Video Games Keep Failing Women

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: A big video game industry event happens and afterward people go, “Wait, did that whole show not include a single woman?” You’d think, in 2023, things would be better. And I guess by the lowest standards they are, but the reality is that we are still dealing with this shit.

As we reported, Summer Game Fest was all men, though host Geoff Keighley (why does he keep showing up in these things?) claimed that wasn’t the plan. They had a woman, one, set to show up but she couldn’t make it. Maybe next year!

Throughout 2023, we watched again and again as gamers and the industry treated women like crap. When we wrote about how most Switch owners, according to data, are women, the comments were filled with men explaining that actually, the moms are buying the consoles. (This was false as the data was about people who buy and play the Switch, you weird losers.) When PC Gamer wrote up a big anniversary post about its 30-year history, it failed to include one woman contributor or writer in the massive list.

And that’s just a handful of examples of how this industry, its fans, and its content creators continue to fail at representing women, supporting them, and taking them seriously as people. Do I have high hopes for next year? Not at all. In fact, I’m expecting some nasty comments or tweets about this section, thus proving it to be accurate.