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Computer Space
First commercially sold video game ever made. -
First Gaming System exposing Women with Advertisment
In November 1971, Atari Ping was one of the first games to be put in an arcade. The advertisment for the game was the first to expose women to appeal to the customer audience being primarily young males. -
The Start of Normalizing Women as Decorative Elements
The burgeoning gaming industry started to normalize using women in advertisments as decorative elements. -
Advertisment of Women as Decorative Elements to Games
Gaming adds continued to put girls on display next to arcade games throughout the 1980's to 1990's, correlating the two as being mere objects to be played with for the target audience of boys and men. -
Racing Game Genre First to Objectify Women in Games
The first genre of gaming to use women in the actual game itself as hyper-sexualized ornamental objects was the racing games. -
The Norm of Background Decoration of Women Fully Emerge
After racing games started using this tactic in there games to lure a certain audience in by highlighting a womens body along side the story plot of the game, other gaming programs adapted this strategy and starting doing the same. -
Defining Background Decoration of Women
Feministfrequency defined this new normality within the gaming world as " the subset of largely insignificant non-player female characters whose sexuality or victimhood is exploited as a way to infuse edgy, gritty, or racy flavoring into game worlds. These sexually objectified female bodies are designed to function as enviromental texture while titillating presumed straught male players." -
Sexualizing Women as Background Decoration
Background decoration of women are programed to say and do whatever the creator of the game permits. To appeal to gamers, women in background decoration were programmed to be highly sexualized. They are programmed to be dressed with minimal to no clothes on and found on the streets and in strip clubs. There dialogue is highly sexualized along with there programmed behavior to add a "seedy" element to the gaming world. -
Sexual Objectification Plays a Big Role in Gaming World
Sexual Objectification of Women: Advances to Theory and Research Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997 define sexual objectification which is in summery the representation of a human being as a thing to be used for another persons sexual purposes. The Counseling Psychologist 39(1) 6–38 © The Authors 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0011000010378402 http://tcp.sagepub.com -
Violence Against Women in Games
How sexism in video games furthers violence against women With sexually objectifing women classifying them as only mere objects, it permited for violence against them as well. Games enabled players to directly abuse women in order to complete missions or to add a sense of power dominance. Allowing the player to assult, mutilate, and murder the background women. -
Defining Violability in regards to the Gaming World
In regards to the gaming world, Martha Nussbaum defines violability as " the objectifier treats the object as lacking in boundary-integrity, as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, breath into." -
"Active Looking" Sexual Objectification of Women
Before the 2000's, games objectified women in terms of passive looking, which means that women were in the background of games but not part of the story plot or mission. By 2000's the term "active looking" was coined because women became part of the story plot and mission. Example of this, in the game Darkness 2, player is forced to look to the left to learn the keys and instructed to objectify women in the surroundings. -
Present Day Activist
Feminstfrequency Youtube Channel Women like Brianna Wu, Zoe Quinn, and Anita Sarkeezian are feminist who are educating the public on this issue in the gaming world through speeches, talks, and blogs. Anita Sarkeezian has a youtube channel called "Feministfrequency" were she talks about the many issues women face in the gaming world.
