Throughout my life I have been involved with many different types of videogames and videogame systems. During Dr. Fox Harrell’s lecture I began to reflect on my experience with video games and their lack of representation of all genders. Many videogames allow you to customize characters (Sims, Wii Avatar, Xbox avatar, Destiny, etc.) however in most of these games you only get a choice between two genders: male and female. This neglects many people who may use these video games, and does not allow them to accurately depict themselves in the virtual world where they will be playing. A lot of the lecture that Dr. Fox Harrell made addressed what this lack of representation, or lack of positive representation can do to ones self esteem. Most of what Fox Harrell discussed was in relation to race and the negative representation of most characters who are not white. This thought could also be applied to the almost complete absense of any representation of any gender other than cis male and cis females. Even aliens in many games are gendered male and female, once again implying that there are only two genders that could possibly exist, when in reality, many people associate with genders other than these.

Recently, Facebook has added fifty six genders which one can select to identify with and more than twelve that can be displayed on the users Facebook information page. This new option allows for all people to accurately represent themselves and even goes as far as to let you adjust your preferred pronoun! This is a great step in the right direction for all forms of social media. It allows for all people to have a way to identify their true self. I think that this model is one that should be applied to all forms of social media and eventually video games. Being able to customize something as simple as an avatar with an accurate gender and accurate pronoun usage would really be an amazing step towards inclusion of more genders than just cisgender females and cisgender males. This might also allow people to become more familiar with all of the different genders that people associate with. It will create awareness of the existence of these different genders and might help build sympathy for the cause concerning gender acceptance.
On this note, I really appreciate all of the work that Dr. Fox Harrell is doing in relation to my reflection. It made me aware of just how little representation of different genders, sexual orientations, and positive representations of people of colors besides Caucasian are present in popular video games. I think that raising awareness of this fact will help in the movement to change all of these problems in video game culture as well in media representation. I really appreciate Facebook for including all these genders and I definitely think that this is great step in the right direction. I hope that other social media organizations follow Facebook’s lead and changes standards for gender representation across the board.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/02/21/gender_facebook_now_has_56_categories_to_choose_from_including_cisgender.html