Grand Theft Auto will have a female protagonist, according to a report from Bloomberg. At the time of this writing, Rockstar Games, which makes Grand Theft Auto, has not confirmed this and did not respond to The Market’s request for comment.
But it will be a big change – there are far fewer playable female characters than male characters in video games. And women have long been portrayed as damsels in distress, like Princess Peach from Super Mario, or as sexual objects depicted in scantily clad clothes and more, like Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider games of the 1990s. She is an archaeologist who researches ancient ruins in boys, shorts and tank tops.
Teresa Lynch, a professor of communication at Ohio State University, has researched how women are portrayed in video games for 31 years and found that they are getting older and it is becoming less common to portray women in this way recently. ‘yes.
The ideas did not disappear completely but they took a step back, giving way to emerging women with deep stories, motives and flaws like Aloy, a warrior and a hunter who has a bow and arrow in the 2017 post-apocalyptic game Horizon Zero Dawn.
“There are a lot of girls in trouble, but it’s not just that there’s a shortage of them,” Lynch said. “And there’s more representation of the main female characters as well.”
One reason for this change? Video game makers understand that women play games too. About half of all American gamers are women, according to the Entertainment Software Association.
“People are really starting to wake up to the idea that they don’t always have to target the same audience,” said Amanda Cote, a professor of media and sports studies at the University of Oregon.
According to Cote, gaming companies began marketing their products to what they considered “non-traditional” gamers and not just teenagers in the early to mid-2000s. This strategy paid off for Nintendo in 2006 – it marketed the Wii console to girls, mothers and the elderly, and eventually sold more than 100 million units.
Cote said that they want their video game avatars to be portrayed in the right way. For example, many female athletes complain about something they call “bikini chain.”
“So this is when you play as a character and you get a cool new piece of armor and when you put it on your avatar, it becomes an armor bikini,” Cote said. “Therefore all your limbs are exposed, and weapons will do nothing to protect you. It actually drives a lot of the players I talk to crazy, because it takes them out of their immersion in the story. It takes them out of their role in the game.”
The 2013 remake of Tomb Raider and its sequels kept these things in mind. The main character, Lara Croft, has been given more realistic dimensions and smaller, undisclosed items.
We still don’t know how Grand Theft Auto 6 will be shown. And the game has been criticized for its controversial content in the past. But it sounds like there is reason for hope.
The video game industry has a reputation for catering to men, and that may be because there are traditionally more men than women playing games.
In a 2021 survey, the World Game Developers Association found that only 30% of respondents working in the game industry identified as women, although the number was slightly up from 2019.
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