Of reviews and women

Video games and their history are mostly seen from a masculine standpoint. Most traces, commentary, workers, communities, significant events or people, etc., are linked to a masculine lens that tends to ignore or marginalize women in video games and their culture. Even if they were clearly minorized in a masculine and sometimes hostile environment, there is a need to observe a part of history that gives us more information on the thought, the production, the influence, and the discourses of women without limiting them to the status of passive victims or to the margins of history. This article uses methods inspired by cultural history and textual analysis to investigate women’s discourses about women protagonists present in the game reviews of the specialized press covering video game culture and the video game industry. By doing so, we will observe a complex situation where different, and sometimes contradicting, intentions can be linked to how women characters are described, criticized, or mentioned in the reviews. As such, this analysis will show a cultural context where women’s writings are sometime influenced by the masculine hegemonic discourses made by or for a mostly gender restricted definition of the ‘gamers’, while other women’s text openly resist this hegemony by criticizing the way the many protagonists and women are represented. Women, their writing, and traces of their intention, can be seen in multiple magazines from 1981 to 2021. As such these public discourses are a small but important part of a more general and diverse history of video games and their communities.