Considering that the players of Temple Run, which has been downloaded more than one billion times, are 60 percent female, this system seems ridiculous. Even worse, of these 50 apps, 90 percent offered boy characters for free, while only 15 percent offered girl characters for free. What shocked me was that only 46 percent offered girl characters. Of the apps that did have gender-identifiable characters, 98 percent offered boy characters. I found that 18 percent had characters whose gender was not identifiable (i.e., potatoes, cats or monkeys). I looked at the gender breakdown of the characters in the top 50 apps. Endless running games, such as “Jetpack Joyride” and the four versions of “Temple Run,” are extremely popular they feature a character running, jumping, sliding and generally avoiding deadly obstacles in a game that does not end until the character dies. My parents let me download the top 50 “Endless Running Games” apps that were listed in the iTunes Store for iPhones. I wondered if this was a larger problem or just a feature of the games my friends and I play, so I started researching. I saw that a lot of them featured boy characters, and if girl characters did exist, you were actually required to pay for them. She said you couldn’t be a girl a boy character was the only option.Īfter that, I started to pay attention to other apps my friends and I were playing. One day I noticed that my friend was playing a game as a boy character and asked why she wasn’t a girl. Almost all of my friends have game apps on their phones, and we’ll spend sleepovers playing side by side. Here’s an excerpt:įor a 12-year-old girl, playing games on an iPhone is pretty regular behavior. When I noticed this gender disparity I immediately remembered seeing a compelling article some time back by a twelve-year-old girl named Madeline Messer, who dug into this question more thoroughly. For further discussion of the locked skins, see my addendum to the end of this post. Note: I am only looking at the ten free skins, not the locked skins. You could argue that this is just one game, or that the ratio isn’t that far off, or that I’m taking games too seriously. It’s when you click on the skin packs that things get dicey.ĭo you see the problem? Of the ten free skins offered, only three (bandit, barmaid, and baroness) present as female while the other seven present as male.
But as you notice at the bottom of the above image, the app also offers two skin packs for you to choose from. You can choose Steve or Alex (as my readers pointed out on a previous post, while Steve presents as male, Alex’s presentation is more ambiguous), or you can upload a custom skin if you have the know-how.
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