The Research Essay As a growing trend, video games mirrors society’s characteristics: from the use of societal topics such as inequality and violence that stems from the implicit prejudices found in today's culture. Whether video games are merely perpetuating the stereotypes of racism and sexism or providing social commentary on burgeoning social issues remains to be discussed. Despite the game developers or artists’ intent on such issues, there is an ongoing trend of negative portrayals upon women, such to the extent that these portrayals have continued the ideals of injustice among the audience and consumers of video games. Despite public discourse, video games are nuanced in their intentions and therefore is left to individual discretion on whether to participate. Recently psychologists have linked video game playing …show more content…
(Burgess, Melinda, et al.). Through numerous studies and experiments there has been substantial evidence to suggest the correlation of such behaviors. According to the Journal of Social Psychology, “exposure to video game violence and aggressive behavior [promotes], thoughts, and feelings” towards the preemptive action(s) or motives of said hypotheses. In the “Effects of Exposure to Sex-Stereotyped Video Game Characters on Tolerance of Sexual Harassment.”, Karen Dill, et al., expanded the causal relationship between violent video games towards “sexual harassment judgements and rape supportive attitudes” against women. Through the experiment, the treatment group were shown pictures of women in video games from a promiscuous and in a lesser respectful manner and then told to read a story where a real sexual assault occurred and then answered questions pertaining to the story. The treatment group resulted in men