. With graphical improvements, it has become much more evident that video games are mostly made by men and for men.
“I saw female characters in games wearing erotic outfits, or in very stereotypical representations… when male characters are normal or more flashy and more powerful…”
“The games I usually like are all adventures and there’s no little princess trapped waiting for her rescuer. Of course, in most of them the protagonists are male… damn!”
“I really liked, for example, The Longest Journey. The protagonist is a normal woman, which might seem silly, but it’s really tiring to always control a male character or a big-boobed chick.”
It seems clear that while male characters represent “ready for violence”, female characters follow the stereotype of “ready for sex”.
A strange case: abstraction in action
Do you remember this game? It appeared in several cases in the surveys as one of the games that girls played in arcades. I didn’t remember it until I read the description that some girls made of it. As you can see from the background images, it looks like a video game totally aimed at a male audience, and yet it was mostly played by girls. Why?
I’ve been thinking about it a lot: if girls don’t identify with stereotyped female characters, why were they attracted to this game? Reviewing the responses of some of the girls surveyed, I find a possible answer:
“If any of these things touched the line you were drawing to make the puzzle, you lost a life. Some of them killed you if they touched you (you were a luminous diamond).”
Again, as in the games mentioned earlier, abstraction takes place: “you are a luminous diamond”. You can identify with it. The images of semi-naked girls were just a background that went unnoticed by our eyes, possibly due to the habit of finding the image of the woman as an object everywhere.
As another interviewed girl says:
“It was about solving a puzzle, which by the way were drawings of Japanese girls with less and less clothing, and when you completed the level, the girl made a sexual moan. Hahaha, I didn’t remember until I said it, how crazy!”
What kind of video games do we like?
Looking at the responses from the interviewees, we can find everything from the classic Tetris to Gran Turismo, passing through Mario or Resident Evil. Therefore, as is obvious, any answer to this question is a generalization.
But it is true that the vast majority of girls respond that they prefer, in their own words: skill games, logical games, strategy games, arcade, platform games, knowledge games, “those in which you have to think”. For example: Tetris, Pang, Bubble Bobble, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros, Sonic, The Sims, Trivial Pursuit, Brain Training, Lemmings, Warcraft, and Age of Empires.
Violent games don’t attract their attention or bore them.
This is not entirely true: violent video games
1. As the age of the respondents decreases, we see a greater preference for violent games (16-20 years old):
“One of my favorite games is GTA San Andreas, because there’s a lot of freedom of action.”
“My favorite video games are Resident Evil and Grand Theft Auto.”
“I usually play war games mainly, both realistic (CoD) and SciFi war (Halo, Gears).”
“The one I liked the most was Conker’s Bad Fur Day for N64. I love shooters, I also really like Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Call of Duty.”
But not too low: 12-year-old girls don’t like them yet.
“A few years ago I started to like killing games. Before that, on my Nintendo consoles, I played more childish games and suddenly one day a Splinter Cell. I noticed I liked it a lot. Our next console was an Xbox 360 where I got hooked on FPS and RPGs (Halo2, Halo3, Call of Duty, Gears of War, Bioshock, GTA, Splinter Cell).”
As you can see, there are girls who enjoy violent video games, although they are not the majority.
2. They also enjoy violence if it’s well integrated into the plot and not gratuitous:
“Yes, but not gratuitously! The game’s plot has to engage me. I like gore cinema; exaggerated violence makes you laugh it off. On the other hand, when I see violence in the news, it has the opposite effect on me. In a movie or a video game, we know it’s fake and that’s the fun part. Also, it’s cool to control a character, as if you were in a movie, whether it’s gore, action, horror, or even comedy, and be able to make decisions, etc. It’s not just about killing for the sake of killing.”
“I don’t dislike violent games, as long as they have a ‘story’.”
3. There is a type of violent game that attracts them especially: fighting games. Many mention Street Fighter or Tekken, and they say they like them because, in their own words:
“It’s like an adrenaline rush.”
“I like them because they release a lot of tension, I don’t think about anything and I clear my mind from all the day-to-day stress.”
“Because they de-stress me.”
“Because you can unleash your fury.”
They also like them because they can play with someone else:
“They’re entertaining to play with 2 players (challenges, mini-tournaments…).”
“I really like fighting with friends, whether they’re girls or guys.”
“The appeal I find in them is sharing a laugh with someone for a while, with a little bit of adrenaline.”
4. And… the most curious thing of all…
Before seeing it, let’s go back for a moment to the type of games that girls like. The one that has attracted the most female audience in recent years has undoubtedly been The Sims. If we analyze it, we can see that it’s a video game version of playing house: you can build your house, interact with neighbors, look for a job, have children. So far, we have the stereotype that boys like war games and girls like playing house. But… is that all you can do in The Sims?
Most girls love to experiment with violence in games whose objective is not that. For example, one respondent said:
“Who hasn’t tried to kill a Sim? Burned, drowned, starved… it’s mostly to see what options the game gives you!”
Another:
“I cause car accidents to see what happens, and in pet games I leave them without food, without water…”
A third one:
“In some games, when it doesn’t lend itself to killing, I do it to see what happens or what the characters say.”
“In Halo, for example, during the campaign I’ve shot at my teammates to see what they say. There’s even an option you can activate with the skulls so they have more dialogues and say funny things.”
“In GTA, the game lends itself to causing more mayhem. Since I had the first GTA on PC, I liked to steal a lot of cars, pile them up, and then chain explosions with a bomb or rocket launcher. Also, running people over is very common and crashing cars.”
“In racing games, only when I play with other friends do we like to cause accidents or crashes so that the cars fly off, just like in GTA.”
And another:
“Lemmings self-destructed, and I swear that even if it was cruel, I loved it when the countdown started and they exploded. I remember showing it to everyone I knew! They were hilarious when they committed suicide!”
Another one:
“In racing games, when I get bored, sometimes I’ve played to crash or try to run someone over to see what happened.”
Do you find something in common in these examples?
I find it especially interesting that they all say: “I do it to see what happens”.
Let’s analyze this. What are the reasons behind these differences? Of course, any essentialist explanation would be wrong. But if we look at education, we see how historically Aristotle, Freud, and a long list of others considered the masculine as active and the feminine as passive. Violence has been associated with the masculine, among other things due to its active role that opposes the passive role of the victim.
Unfortunately, this way of thinking is still present today. We can see it in Microsoft’s statements that women “don’t like to act, they prefer to watch” (statements made in reference to how the spectator and editing mode of Xbox Live was supposedly going to attract women to video games).
How does this affect the differences between the games and the way boys and girls choose to play?
For men, it conveys a subtle association of virility with violence or war. In this way, war becomes the best expression of masculinity. While women have always been kept away from death: “women and children first”, “you’re a woman, you can’t see this”, “it’s too violent for you”, “war is no place for a woman” (unless, of course, it’s a nurse who heals wounds and doesn’t leave her role as a perpetuator of life), and a long etcetera.
Obviously, here we are not talking about real violence, but about fictitious violence in a world without consequences. Fictitious violence and death are necessary. As Mathias Clasen said, playing with violence is an adaptive exploratory behavior, a training for the unexpected, inherently satisfying, since it allows experimentation without consequences.
Or, as Gerald Jones said in his book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, video games, in addition to being a great form of leisure, are essentially fantasies of power and control, as necessary for a person’s emotional development as fraternal love. And women also have fantasies of power and control that are as healthy, natural, and common as those of men.
But the fact is that women have been culturally distanced from this type of game, so now, they remain mostly distanced from violent games, but they experiment with violence in video games whose objective is not that, even though their behavior may seem more cruel. I don’t think it is, but rather that they start from scratch. The key lies in “seeing what happens”. Boys, let’s say, “know what happens”, they have been educated for it. Women are faced with unexplored territory where curiosity is what rules.