Female characters were so commonly hypersexualized that “The message clearly seemed to be that large breasts and/or a hypersexualized appearance were an essential element of female characters” (Burgess). On the other hand, the frequency of unrealistically sized and shaped breasts was difficult to interpret as anything other than sexist objectification given the irrelevance of breasts to the tasks facing video game characters” (Burgess).Ī different study, which was focused on the covers of video games and how they portrayed characters, found similar results to Downs and Smith’s. The pairing of muscular men and violence was not surprising given that one could reasonably expect strength to be required to vanquish super-human enemies.
“In the relatively rare cases where women were portrayed as…wielding the violent power video games offer, this role almost always came with exaggerated sexuality.
Male characters are often portrayed as violent and tough or violent and powerful, but their violence is rarely ever offset by beauty or sexiness as is the case with female characters. The Male versus Female: A Visual Comparison page contains examples of this.Īdditionally, female characters frequently display a combination of violence and sexiness that male characters do not. Likewise, the conclusion that they came to still holds true female video game characters are far more widely sexualized than male characters, even when the only difference between two characters is their gender. While the variables listed above were generated for the purpose of Downs and Smith’s study, they can be applied with just as much impact to other video games. They concluded that more than 50% of the female characters were hypersexualized, while less than 10% of male characters were. Their variables were as follows:īy studying 60 different popular games for three different consoles, Downs and Smith found that the variables applied overwhelmingly more to female characters than to male characters. In a 2009 journal article about the hypersexuality of video game characters, researchers Downs and Smith came up with a list of variables that could be used to classify a character as hypersexualized.
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