Blog post 7

Masculinity in video games

Looking into this topic I really enjoyed reading the article, The Misconception of Masculinity in Games. This article starts off explaining that women are misrepresented within game and that they are the underdogs of this industry but they seem to focus on how few gamers notice or address that men are also misrepresented. Ryan Perez explains his intentions as, “Here, I take a look at the overbearingly juvenile image of masculinity in video games and which games have done justice to the male image” (Perez, 2011). These video games use male characters in different ways but many use them as a insanely muscular and normally give them a lot of physical features that are unheard of in real life. In the video game mortal combat these characters aren’t really human but they do use men and women in these games. The characters are extremely muscular and have many different physical feature that make these character completely different than that of real life. I personally like the characters in Call of Duty because they are the most realistic to that of real life. In this game the characters look like real solders and have outfits that you can unlock from different wars from the past. The physical features aren’t unheard of like many other games that have been created. Call of Duty also has a game mode called Nazi zombies which has four character that are spilt between men and women and the objective is kill all of the zombie and advance to as many rounds as you can. These games also portray men as very destructive and assume they only like to blow these up and kill immeasurable amounts of people “Innocent or not”.

One video game that was mentioned in this article is Grand Theft Auto, this game is extremely violent. The main character of this game is a man who seems like he hates the world that he lives in. This game is based around crime which includes: Robbery, selling drugs, murder and many other crimes that they do in order to make money and pass missions.

In conclusion, video games use men and women in many different ways which can be really offensive to those playing the game. These games also give people the thought that this is what they should be like such as big and strong with many different physical features. I believe some games need to do a better job when making characters because they are speaking to an audience even if they don’t think so. I personally think creators should look at games like call of duty and understand the significance of the outfits and physical feature they use to portray a respected person like those in the military. I also would like to mention that I do appreciate the fact that more video games are using women or giving the option of being a female character while playing these game because men aren’t the only people enjoying video games on a daily basis.