Non-Traditional Women in Video Games: Playing with Female Characters’ Gender Presentation

Video games have become notorious as a male-dominated and heteronormative environment, where gender non-traditional women characters have little space for equal representation. Research has explored the sexualization of women and limited portrayal of gender non-traditional women characters, though it is unclear what the effects are of including non-traditional women in video games. To test this, we randomly assigned 425 people (Mage = 23.81; SD = 5.71) to imagine playing a female character in a third-person, single-player, RPG video game, where the character either had a more traditionally masculine or feminine gender presentation. Participants then rated the character on heroicness, satisfaction with playing the character, and relatability to the character, along with the anticipated quality of the video game. Our results showed that participants rated the character’s traits and the video game quality more positively when the female character appeared more masculine and that this effect was amplified for participants with high egalitarian values. These results suggest that players do prefer non-traditional female video game characters who appear more masculine over feminine female characters.