Welcome to Gaia! ::

Yeah, that's a men's rights site. MRAs have issues with gender inequality (specifically in regards to issues that hurt men), but I've never heard of them actually doing anything aside from blaming feminists for all of their problems. Although based on this thread, these guys just hate women in general. *sigh*


Anyway, the topic. Sexism is definitely present in games, but not in the way they're complaining about. There are some really good female characters in games. But most of the time the female characters are restricted to a couple of specific roles: damsel in distress, love interest, sister, princess, etc. There's nothing wrong with a character falling into these categories in and of themselves, but it is a problem when A) this is their entire personality and B) these archetypes are ridiculously common.

There are also the outfits. There are cases where a character wearing skimpy clothing makes sense. It fits their personality or was plot-important or whatever other reason you can come up with, and that's fine. I'd never say 'no boobs or sex appeal in games ever', because that's really silly. But there are also a lot of characters that wear skimpy outfits and stand in sexy poses because the designers just want to make them appealing to straight teenage boys, and that's really annoying. Plenty of gamers are not straight, teenage, or boys; could you stop pandering to one group and make stuff that can be enjoyed by more of us?

The community's pretty terrible, too. I don't usually play on multiplayer because of the crazy stuff some of the gamers will do when they find out that one of the players is a girl. This is hardly exclusive to the video game community though.