Angry in Pink: Representation of Women in Video Games in the Infamous Franchise (2009-2014)

It is still common for video games to be classified as a predominantly male pastime. Five years after GamerGate, women and non-binary people still meet with the harassment, sexism, and aggressive behavior (Fox and Tang 2017). On the other hand those games that target women specifically — sometimes called “pink games” — mostly include stereotypes, concentrating their themes around chores, cooking, and fashion. Furthermore, in mainstream games, the male representation of the main characters still overshadows the number of female playable characters. While the non-binary and transgender characters are hardly ever present, women characters are often pigeonholed as a narrative tool, mostly as a trope of “damsel in distress”, victim whose death is to be avenged, or the heterosexual love interest (Ivory 2006, Beck at al. 2012, Huntemann 2014). The parallels can be drawn between the over-sexualization of the playable action protagonists in digital games (Behm-Morawitz and Mastro 2009) and the disagreement to overt expressions of female masculinity in the society (Halberstam 1998). Drawing on Halberstam’s work and I will offer an analysis of Fetch, a protagonist of Infamous First Light (2014) — the standalone additional content to a series of video games developed by Sucker Punch Productions