Culture - Portrayal Of Gender

How Has Gender Portrayal influenced Games Development?

Gender portrayal is important in any forms of media as people should aim to treat them fairly, this is important in gaming as it can lead to people having certain feelings towards how a gender may be portrayed – this means that developers will need to take consideration of gender portrayal carefully. 


An example of gender portrayal that did not result well was when (McWhertor, 2016) reports that Blizzard Entertainment’s multiplayer shooter Overwatch faced controversial backlash in 2016 due to a portrayal of a character within their game. The article reads that the character Tracer (who is female) possessed a winning pose that was considered sexual to a large number of people, this led to the audience feeling that she was being intentionally being sexualised due to the pose she was doing and the obviously the gender that was doing it which made people feel that Blizzard Entertainment choose to sexualise female characters. This initially started when a player pointed out that the winning pose was ‘oversexualized’ and ‘unbefitting the character’s personality’ (McWhertor, 2016) to which from there more people were aware about the situation, sparking the backlash towards Blizzard as a result of this. Blizzard learnt their mistake from this and has removed the pose from the game with considerations of being careful about how they portray their in-game character’s gender in Overwatch. From this report, we can make a conclusion that gender portrayal is important in today’s world of gaming as it can lead to negative backlash from a general audience. This event will make developers want to consider how they fairly portray gender in their character designs as they will want to avoid objectifying a gender or displaying them in an inappropriate manner for their videogames, not being careful will lead to consequences such as the one Blizzard Entertainment faced.