Final Project

Not much has changed in video game box covers

Men are featured much more frequently than women on the box covers of the best-selling video games, and rarely less than fully-clothed. Any women that appear are often depicted as partially nude, sexualized, marginalized, or some combination thereof.

The previous study was conducted by Smith, Pieper, and Choueiti, in 2004 and covered 74 best-selling games spread across the three major consoles (also called platforms or systems): 25 each for Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s Playstation 2, and 24 for Nintendo’s Gamecube. It revealed that men dominate covers, and are rarely coded as “partially nude” or as wearing “sexually explicit attire.” The opposite was true for women: less than a third of all video games studied have even one woman on the cover, but 73% of those that did featured partial female nudity. The study made similar findings in every category; of the covers with sexually revealing clothing, 73% put women in that attire, only 33% did so with men. Even games rated E (the video game equivalent of a movie rated G) featured partial nudity, to the tune of 36%.

The most relevant previous study was done by Provenzo in 1991, and looked at 47 of Nintendo’s best-selling video games. This study was the first to analyze box cover art, as the Smith study later would. It found that men outnumbered women on box covers 13 to 1, and also found that even non-gendered characters like aliens and mythical creatures outnumbered women. Also, it determined that men were often portrayed as dominant, while a full third of women were not only not depicted as dominant; they were submissive.

My corpus consists of 74 video games, the 25 best-selling games each for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, and the 24 best-selling games for the Wii, according to Amazon.com. Essentially, I am recreating the Smith study almost exactly as it was performed, except on the new generation of video game consoles; the consoles in my study are newer and better, and each one replaces one in the Smith study (Xbox 360 instead of Xbox, etc). My method includes a quantitative analysis of simpler aspects such as the number of men and women, game ratings, etc. I then did a qualitative analysis wherein I coded the amount of nudity, the sexual nature of a character’s clothing, a character’ submission/dominance and any sexual behaviors displayed. Worth noting: many video game characters are soldiers, mercenaries, spies, or otherwise engaged in career violence, so I coded characters with bloodthirsty, determined, stoic, or otherwise difficult-to-categorize appearances as simply dominant. Results were compiled and divided according to each game’s rating: either E, T (like the PG-13 rating for movies), and M (comparable to the R rating; games with this rating cannot be purchased by anyone under 17 without a parent present). Additional provision: games are often developed “cross-platform,” meaning the same game is made for several game consoles in order to reach more of the market; I counted each occurrence of the game separately. For example, Call of Duty 4 is available for the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3, and was counted as two instances of an M-rated game with one fully-dressed, non-sexual, dominant man and no women on its cover.

Predictably, I found that men still dominate video game box covers. Men were present on 49 of the 74 box covers; women could be found on only 23. Of the 49 depictions of men, 48 were coded as fully clothed, leaving only 2% partially nude. Women were depicted as fully clothed in 11 out of the 23 covers they appeared on; 56% were partially nude. Just 6 box covers featured a woman as the main character; two were coded as partially nude, one as as sexual, two as both, and only one as neither fully-clothed nor non-sexual. One game, Mass Effect (rated M), featured a male main character and a fully-dressed non-sexual woman slightly behind and left of him in a supporting role. But there was an alien behind and to the man’s right, in a similar supporting role, and another alien’s face spanning the width of the cover across the top; this one had a menacing look and was apparently the main bad guy. Here, exactly as in the Provenzo report, non-gendered characters outnumbered women. Men appeared dominant on 34 covers, or 69%, while women were dominant on 3 covers, or 13%. The Nintendo Wii had more E-rated best-selling games than the other two systems combined, but men were just as prevalent and women just as rare. Overall, the typical depiction of men on T- and M-rated game covers was dominant, fully-dressed, and often carrying one or several weapons. I was unable to come up with a typical depiction of women; they were literally too rare to draw any meaningful conclusions.

The results of my abbreviated study fall very much in line with the results of previous studies. I found a steady supply of women on box covers from games like Guitar Hero, where women were often depicted as partially nude band members (but never as the band’s leader). I also saw a pronounced split between the Xbox 360 & Playstation 3, which had many best-selling M-rated games, and the Wii, whose best-seller list is almost exclusively populated with E-rated games. If I could do a more in-depth study, I would go beyond the box cover art and explore the correlation between characters’ representations on game covers versus in the game. The game mentioned earlier, Mass Effect, features a relatively marginalized woman on its cover, but my research indicates she is an important major character. Other possible avenues to explore include finding out how often a woman depicted as partially nude and/or sexualized on the cover actually plays a minor role, or wears more clothing, or acts more demurely in the game; like she was being used as window dressing. I could also examine sexuality vis-à-vis body language, vocal tonality, innuendo, situations, camera angles, music and so on, and compare men and women in this area.

Bibliography

Smith, S.L., Pieper, K., and Choueiti, M. (2004). Video Game Packaging and Ad Copy: Are Gaming Publishers in Compliance with the ARC. Previously unpublished raw data.

Provenzo, E.F. (1991). Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.