Government-funded innovation agency, Vinnova, has enlisted the Swedish video-game industry trade group Dataspelsbranschen to explore the prospect of creating a “sexist” label for future games produced in Sweden.
Dataspelsbranschen is reportedly being paid approximately $36,672 to evaluate the portrayal of female characters in games.
The project’s director, Anton Albiin, told Swedish newspaper, the Local, it has not been determined whether the “sexist” certification will be a label on the box or a certificate for the game developer’s website.
“I do not know of any other project in the world asking this question, and of course, we want Sweden to be a beacon in this area,” said Albiin.
Albiin also noted he is not sure if all Swedish games would be graded on their treatment of women or whether only games with positive portrayals would receive special labels.
Video games have long been seen as a source of misogynistic fantasy and though some developers are placing strong female characters in games – think BioWare’s Dragon Age: Inquisition and Square Enix’s Tomb Raider reboot – women are often used as props, rewards, objects or targets to be assaulted, raped or run over by a cars.
Even while gaming increases in popularity among women currently only 16 per cent of the people working in Sweden’s booming $935 million gaming industry are women. And while that figure is low it is significantly higher than the 3 per cent of female video-game programmers and 11 per cent of female designers that make up the industry in the US.
“Of course games can be about fantasy, but they can be so much more than this,” Albiin said.
“They can also be a form of cultural expression — reflecting society or the society we are hoping for.
“Games can help us to create more diverse workplaces and can even change the way we think about thing.”
*The Bechdel test was coined by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in 1985 which asks three rudimentary questions of a film as a way to demonstrate the very basic level at which gender biases operate in movies: 1) Does the movie have two female characters?; 2) Do they speak to each other?; 3) Do they speak about something other than a man? Unfortunately, many movies — even today, almost 20 years after the test was created — don’t pass.
