A Greater Need for Diversity in the Video Game Industry and Culture

Since time immemorial, men have often viewed women as innocent, frail, and desirable objects. Throughout history, stories and art done by men tend to be a reflection those beliefs. Cases in point include the ancient Greek myth Andromeda, the medieval fairy tale Snow White, Jacques-louis David's The Oath of the Horatii, and Adolphe William Bouguereau's Nymphs and Satyr. Enter the 21st century and video games. By now, views of women have changed. Yet the way in which women are depicted and represented in mass media and popular culture have continued to cling to the ancient and by-now outdated views of women in spite of the social reforms instigated in the United States, Japan, and other progressive nations. This is also the unfortunate case with video games.

Escapism and Maturity in Video Games

(Note: This post is one of two posts that were originally posted three days prior on The Voice of Heard. I reposted them here as start-up entries and as an attempt to make them accessible to a wider audience with The Escapist's Realm.)

Every day, we all go through some form of daily routine in our lives, which include taking responsibilities for ourselves. We work at our jobs to make a living; we support our families by buying food for the table, paying our taxes, etc; we spend our mornings, afternoons, and sometimes evenings studying in school; at home, we clean our rooms, our cars, and sometimes our whole houses; we work on assignments for the schools we study in and/or the jobs we work in, which is also usually at home; the list of our responsibilities goes on and varies from individual to individual. Once we get those responsibilities done, and until we would inevitably have to deal with more, we have a few hours or more to ourselves; we would have a break from our routines, a moment to unwind and have some peace of mind. Many would call this leisure, spare time in which we could do anything for our pleasure and to relieve ourselves of the stress that results from the responsibilities had to deal with. We could spend that time doing anything that suits our interests, like reading a book (such as a work of nonfiction, novel, comic book, etc.), watching TV (be it something on broadcast or on a DVD or Blu-Ray, like a TV series or a movie), or playing a video game. By doing activities like these, we immerse ourselves in other worlds we could find enjoyable to observe or interact in. Some of those worlds are similar to the one we live and breathe in but are not entirely real while others are, for lack of better words, entirely made up. This sort of activity is an escape from the responsibilities and routines of our everyday lives; in short, it is escapism, the subject of this entry.