Sexism in Video Games

EDITED: I didn’t like how this post turned out. Updated in an easier to read format, and to the point.

Yesterday I was trying out the most recent expansion Wraith of the Lich King for World of Warcraft when I made a female Night Elf Death Knight. Afterwards, I also made a male Human Death Knight. After you complete the starting area and are free of the Lich King, every Death Knight will have similar armor. Plate mail, dark in color, and covers every part of you and with spikes hanging off. Unless you’re a female. I noticed she had a bare mid section and bare elbows, despite the enormous amount of metal that covered her otherwise. My male character didn’t have this problem. It seems like a poor decision to go into battle with one of your more vulnerable body sections visible, and available for your enemy to gouge you and disembowel you. Some differences in armor are to be expected. The chest plate will always be different, to account for the woman’s breasts for example. Different proportions are also expected between sexes, and other ornamental differences are easily explained and make sense. I mean, a tabard can cover that area, but it’s still just cloth. Could it have been an option to bare certain parts of the body? Modifications to the armor? Actually, modifying armor for visual or practical use would be great regardless, so I’d like to see it in the game anyways.

Now, since it’s the same armor, the female and male sets have the same defense rating and added bonuses. This is where the real problem arises: The bare stomach should cause your character to incur a lot more damage than if it were completely protected. There are several options they had to explain this to keep it from being sexist: They could say that it was because the women aren’t quite as strong as the men, and prefer the open gaps for better maneuverability and then decrease the armor rating and increase the dodging ability. It could have been a different set of armor technically. Or, best yet, they could have just chosen not to put the gap in at all. Having such an obvious difference in how the sexes are treated kind of pulls you out of the fantasy the game world is trying to place in front of you. This isn’t our world that you’re playing in, this is a world created by the game developers, and therefore sexism didn’t have to be introduced. In fact, in the Night Elf territory, all of the sentinels are female, and I believe the faction leader is also female. If they have so much power over their society, then why are they still being treated as unequals? Why do they still feel the need to run around under dressed? It just seems so out of place. The different dances for each sex is also leaning towards sexism. Men don’t dance like they belong in strip clubs.

In the end, I guess what really irritates me is just that the sexism is involuntary. If you want to be able to dress the character in something provocative, fine, but give everyone the option of not dressing like that. They could also give the option of dressing men in something provocative for the women too, and give them a sexy dance too. I wouldn’t personally use it, but it would be fine for those that want it. It may not seem like a big deal, but in the end, that’s really what the problem is. Why not just make the armor cover all the same areas for each gender? It would be less work to do so. They had to purposely make the women bare in the character models, so they had to do the work to make them different. This seems to counter the idea that women and men can be just as strong as one another that you see in the rest of the game. Men and women of the same race can reach the same level in stats such as strength and agility. They can wear the same armor. Why does it have to look different?

The final issue I have with the sexism, is that they could very easily fix it without really even making any major changes to the game as it stands. How? Lampshade it.

Woman NPC: Why are the women’s armor so revealing?

Man NPC: Because all the armor smiths are men.