“THE CREATURE ITSELF IS NASTY, BUT NOTHING REALLY COMPARES TO THE BUILDING OF DREAD BEFORE YOU EVER GET TO IT”: ONLINE PLAYER AND DEVELOPER COMMENTARY ON FEMALE MONSTROSITY IN VIDEO GAMES

Gender representation in video games has long been a fraught topic ofdiscussion within online gaming communities. In game scholarship, analysis of the usuallyharmful tropes and trends of female representation has resulted in countless studiesdemonstrating that video games are often a regressive medium in terms of representation,privileging heterosexual white male subjectivities and erasing, marginalizing, or evenvilifying anyone outside of that specific demographic. These conversations and scholarlystudies tend to focus on the representation of human women, especially as victimizeddamsels-in-distress. Considerably less work has been done to analyse the portrayal ofvillainous and monstrous nonhuman women in games, even though countless science fiction,fantasy, and horror games feature these kinds of characters. Many of these games utilizeharmful tropes and design practices related to female villainy and monstrosity, therebyreinforcing misogynistic ideologies. With the understanding that gender representations ingames can have deep cultural ramifications, especially as they intersect withrepresentations of race, sexuality, queerness, body size, disability, mental illness, andage, this paper examines online player and developer discourse regarding female-codedmonsters from a selection of commercially successful “AAA” video games. The intent of thisproject is to contribute to ongoing scholarship on monstrosity in games by looking at howdevelopers explain and justify their design processes in online interviews and forum postsand how players/fans articulate their attitudes towards and reception of these monstrouscreatures.