Controversy ensued over the “Plastic Surgery for Barbara” game for Google Play and iTunes developed by Corina Rodriguez. The game, filed under Kids Educational for ages four and older, involves the game player performing liposuction on the blonde, overweight character, Barbara.

The app’s description read:

“This unfortunate girl has so much extra weight that no diet can help her. In our clinic she can go through a surgery called liposuction that will make her slim and beautiful. We’ll need to make small cuts on problem areas and suck out the extra fat. Will you operate her [sic], doctor?” (Lumpkin 2014, n.p.n.)

The game begins with the woman lying on an operating table with a green bra and a bare belly. The player injects, makes incisions, and performs liposuction. At the end of the game, Barbara is thin and covered in bandages. Educating young women about plastic surgery is dangerous. Girls playing these games are taught about the accessibility of body modification and the necessity of the ‘perfect’ body shape is implied. The app was later pulled from the Apple App Store and Google Play, but other games like it still exist and are easily accessible to young users of smartphones. Rodriguez, and others, have developed many games that cultivate harmful and oppressive identities for young girls and women to follow via tropes such as the “Damsel in Distress”, subjugation of women, and a unnecessary focus on physical appearance.

FeministFrequency video blogger, Anita Sarkeesian, releases multi-part video series exploring the roles and representations of women in video games. Her first episode explores female videogame character tropes, including the recurring theme of the“damsels in distress” (Mirk 2013, n.p.n.). The frequently represented damsel in distress character helps to normalize a toxic, patronizing, and demeaning attitude about women. The trope of women as a “naturally weaker gender” (Mirk 2013, n.p.n.) is perpetually ingrained in the social construction of a majority of video games like Mario, Zelda, etc. What are children learning about gender roles when women are, “continuously portrayed as frail, fragile and vulnerable creatures” (Mirk 2013, n.p.n.)? In the Rodriguez’s games for children, targeted for girls, the idea of beauty as a woman’s most important, and perhaps only, function is enforced. By featuring “Barbie Dentist,” for example, in her bikini, children are taught the importance of the “right” kind of body over the significance of intelligence. Games like these, in their focus on exterior apppearance, reinforce a negative perspective of female identity.

Gendered discourses and narratives in the media perpetuate oppression and subjugation of women. Patriarchal systems of signification in various forms of popular media like television, film, and music produce dominant negative ideologies about the role of women (Soukoup 2007, n.p.n.). Soukup suggests in his essay in the journal Women’s Studies in Communication, entitled Mastering the game: gender and the entelechial motivational system of video games, video games have a large impact on children and operate as the preferred form of entertainment for them. Scantily-clad women are not only featured in Rodriguez’s games intended for female children, they are also repeatedly present in games marketed towards adolescent boys and men, like Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, etc. The conventionalized images of women in magazines like Sports Illustrated, Maxim, or Playboy are very similar to the animated women in these video games. The prominence of the sexualized role for the female characters propagate the belief that women’s significance lies in her physical appearance. This can have an impact on a child’s sense of identity and their interactions with peers. For young girls this can limit and distort their understanding of how the world perceives them and what they can grow up to be as adult women.

Rodriguez’s games targeted to young girls brings up questions of how cognitive development during childhood has been implicitly gendered. Culturally, society allows for a distinct separation between the roles and interests of women versus men. Women in games for young men are shown as objectified bodies, measured by physical appearance. Rarely will these female character play a central role or display physical strength or depth of character. Games for young women often implicitly demonstrate a woman’s significance lies in physical appearance (Miller 2005, 26.1).

The book, from Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, by Cassell and Jenkins, examines the “Girls’ Game Movement” (Cassell and Jenkins 1999, 22.1) and the consequences of separating girls from boys in cyberspace and the marketplace. There is a strong parallel between the depiction of women within video games and the role assigned to female players in games intended for women and girls. Often games targeted at young women players are non-competitive, mindless point-and-click games depicting stereotypical roles focused on beauty/physical attractiveness and traditional family roles. These games lack elements of building a positive female identity for young girls and women players.

In the now classic feminist text The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir claims, “one is not born, but rather, becomes a woman” (quoted in Butler 1986, 35). Judith Butler explains in her investigation of Beauvoir that women are appropriating and reinterpreting actions of the women who existed previously. In this sense, gender is not a stable identity, but rather is dependent on the events and actions of previous social actors. Butler says gender identity is instituted through a “stylized repetition of acts” or “social temporality” (Butler 1986, 49). Essentially, gender is instituted through socially situated acts. In investigation of video games, the role women play as characters within games and the role played by players, brings to light several questions. How is the representation of female characters and players indicative of societal views of women? How is this limiting? What is the connection?

The constructed identity of women within video games often features physical appearance, social popularity, domestic responsibilities, and minimal mental exertion. The role of this objectified female character and the female video game player is significant to the contemporary identity of women. The female player will be influenced to assimilate to the tropes propagated within the video game. This female player will also be influenced by limiting agendas of female targeted games and will again come to some understanding of the role intended for her to assume. These games created by Rodriguez reproduce the way women are stereotypically represented in media and video games, further enforcing how female identity has little significance, power, and complexity in these games. Whether it be domestic importance, physical objectification, or social hierarchy; games for girls do not often aim to challenge limiting stereotypical tropes or archetypes.