Do you think that development of sexist video games needs to be stopped? Well, we can debate on that all we want, but there are at least some French members of parliament who think that such games not only need to be stopped but penalized!
This is not new, an amendment to penalize games that have degrading representation of women was forwarded some time ago but got withdrawn. This was the second time such an amendment to the law was put forward but this time it was rejected by the parliament itself.
The President of the Delegation for Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities Between Men and Women, Catherine Coutelle, led the introduction of the amendment in the French parliament alongside 13 other members of the parliament.
She insisted that sexist games (I am assuming she had Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 revolving all around in her head at that time) as well as games that completely avoid using female characters needed to be stopped.
She referred to how Assassin’s Creed Unity developers have been misquoted to have said that female characters are to hard to draw and even made reference to Kara from the tech demo of Quantic Dream where Coutelle implied that the female droid’s representation was sexist.
Thereafter, 3DS games Imagine were also brought up because they promoted household chores for women and lastly the hypersexualization in Dishonored.
In all honesty, some of the examples she gave were either misquotations, misrepresentations or just out of context although the issue she raised with the sexist video games is very real.
However, the French parliament decided that the country does not need a law against sexist video games because their own studios are already working on games like Life is Strange that push forth a better image of women and also because such a drastic step would push away the chances of a growing industry in the country.
Do you think games are becoming more and more sexist as Coutelle suggested or is it the other way around now?
