So, a lot of posts have come up over the years deriding the way that women are portrayed in the video game milieu. So, i guess i might as well chime in.
Many of the more recent articles of the subject of gender roles in video games i've seen recently have been more than a little wrong. In some ways they seem to be pandering to the ever so polite politically correct movement. i am not going to do that. Maybe i am just too sick and twisted. Or maybe i oversimplified things.
In many ways, gender roles reflected in video games are those in real life. The caricatures of women may be a little off (and many of them are going to have serious back pain in the future), but the gender roles are fairly solid. The problem here is that real life gender role discussions are kind of wrong. In the real world you have the ever confusing abstraction of reality to fit within the current context. One of these forces is feminism. Personally, i see feminism as an evolutionarily disingenuous. So what are the roles of females in real life? Sex objects. The role of females is to have and raise offspring - that is not a choice, that is for the survival of the species. i know that the modern sensitive male doesn't want to acknowledge this, but there is a strong sexual undercurrent to almost everything in life. Video games are still gingerly tackling (somewhat awkwardly, human sexuality). i have absolutely no problem with sex and nudity in video games. For story telling - that is the next level (in story based games, anyway).
Video game characters are basically super id. Think of them as basically being blockbuster movie characters. The men will typically be your alpha male manly man. One of the points of being an alpha male is the opportunity to mate - alpha males don't need to cuddle or share their feelings. As for other female stock roles... What is so wrong with male characters re-affirming their manhood by having to rescue the damsel in distress (that used to be seen as gallant)? Just don't have the masculine hero share his feelings - yuck. Females in the real world wield sex as a weapon quite frequently. Really strong female characters are somewhat of a threat to the alpha male's manhood. So, even the really strong female character needs to be somewhat sexualized - to soften the character. Even the female protagonist characters are largely re-skinned males (not really that feminine - other than phsically).
This is somewhat selling to the target demographic - how boring would a video game be if your female love interest made you mow the lawn or do other yard work (or mundane tasks). The point is that people really don't want confusing realism in their chosen forms of escapism.
One of the reasons video games are needed is that the world has become increasingly abstract. Part of the appeal of video games is to be a different persona - one that is not available to you in real life. Characters like Duke Nukem are surprisingly simple - big on violence and lust. In many ways this is more honest than many people are about themselves. This is in stark contrast (thankfully) to the modern world where nothing is a simple as in video games. So, in some ways, video games feel the void for how people wish they could act in real life - without the ever present double standards and threat of lawsuits.
i consider dating to be one of the deeper levels of hell. So for me, video games offer something i couldn't get in the real world. Everything is so confusing - do you hold the door, who pays, etc. i wish for a greater sense of traditionalism - and video game depictions of relationships actually seem more traditional. i found in the real world, if i spend significant time with a female that i start to have more physical thoughts about them, why shouldn't my video game character? i mean, isn't the struggle for the fate of the universe (world) kind of sexy - and to paraphrase Armageddon isn't that really what your virtual self is fighting for (in many games). Also relationships vary drastically in terms of honesty. You really cannot broach the subject of relationships without associating it with sex (that is kind of why relationships exists). There is something strangely appealing about a game where i can form virtual relationships - even if they are that well fleshed out. For some reason, i find Fable 2 and 3 to be strangely attractive - you can get married and have children. i spend way too much time when i was playing those games with the black screen and background noise - and there was something oddly appealing to being told my character was going to be a dad.
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