“Pretty good for a girl”: A feminist content analysis of female video game characters, and interviews with female gamers

Munday, Elizabeth 2018. “Pretty good for a girl”: A feminist content analysis of female video game characters, and interviews with female gamers. MPhil Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Feminist media scholars have long sought to understand the representations of women in the media, in which women are consistently depicted as secondary to men, which they have used to highlight issues of gender relations. My research involved the analysis of representations of female characters in games and explored how female gamers make sense of them, providing a more in-depth look at women in the media, whilst also addressing issues of gender such as leisure time. The gendering of leisure is important as it provides a wider basis for my more nuanced arguments about video games and those who play them. Throughout my research I endeavoured to study not only how women are represented in video games, but also the experiences of female gamers and how they continue to interact with the gaming community. Drawing widely from existing feminist media research, I studied the common representations of women in video games, and what female gamers thought of them. I also researched their experiences as female gamers within the gaming community – how they had been treated as “gamers”, but also how they continued to engage and interact with the gaming community. In order to gather this information, I utilised Content Analysis to gather and analyse game content through further Visual Analysis. This provided me with a range of insights into common patterns in the representations of women across a wide range of currently popular games, such as the role of healer. As for the experiences and engagement of gamers, I utilised interviews to gather information from individuals and tracked patterns across their experiences as a whole. Most notable are the issues of abuse and harassment, but also how women continue to engage with gaming and create their own “safe spaces” within the community both for themselves and others.

Item Type:	Thesis (MPhil)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Journalism, Media and Culture
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	15 July 2019
Last Modified:	04 Oct 2021 11:29
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/124182

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