Violence! Mistreatment of women! Go on a homicidal rampage! Show no respect to women! This is what most games nowadays scream out from their lofty perches in video game stores…just waiting for an unsuspecting gamer. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a gamer and I have played a lot of video games including Halo 2, Jade Empire, Final Fantasy 10, Soulcalibur 2, and the Need For Speed series (just to name a few), but the way women are portrayed, in some video games, is upsetting. I do, however, like games with moderate violence; although I know it’s pretend.

According to a survey of several students in the school, people that play video games are strongly against the pointless sexism in video games.

“Well I feel they make the women look as if they don’t care if they’re barely wearing anything. I say put on more clothes. The violence is fine, I love the suspense of it,” said Ashley Bletch.

Violence and the mistreatment of women in video games is the dark side of the industry. The fact is violence is nearly inescapable in video games. Violence can be found in games rated from “E”, for everyone, to “M”, for mature. There are some very good games that have violence like: Halo, Halo 2, the Ratchet and Clank series, Jade Empire, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR), KOTOR 2: The Sith Lords, and the Final Fantasy series. The violence in these games are just by-products of the plot or because they are shooters like Halo and Halo 2.

These quality games are lumped together with the category of video games that I nicely and civilly call “junk games”; junk games are plotless, pointless, and overly violent games like the Grand Theft Auto and the Dead or Alive series. Junk games are sad games that try literally every gimmick ever thought of, from needless sexuality to incredible amounts of violence, that should be illegal, to get people to play their plotless piece of junk. Then you have games like Halo 2, which has moderate levels of violence, gore, shooting, hostile space aliens, and swearing, but yet it uses all of these things but also creates a superb story with an interesting plot.

Another danger is the people that play violent video games and get the dumb idea to go commit the type of acts they witnessed in the game. These fools obviously have either played the game too long or can’t deal with reality well enough to realize that the game is not real. These few people ruin the entire thing for the rest of us gamers that like moderate levels of violence in our video games.

Too often women in many modern video games are degraded. They look like the game designers have never seen an actual woman in their lives. This is especially true for the fighting genre. For example the video game series, Dead or Alive is a sad game trying to use sex appeal to get more people to play it; the same is true for Tomb Raider and other games with tons of sexuality.

In these games they have female characters that look like some kind of supermodel reject that grabbed a military uniform and a gun, or like a they got dressed for a hot night out but instead were dropped into a fighting arena.

There are some games, however, that get it right. Jade Empire, for example, does have some sexuality but it’s tolerable; there is only one scantily clad female character and that is one you can choose; otherwise there is a very small amount of sexuality. In that game most of the women are dressed normally and don’t have backbreaking sized chests. Yet this is just a maverick in an ocean of sameness; in other words a lot of games are degrading to women. This pattern is repeated in every other male dominated area like car magazines and sports.

There is hope for video games. If we get more women to get involved in video games and playing video games, the industry would be forced to undergo some major changes. For example, they would have to re-gear the advertising for games and have less female characters looking like supermodel rejects with chests that have fifty-five gallons of silicone pumped into them. All the mindless garbage is not needed in video games; they have become a multi-million dollar industry.

Video games are actually beginning to get some big name stars and big musicians like Sean Connery, John Cleese, and Danny Elfman. Even the credits for video games are as long or longer than most movies. Yet, these foolish idiots still cling to over sexing their games.

The video game industry pushes girls away by creating a stereotype that says, “girls know nothing about video games”…obviously these guys haven’t been paying attention to other so-called male dominated areas which are beginning to cater more to women.

The people have spoken and now it’s time for video games to tone down the violence and sexism, and stop alienating half of their prospective consumers.