Video Games and Female Stereotypes

I am going to be playing Diablo III with my girlfriend’s family tonight and this particular game made me notice something in particular. There are five classes, and the game allows the player to select the gender of the class. There is no difference whatsoever in the play style, stats, leveling, or gameplay of the character between male and female. The only real difference is the clothing and voices. This same gender choice is in a lot of video game, such as Mass Effect 3. In fact, the female version of the main character was so popular that Mass Effect 3 came out with disc cases that featured the fiery, strong willed, redhead Commander Shepard in the place of the default Male Commander Shepard with the same starting stats.

In video games, not just Diablo, a great deal of gender stereotypes are being flipped on their head. Strong female leads are becoming more and more popular. For example, in the first “Portal” game, Valve (The creators of Portal) decided to make the playable character in this brain teaser game a woman by the name of Chell.  As you play through the game, her sex is never a plot point or even discussed. All the other characters in the game are robots and they don’t care that Chell is a woman. That fact she is could have been a coin toss.  

Another example would be that of Samus Aran from the Metroid Prime series. Samus is a complete badass, killing space pirates and aliens while discovering the secrets of the planet she’s on. The player first discovered that Samus was a woman in the ending scene of the first game. In later installments, Retro Studios (The creators of Metroid) don’t even acknowledge that Samus is a woman. They simply allow the player to figure it out through vague readings within the game.

I’m not trying to say that video games are good for the feminist movement. However, I think there are some games which defy the stereotypical buxom damsel, whose sexuality is used as a plot driver and nothing else. Video games are a medium. The stories that the game tells are in the hands of the creators.