Compared to a number of my peers in BCM215 doing our digital artefacts, I am not looking at one game in particular, which has shown to be a slight issue, but rather than looking at one game, I am looking at one experience. The experience of Let’s Players and their interaction with characters – and whether this is influenced by their gender. When considering the academic framework, I wanted this digital artefact to really express what I was passionate about and to share some key issues in our society today. As a young woman in this modern day, who is someone who plays videogames and does watch a lot of YouTube something that always sticks out to me is the influence that Lets Players can have.
So, this is where my first concept of my digital artefact came into play : The Let’s Player.
It’s not easy to credit the very first Let’s Play video, but they’ve exploded in popularity since roughly 2012. Big names like PewDiePie, Markiplier, and RoosterTeeth had enormous growth in their channels by playing games on their channels. By melding personality with gameplay, the Let’s Play community makes content that is both informative and entertaining. Watching others play video games gives you a sense of what a game is like without having to shell out the dollars for it yourself.
Coming from roughly 2012, audiences continue to follow these channels to this day – even if the channels aren’t always publishing Let’s Play videos. So, reflecting just under 10 years later, audiences have grown up and developed their personalities alongside these content creators. A paper written by Matisse Melendres expressed that, “Youtubers do not realize the amount of affect and influence their behaviour and actions reflect on teenagers”.
From this, leads into my next two focus points in my digital artefact, which really come hand in hand with one another, (and becomes slightly hard to separate) is the character, and the gender of the character.
Upon researching in Google ‘best videogame characters’, you are met with Game Designing’s article, “The 50 Most Influential Video Game Characters of All Time”, and as you scroll through this article and this list of videogame characters, you will find that out of 50 characters on the list, there is a total of 9 females on the list… compared to the total of 41 males on the list. Should I begin to even explain the lack of female representation in videogames? Over the last few years, we have seen some rapid improvement, there are still lengths to go to equalise the representation of females on our screen compared to males. When Let’s Players are interacting with these characters, they are trying to connect to the characters on a personal level, and in a sense, are getting to know them. But when an individual may have some perceived notions about a particular kind of person, they will often treat them in a particular way in regard to that eg. someone may see women as weak, and their natural instinct in games is to be protecting, or perhaps they may be rougher with a male character because males are just expected to be stronger.
When they may treat a character in particular because of their gender, do we then find that, because of their influence as an ‘internet figure’, they are subconsciously influencing their audience to react in a similar way? It is a heavily researched topic and is not one that I believe will die down any time soon, but for my digital artefact, I am keen to share my own findings with my own audience and let them decide.
Bibliography
Melendres, Matisse, “Youtubers Influence of Young People” (2019). Pop Culture Intersections. 42. https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/engl_176/42
Tyler, Dustin, “The 50 Most Influential Videogame Characters of All Time”, date unknown. https://www.gamedesigning.org/gaming/characters/
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