Evaluation

I started this project with a couple of expectations; I expected to see a trend in male characters being depicted as the dominant, strong, heroes while female characters were depicted on the whole as far more passive, reliant and helpless supporting roles. Throughout my research these archetypes did seem to appear quite commonly.

When reading other peoples views on the representations of the genders in digital games most of the discussion was pertaining to the sexist connotations of the gender representations. I myself was always more inclined to agree with those that said digital games were sexist, particularly pertaining to their representation of women. Upon reading what Mark Marrow and Jon Wood had to say, I am now more inclined to agree that there is definately an "ideal" shown in a lot of game characters, quite often oriented around sexy or heroic characters. These ideals can sometimes be seen as sexist in their depiction, but it is not only women who are displayed thus, men are too and if the game is one oriented around high action then these types of characters are more likely to be in those situations anyway.

Ultimately I think that the representation of men and women in digital games is very similar to the depiction of men and women in cinema. Cinema has had around a century now to become a widely accepted and available media and the ways in which men and women have been depicted has changed with the fashions and trends of the times but seems to have always had some consistent themes of representation within it.
Games on the other hand are a far newer media, with not even half a century of history behind them. Their development, visually in particular has advanced rapidly over the last few years and so we've been able to produce better quality, more realistic looking characters. A lot of these characters fit similar archetypes to those that appear in cinema, but with a game we have the freedom to customise the appearance of the characters far more than we can with actors. This seems to have resulted in far more "idealised" representations of men and women.

I feel it is this ability to create a character to our exact specifications, and it's application in making these "ideal" characters, along with the relative age of digital games which contributes to the views that games do not fairly represent men and women. As games become more widely accepted in mainstream culture and society, perhaps our views of the representation of men and women will change, or perhaps game developers will pay more attention to other areas of the games and not focus on having such "idealised" characters.
Either way, I see little difference to the way men and women are represented in games as they are in other medias, we merely have more say on the specifics of the characters we create than the actors we have to choose from to adopt a persona in a film for example.