Of Reviews and Women: A Study of Women Discourses on Gender in Videogame Magazines

Drawing on a sample of 14,836 reviews from 15 Western video game magazines published between 1981 and 2021, this study examines how women reviewers wrote about gender in the medium. The authors begin from the observation that game magazines have long centered a masculine "gamer" ideal, and they argue that the women who did write for these publications, though rare, offer a valuable and underexplored window into gaming's history. Women authored only 637 reviews, or 4.29 percent of the sample, spread across 10 of the 15 magazines, while men wrote roughly 70 percent and anonymous authors about 24 percent.

Within this small body of work, the study focuses on 51 reviews that engaged with gender themes, primarily from the 1990s and 2000s. The findings are mixed. Some reviewers reproduced stereotypes, including "games for girls" framings and sexualized character descriptions drawn from official promotional material, while others took neutral stances or offered critical perspectives. The most common approach was neutrality: most women reviewers concentrated on gameplay features and seldom examined gender representation, a silence the authors read as a tacit acceptance of dominant norms. Women reviewers were generally less sexualizing than their male colleagues, and a small number explicitly criticized sexism in adventure and roleplaying games.

The study also traces critiques of gendered statistics, sexualization, and "girly" stereotypes back to the 1980s and early 1990s, when they appeared early but remained relatively rare and largely disappeared after 2000. The authors frame these interventions as early resistance to patriarchal norms within the magazine industry. They caution that editorial influence, social pressure, and the brevity of reviews constrain how confidently these patterns can be interpreted, and the qualitative, reader-dependent method further limits generalization. Ultimately, the authors contend that women's presence, critiques, and advocacy for more inclusive portrayals form a counter-hegemonic discourse that existing histories have overlooked, and they call for further research across additional sources, media, and methods.