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How Gender Is Portrayed In 'Tomb Raider'

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Video game playing has become an increasingly popular activity for many people to do. With all the video game playing, this gives rise to possible concerns about how the media portrays such things in the game. One aspect of the game that is an increasing talked about subject in video games is gender and how it portrays both men and women. In many games, women are shown as having the passive role and men having a more role. In an article written by Jeroen Jansz, who is a professor of communication and media at Erasmus University and Raynel G. Martis, his colleague, focus on the way gender is portrayed in video games. In the article they wrote, it focuses on the way that women are viewed in video games as a submissive and non-dominant player as the paratext around females in games would suggest. However, in Tomb Raider, Lara Croft distinguishes a different role than …show more content…
The media and prior research on the gender is based on how each person interrupts it. For the sake of Lara, many people do not want to see her as a dominant female character, when in fact she is. According to Martis and Jansz and they showed “People actively interpret what they have seen in the media and attribute specific meaning to [it]” (Jansz and Martis 142). People before hand saw females as submissive and sweet. Prior to this people were going off the notion that for example, Princess Peach and Princess Zelda, and many others game people the impression that females are portrayed as a submissive character. Now with Lara Croft’s female character created, it has created a new representation that people can interrupt that females, in fact, can play a dominant role in games. Lara is dominant in this game and escapes the paratext around females in video games and sets a new meaning to how females are interpreted in

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