Internalized misogyny and video games can be seen as a two way street where ideas and stereotypes can influence the ideas of the player, and where the mindset of the maker impacts the outcome and messaging within their game. Because our game is about the experience of womanhood, it is relevant to research different aspects of womanhood and the mechanisms that shape a woman’s experience with womanhood. The goal of this paper is to understand the underlying phenomenon of internalized misogyny, and the way this impacts young women specifically. This is why this literature study aims to answer the question: How can internalized misogyny impact young women?

To answer this question, I studied academic research from different disciplines such as gender studies, sociology and psychology. According the justification theory of Jost and Banaji (1994), people can accept sexist and misogynistic ideas as truth to justify why you are in the disadvantaged position than you are in. For some people it might be easier to tell themselves that they really are less than, instead of being confronted with the truth that they are part of an oppressed group. Girls and young women are especially susceptible to internalized misogyny because they are in a generally more vulnerable state than women in other life stages. Due to harsh judgement online, such as the gaming community, girls and young women receive messaging in the forms of sexualization, objectification, and negative stereotyping from society. Indicating that there is something wrong with being ‘just a girl’ and start rejecting womanhood from an early age.

In this paper I examine the role of narrative in creating emotional immersion in video games. I suggest the interplay between narratology and ludology and argue that looking at narrative is necessary to understand how immersive experiences can be created for the player. The analysis distinguishes various narrative strategies employed in video games, including pre-established narratives, evocative narratives, enacting narratives, embedded narratives, and emergent narratives. It reveals that interactive narrative structures, allowing players to influence the storyline, tend to evoke stronger emotional responses and enhance immersion. The Dynamic Narrative Emotion Model demonstrates how emotional responses to narrative-based video games impact their commercial success. Games that generate emotions frequently and with intensity are more likely to be immersive and successful. While primarily investigating emotional immersion in video games, this paper also acknowledges the potential of narrative video games to represent specific experiences. Video games offer a unique medium for representation and engagement with the experiences of young western women. Narrative design should be considered in game development as an important factor in this representation. It can structure the players’ emotional responses and immersion in a way no other media form can.

How would you portray a woman in a video game? There are many different ways in which female characters have been employed in video games, but the goal of this paper was to explore how not to do that. Historically, these have been often problematic and stereotypical. My goal for this paper was to provide an overview of patterns in the representation of women in past AAA video games and connect this to interactivity. These can be roughly divided in the categories of protagonist, secondary role, and obstacles. The paper discusses more specific stereotypes and principles paired with examples, in which the role of the player was an important factor for their portrayal. These illuminated the patterns of the sexualisation of women, the victimisation of women, and the portrayal of women as secondary to men. In these a more general pattern emerged: the female characters are actively defined by their femininity in a negative way.

In this paper I explore how narrative video games can capture the 'female experience' and provide women with a way to explore their identities beyond real-world constraints. The research question addressed is ”How can the tools that narrative video games offer be used to add a new dimension to the exploration of women's experience and identity?”. The analysis focuses on three key elements: the role of narrative in shaping meaning and womanhood, the ability of video games to offer a 'new body' free from physical limitations, and the sense of agency games provide through problem-solving. These elements highlight the potential of narrative video games as a medium for exploration of women’s identity. It is important to note that women's experiences vary, and the goal of using these games is to let women define their own womanhood. By utilizing narrative video games, we can gain a broader understanding of womanhood. This research helps explain why we have chosen to create a narrative video game specifically, and which elements of the medium we can emphasize in order to best achieve our goal of exploring the female experience.

Although the field of game studies has been developing for a few decades now, little attention has been paid to the way video games can shape a persuasive representation of existing social groups. In this paper, I will argue how the persuasive strategies deployed in video games, such as the procedural rhetoric, can be used to reverse the negative effects of existing stereotypes and replace them with convincing and affirming representations instead. This study will look specifically at the representation of women in narrative video games, with a focus on young, Western women, and how they can be represented through the theoretical models of persuasion in video games.

Issues of representation have been discussed within the field of Game Studies for a long time. These issues have been largely separated from the field of Gender Studies, with a general lack in interdisciplinary research. Therefore, in this paper I argue that feminist theory has been underutilized when discussing this issues. Intersectional feminism also allows us to look further than just gender, by taking all identifiers into account that might affect ones position in social power structures. It takes into account, for example, the different way that black women are affected by both the patriarchy and white supremacy in comparison to white women, who are only affected by the patriarchy. Using these theories, especially intersectional feminist theories, will create new opportunities, both to uncover patterns and to start creating new ones. Hopefully, our Video Game will be an example of a new pattern being created.