Last week we discussed fighting games and first-person shooter games. Both of these game types are associated with violence.  FPS is associated more with weaponized violence and fighting games are more associated with hand to hand combat.  Both genres of games are associated with a high degree of hypermasculinity.  With fighting games, I feel that the hypermasculinity could steam from the design of female characters within the games.  For FPS games, I feel that the hypermasculinity could steam from the community surrounding the game and how people view FPS games as a “guy game”.  This could be based off of the idea that warfare and violence are typically male driven, thus it is carried through video games.

Within the article, “Female Fighters: Perception of Femininity in the Super Smash Bros. Community” by John Adams, the concept of vague positivity was brought up.  Vague positivity refers to positivity expressed toward female characters within games that isn’t based off of a sexual or romantic manner (106). When reading this I was actually pretty surprised. It’s unfortunate that the norm is for players to criticize female characters in games or to overly sexualize them.  When creating a tier list of all the fighting characters, the preference for the characters seemed to be based off of the characters merits, not people’s personal feelings towards them. Because of this, there was no real gender preference.  I feel like this should be the normal for any kind of game and has character selection. This reminds me of games like Rainbow Six Siege and Overwatch which both include a good balance of female and male characters that each have their own unique abilities and role on the team. When I play both these games with friends, no one really focuses on the gender of each character and everyone is comfortable playing characters that aren’t their own gender.  I would be curious what the overall attitude would be towards female characters in these games if there were to be a study conducted in the same manner as the one in this article. I would think that the overall attitude of players toward female characters in these games would fall in line with the results that were found in the article.

With fighting games and FPS games, there always seems to be this issue of hypermasculinity but games such as Super Smash Bros are combating that.  Other fighting games like Mortal Kombat are known for their hypermasculinity and that probably will not change.  In Mortal Kombat the female characters are often wearing very revealing clothing with exaggerated bodily features.  The design of the female characters contributes to how players view femininity in that game.  Super Smash Bros does not have female characters that are designed in that way, so the focus if taken less off of the design and femininity of the character and more on their actual moves and abilities.

Works Cited

Adams , John. Female Fighters: Perceptions of Femininity in the Super Smash Bros. Community.