2014 in Gaming Cover Art

The end of the year is drawing upon us and in the first of two posts reviewing this year of gaming, I thought I’d analyze the cover or box art of some of this year’s new console releases. For the sake of simplicity I will be focusing only on some of the best selling titles this year. I will put a disclaimer here: in an era of digital downloads, less reliance on hard copies of games, and extensive pre-release trailers, box art has ceased to play as integral a role in a game’s marketing and sales. Nevertheless, the box art still acts as a “public face” for the game and provides an almost candid look into the presence female characters have in the game and how they are treated. So with that perspective in mind, let’s look at how women are displayed in the covers of some of the top selling console video games of 2014.

The games I’ll be examining are: Grand Theft Auto V, Watch_Dogs, Destiny, FIFA 15, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Lego Marvel Super Heroes, inFAMOUS Second Son, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Minecraft, Battlefield 4, The LEGO Movie Videogame, NBA 2K14, and Titanfall.

I’ll start first with a breakdown of the number of covers that have a woman in some way depicted on the cover.

Exclusively Men: 8

Exclusively Women: 0

Both: 3

No Person, Only Non-Human, or Only Ambiguously Gendered: 2

gta5coverThe first cover to feature a woman is Grand Theft Auto V, proving that appearances can be deceiving. Rather than be a character that plays an active role in the game, this woman is something of a dummy image  or character. She looks deviously at the player, perhaps as an hint to the player of what’s to come. As we’ve talked fairly extensively on GTA games, so I’ll refrain from going to far into how the correlated with the game itself. I mean, the strippers really speak for themselves. Although this cover does have at least one woman in it, she functions as little more than living eye candy and offers a small glimpse into the objectification left to come.LEGO_Marvel_Super_Heroes_box_art

The second is Lego Marvel Super Heroes, which features Black Widow on the cover with an array of male heroes. Out of 155 characters, only one woman is featured. In this way, the cover is almost a preview into the disproportionate number of female characters to male ones.

The_Lego_Movie_Videogame_coverThe final one that features a woman is The LEGO Movie Videogame which, like the movie it’s based on, only really has one female reoccurring character. Although this one could be blamed on the source material, it points out unfortunate trends the covers of these 13 games reveal. Most of the top selling games have little to no female characters in them. Even if they do or if they have a female character customization option in the game, they’re largely unfeatured or there to serve a purpose that ties in with a male fantasy. If there are both female and male characters in the game, the number will be overwhelmingly disproportionate in male favor. Even ambiguously gendered characters on the covers are certainly more coded as male than female.

That’s not to say that these games are bad games – there is a reason why they’re some of the best selling games this year after all. But it seems like when it comes to video games, you often can judge their content and the representation of women held within by their covers.