ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the feminist understanding of videogames by identifying and critically examining several related lines of feminist criticism of videogames. Common to all invisibility arguments is the charge that videogames systematically under-represent female characters and misrepresent them as passive, in need of saving, and as hypersexualized. The chapter outlines and criticizes popular invisibility arguments. It argues that both academic and popular invisibility arguments fail on empirical grounds. The chapter develops invisibility arguments that are independent of at least some of the empirical data that popular invisibility arguments rely upon. Popular invisibility arguments share a common thought with academic ones, namely that females are systematically underrepresented and misrepresented in video-game worlds. There is likely a substantive racio-ethnic gap in videogames overall, as well as a racio-gender gap. And, there is likely a substantive gender gap in that videogames tend to reflect the assumption of a male-female binary with respect to gender.
