Body Image in Video Games

Introduction:Video games have many aspects to it. Body image is one of these aspects, which can piece together why men (the main buyer and player of video games) love to play video games. Body image in video games can be different depending on the genre, process power, and the developers. Body image can tell us about how entertainment interprets men and women in video games.

I researched body image in video games by playing these games: Modern Warfare 2 (first person shooter,) Tekken Tag Tournament (fighting game,) Need for Speed Underground (racing game,) Uncharted: Drakes Fortune (free running third person shooter,) and Gears of War (third person shooter.) I looked at the characters, both men and women and wrote down what I saw.


What I Found: Modern Warfare 2 is probably the best example I have of male domination in video games. Male the only people present in MW2. The men in MW2 are not much different from each other. They are buff, powerful and pretty invincible. Soap MacTavish, one of the main characters, is an average white male with tattoos, scars, a buzz cut Mohawk, and a buff body. He's just like the other characters. All of the characters are buff, have scars and some other attribute to disguise the clone-like characters in the game, like Soap's buzz cut Mohawk. The characters are pretty diverse in skin color. Whites and people of color are pretty balanced in the game.

Tekken Tag Tournament is what I would call an all out suggestive clothing game. The men of TTT are pretty straight forward. They have scars (a lot of them,) crazy hairdos, diverse skin color, buff and thin bodies (some are bigger than others) and normal clothes like pants, shorts, shirts and robot armor.  The women are a lot different (except they are thin and diverse in skin color.) The women wear suggestive and revealing clothing ALL the time. The Women have clear, fair skin and skinny bodies. They are all really skinny and to hot to be true. This just another way for male developers to get you to buy their product. They all have either short hair or long flowing hair. Their ethnicities are mostly Asian (made in Japan,) but there is some white and other people of color in the game. This game is pretty focused on the characters because it's a fighting game. The men and women are specially crafted to be pleasing and cool. The men are powerful and strong, and the women are hot and suggestive. But the one thing that was weird about the game was that the women are just as powerful as men in the game play. Even though the men are buffer and bigger than the women, the women were just as good. I guess as long as you look good, then you can still beat a dude up.  This game is a PS2 game (PlayStation 2) so the graphics are a bit old. Due to this fact, the Japanese developers made the women' breasts bigger to compensate for for that.

Need for Speed Underground is probably the most boring racing game ever. This game is about CARS. I only see the people out side the car that are watching me, not myself or the drivers. It's also an PS2 game, so the graphics are pretty bad, making the outside people choppy and weird looking. They don't have those people very often in the game probably because of that. I can only guess the person that's inside my car. It's probably a guy.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is an example of normal people really. Uncharted uses motion capturing to capture the faces and movements of actors that are in real life to transfer onto a person on a video game. Nathan Drake, the main character, is motion captured by a male actor. Nathan Drake is a white male who is pretty average, except he is really skinny and is able to scale temples and walls in caves. He isn't exactly realistic because of his crazy strength and stamina. I don't think Arnold Schwarzenegger (when he was buff) could even be able to climb temples. Elena, the woman in the story, is a white lady who is skinny and is a normal lady who's not all kinky and sexual like in TTT. She's just as tough as Nathan (she can climb stuff) and she's a pretty normal person. This game is probably the most accurate representation of normal people.

Gears of War features all of dudes. There is one woman that I saw once in the game, that was skinny and weird looking because of the game graphics. This game is once again male dominated. Most of the men in the game are huge behemoths with giant muscles, scars, and low loud voices. Marcus Fenix, the main character you play, is the biggest bad *** in the game. He can pack a punch. He is the manliest man there. He has big heavy armor and big muscles, loud low voice and scars all over his face. He's also really ugly, making him seem really manly.


Thoughts: The hidden messages that are ingrained in these games are both same and different. In both MW2 and Gears of War, there are only men and they are all buff and crazy. When there are females present like in TTT, the men become less invincible and come to the women' level. Women are seen more like objects in video games because the male developers can bend the shape of the character's body and everything they are. In other games besides TTT like Dead or Alive, this is evident. The women in DOA are extremely suggestive and revealing, evidence of male developer fantasy. Other messages like men are strong and women are weak come up. In Gears of War, the only woman in the game is a little scrawny weakling. This media can could have a tremendous impact on people who aren't thinking about media messages in my media. Men would be more effected because men play more video games than women. Men (like me) would probably not give a second though about looking at a woman in TTT because it's part of our modern culture. The media says that suggestive video game women is okay, so men won't give it a second thought. What would you do you think the video game developers put these messages into their games? I already knew about inequality with women in video game, but I didn't know a lot about it and when I saw a sexual stereotype I kind of let it slide and just thought that was the way the media is. I felt very disappointed with the developers because of the issue with men and women inequality. I thought that was very evil of them to make women in video games so suggestive and revealing for male enjoyment. This project really won't change the way I use the media because I don't usually play games that contain very many women in them that are sexual or suggestive anyways, so this will not change my using of my media.