From “Damsel in distress” to neo-freudism and phenomenology: gender images in video games

The relevance of the topic of gender issues in video games is determined by the modern social and cultural situation, where video games are becoming a significant phenomenon of mass culture, which, on the one hand, reflects the common ideas in society of gender models and roles, on the other hand, forms these ideas through its procedures and customization of avatar, character settings, and through visual, auditory and narrative means. This actualizes the need for a cultural and philosophical study of gender regimes, models and images that are represented by modern video games. The subject of the study is ways of fixing gender in the images of video game characters. The purpose of the study is to analyze the representation of gender images, characterized by a greater or lesser degree of complexity and multi-layeredness, within the framework of the concept of gender hermeneutics in video games created by the authors. Methods and approaches: structural-semiotic approach, psychoanalytic approach, phenomenological method, hermeneutic method. The article analyzes the construction and representation of gender images in video games from a relatively simple narrative to a complex and non-linear narrative. The authors identify and explore psychoanalytic and phenomenological methods of constructing gender images in video games, consider the phenomenon of “secondary semiotization” in games, correlated with the semiotic diversity of complex gender images. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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