Video Game Gender Portrayal

1. What Does Gender Have To Do With It:
The Inherent Biases Of The Video Game Industry
Aaron Williams

2. Who Plays?
• The population
• Why should we care

3. Brief History of Video Games
• Original sports game format
• Non-gender bias
• Family marketed

4. Video Games Crash 1983
• Reasons
• Immediate impact

5. The Beginning
• The Toy Section and Marketing
• Why males?

6. Damsels in Distress
• Roles in video games
• Classic examples and why
• (e.g. Mario, Dragon’s Lair, etc)

7. Hyper-sexualization
• Reasons
• Examples
• Prevalence in gaming history

8. “Strong Female Characters”
• Acclaimed characters examples
• (e.g. Lara Croft, Samus Aran)
• Why they still fail to fix the problem

9. Developers are trying
• Recent progression in gender portrayal
• Casual games

10. Video (Examples)

11. Conclusions
• How we can fix gender representation
• How it can help the industry ( Critically,
economically, etc.)