be//UPTODATE, be//VOCAL, UB

“arcademy” at Subotron, Lecture Series, Wien, 23 February 2018

Lecture Series “arcademy” at Subotron, the hub for digital game culture at Museumsquartier Wien (Austria), 23 February 2018

Uta Brandes

Body Talk: Representations of Gender Constructions in Video Games

We are body, we have a body, we may own a body. And this body as well as its image can be distorted, rearranged, blurred … . This applies to both the body of flesh and blood and the virtual one. The idea of a natural body of humans is as obsolete as it is for a virtual body, an avatar or cyborg.

I will position my long-term research on gender in design and its still highly stereotypical ideology of socially constructed male and female roles towards gender representations in video games. In my lecture I will transfer human gender codes to the field of virtual characters and their body designs. By way of example, I will analyse the appearance of genders in some of the most recent games.