Graduate student Jan James will be presenting her paper “Negating the Female Gamer: A Cluster Criticism of BioWare’s Game Cover for Mass Effect: Andromeda” at the 103rd National Communications Association in the Visual Communication Division held in Dallas, Texas.
James is a non-traditional graduate student in the Communications Department. Her passion for equal representation in a virtual reality is evident in being in her presence.
Dylan McCurdy, a communications graduate student and office-mate of James’ commented on her work and passion.
“I can tell you she is super invested in her work, and it’s cool. She is, for lack of a better word, appropriating her life experiences. She uses this thing called autoethnography,” McCurdy said. “She finds agency in a structured environment. Despite that program with the predestine structure so you are the one expressing agency.”
James will be bringing to light discrimination within video games and their covers. With 59 percent of players being men and 41 percent as women, with average ages being 33 and 37 respectively, there is raise in equal representation; however, there continues to a female lack of representation.
BioWare, a video game company, has taken leaps and bounds in representation by including the option to choose the gender, race, and sexual orientation of you character, described James.
But we have yet to reach a resolution in gaming, as for game covers, there is a very unequal representation of women or even the game itself. James analyses the covers through the characters’ and games’ representation.
Most game covers James found, show the male protagonists with heavy armor, aggressive body stances, hyper masculine forms along with other factors, all referring to male strength.
James was able to find one foreign cover with a woman. The woman depicted on the cover was standing in full armor, checking her watch, holding her gun down, with a transparent shield on her helmet.
“Wait for a moment to see how she looks. I’ve never had a woman character or in real life, stand like that. Arched back, and forward tilting chest, and rear end out. It’s like, come on BioWare, you’re better than that,” James said. “I would like to think that it is a first-person shooter game, when it is not. It’s a role-playing game.”
She uses a comparison to book covers as an example of the importance in the message video game covers convey. There is no blurb on the back of the video game like there are on books. An audience must deter all their information from the game cover because the back has all the game stats and programming on it.
Many of the covers, described by James, are similar to a Darth Vader like stance of intimidation. The further the covers are examined the visual representation allows for a n established male, marginalizing women.
With further analyzation of characters within the game, James provided light about the characters she creates and the game generated characters.
From a study used in her research, Jan described the over 8,700 game generated characters of which 85 percent were male. This study pooled information from video games that were actually sold and represented 95 percent of sales.
“My whole goal with this is to make cyberspace gender neutral. Really, we need to share. James said. “Even the alien races that are represented, can’t we just appreciate each other as living beings, as it doesn’t have to be either/or.”
