The media pays a lot of attention to violence in kids’ video games. But when we’re looking at messages in games, I’m also concerned about the troubling signals in games designed for tween girls. In an article in WIRED magazine, Tracey John asks whether games that encourage girls to be pretty and liked above all else could be just as damaging as games like Grand Theft Auto.
What is Carrie the Caregiver teaching our daughters?
John mainly deals with console games, but I also looked at a variety of PC games and noticed similar lessons and messages. Mostly I tried time-management games where the player takes on the role of a young woman running a business, including Carrie the Caregiver, Pet Show Craze, Sally’s Salon, and Fix-It-Up: Kate’s Adventure.
1. Girls should be encouraged to pursue caregiving occupations.
Perhaps the most cringe-worthy of this type of game is Carrie the Caregiver. The first game in this series sees the ever-perky Carrie working in a nursery where she exhibits an unnatural level of enthusiasm all day as she feeds, burps, and changes babies. Check out the trailer:
Even the games where the main character runs a business involve small service-industry businesses like Sally’s Salon or the bakeries in Cake Mania, which reinforce the perception that all women are natural caretakers.
2.Ambitious older women are your enemies.
The older woman enemy in Pet Show Craze
The back-stories for the games usually include an older, angry, cold, and ambitious woman who’s trying to put you out of business.
Most of these games have twin goals of earning money and boosting your reputation (usually represented by hearts), indicating that likeability is just as or more important than money. If you don’t worry about what other people think of you, these games suggest, you might end up like the frigid, older woman you’ve been fighting.
Do you know of any boys’ games that encourage the player to spend time collecting hearts to make people like him?
3. Your customers will reinforce race and gender stereotypes, and beauty is key.
All the male characters in Pet Show Craze gain hearts if you seat them next to the supermodel, even the little boy
Pet Show Craze has some of the best examples of this: each type of character owns one type of animal and your black customers are the only ones who own monkeys. Also, all the male customers gain hearts if you seat them next to the supermodel, but most don’t get a kick out of the sporty girl.
Rewards in these games include unlocking new outfits for your character and new décor for the business.
4. You’d better end up in a (heterosexual) relationship
Many tween girl games include the main character finding love. For example, the entire story of Cake Mania 3 revolves around making sure the main girl character gets back in time for her wedding. Further, Carrie the Caregiver adopts a daughter from Africa and meets her future husband, Will.
Even the more unique Fix-It-Up: Kate’s Adventure, which features a muscular girl with dreadlocks repairing cars, revolves around a back-story in which she falls in love with a guy who helps her fix cars. The amount of attention given to this story and its happy resolution implies her ending up with the guy at the end is just as important as the success of her business.
So are these games as harmless as they seem on the surface? Or are they telling young girls that being beautiful and being liked are the goals, not just in the game, but in life?
Felicia Day is not your typical female star—and that’s what we love about her.
Day became known to many television viewers during her stint on the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, starred in “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog,” and is the writer, producer, and director of the popular web series The Guild, a show that parodies the culture of online role-playing games.
As noted in a post a few weeks ago, the majority of starring roles in television seem to go to curvy blondes. Redheads are usually cast as wacky sidekicks, like Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or as fiery-tempered fighters, like the argumentative Dr. Brennan in Bones. In defiance of this limiting stereotype, Day’s character, “Codex”, is a shy yet intelligent gamer who seems like the girl next door.
When asked by Wired magazine about the inspiration for The Guild, Day said:
Most people don’t make a living acting. But being the kind of girl who is stereotyped as the secretary — or I’ve played a crazy cat lady five times, which is fine because I do that very well — but at a certain point you’re like, ‘I am more than this.’ That’s why I wrote Codex [her character in The Guild]. I sat down and was like, ‘What role would I have the most fun playing and would never be offered to me?’ I think Codex, in a mainstream world, would have a perfect nose and great highlights, but that’s not reality. And I wanted to, somehow, infuse reality into what I was doing.
Rather than give in to the pressure to change to fit the Hollywood ideal, Day seems more interested in changing the way Hollywood works.The Guild has no studio oversight, no million-dollar budget, and no A-list cast. Yet their promotional video for the third season of the show has over 4 million views on YouTube, and was the number one video download on iTunes.
The viral video, entitled “Do You Want to Date My Avatar”, pokes fun at the disconnect between oversexualized gaming avatars and the real appearance and lives of the gamers themselves:
Felicia Day is proof that there is more than one way to succeed as a woman in entertainment, and that women don’t need to accept negative stereotypes in order to do so.
From Kanye to Serena Williams, it seems like everyone has been apologizing for inappropriate comments recently. But one apology you may have missed was that of Orange County Register columnist Mark Whicker.
Phillip Garrido’s backyard, where Jaycee Dugard was held captive for 18 years.
Whicker wrote a seriously offensive column on September 7th that attempted to use the rescue of Jaycee Dugard as a hook for a story on a series of sports highlights.
Dugard’s rescue earlier this year after being kidnapped at age 11 was big news. She had spent 18 years held captive in her abductor’s backyard, where he repeatedly raped her and forced her to give birth to two children.
Apparently Whicker thought a totally appropriate response would be this:
[Dugard] never saw a highlight. Never got to the ballpark for Beach Towel Night. Probably hasn’t high-fived in a while. She was not allowed to spike a volleyball… Now, that’s deprivation.
By turning her story into an intro for sports trivia, Whicker downplayed the violence Dugard suffered. After a reaction by angry readers, Whicker and the OCR’s Deputy Editor of Sports were forced to apologize. Unfortunately, neither actually seemed to understand why.
The same day as his apology, Whicker defended himself to Michael David Smith of AOL Fanhouse, saying: “I am quite surprised by the angry tone of the reaction. I think the intent of the column was still valid.” After Smith said Whicker shouldn’t have been surprised at the backlash, Whicker responded, “Thanks for ripping me. I’m really happy I devoted part of this very hectic day responding to someone who had as little interest in my viewpoint as the crazies out there.”
Likewise, Whicker’s apology comes across as audience-blaming, implying he’s mostly apologetic that “this column appears to have disconnected that bond with at least part of our readers.”
This video game involves "using poison gas on the victim, sexually assaulting her and using psychological abuse against her in efforts to make her 'love' you."
Even the deputy editor’s apology seems to apologize more to Whicker — for “depriv[ing] Mark of what every writer needs: an attentive editor” — than to the audience.
The OCR’s handling of the situation is symptomatic of a society that is so desensitized by the media sensationalizing violence against women that the representation is dissociated from reality.
For example, many commentators argued George Sodini’s shooting of 12 women at a Pennsylvania gym wasn’t motivated by a hatred of women. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert responded to this incident and discussed our perception of violence against women:
“We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.”
With rape simulations in video games becoming more common, crime dramas depicting violence against women with increasing explicitness, and mainstream “comedy” movies like Observe and Reporttreating rape as a joke, violence against women is glamorized and packaged for public consumption.
Observe and Report treats date rape as comedy
Whicker isn’t the only one in the media trivializing misogynist acts of violence and ignoring real women’s trauma, but he should definitely own up to his contribution.
–Jarrah
Jarrah Hodge is a freelance writer and blogger from Vancouver, BC. Jarrah has a degree in Women’s Studies and Sociology and her writing takes an anti-racist, feminist look at pop culture, gender in the news, and politics. Currently Jarrah writes a column called Gender Files for the Vancouver Observer, and also runs her own blog at www.jarrahhodge.wordpress.com. When she’s not working or writing, Jarrah can usually be found playing board games.
As if the world of gaming wasn’t unfriendly enough for women. Feministing caught wind of the latest steaming pile of circuits from Sony: a game called Fat Princess. The premise is capture-the-flag, except here the flag is a woman. Each team feeds their kidnap victim as much cake as possible in order to render her too heavy to carry back to the other side.
Sometimes I wish I wasn’t bound to family-friendly vocabulary. I am exceedingly creeped out by the way the woman is shown as inert, with no free will, no ability or desire to refuse forced feeding. I am upset by the idea that the GOAL is to render a woman immobile. And I can bet you that the game won’t show her fighting off your advances or struggling too much. No, no, that would be too disturbing, too weird. After all, who doesn’t like cake?
I wonder how many women were in the boardroom when they came up with this trash.
Some women???????? are criticizing this game for being offensive to the obese. And it is. The idea that a (victimized, abused) heavy woman can’t just stand up and walk out on her own is disgusting. Let me go a step further though, and say this game is offensive to all women. I’m no gamer, but it seems that our choices are either this or the hydraulic anatomy of Lara Croft. Mario is no bodybuilder and he gets around just fine on his own!
Do you ladies have experiences with video games that you want to share? What do you make of Fat Princess? Vent here or contact PlayStation yourself.
