I think it's an issue of options. There's a wealth of options of non-violence games to play. There's a wealth of games with violence that don't require chainsawing someone with blood splattering all over the screen or putting a bullet through someone's head. So while overall society has stayed harping on on violence in games because of a combination of sheer opportunism, the myth of video games being still a child's toy, and the fact it's less social acceptable to be violent than to be sexist.

The gender doesn't fall to far from the race issue as a diversity issue. You never please everybody  but the more options you put out there for people to identify with, the better the situation gets. In prepping an old reserach paper on race in GTA:San Andreas last decade, one of the sources I looked into (sorry I don't have it to cite at the moment) showed in just a general survey around 90% of the black characters in games were athletes in sports games and aside from prostitutes in GTA games and other ancillary at best characters, black women didn't exist at all.

Now there are a lot more blacks characters in games. Most still are athletes in sports games, but there are many more and the representations are more diverse than all being lazy stereotypes. There still are major ones, Cole from Gears of War for example, but it's less of a problem because there representations beyond that. And at the end of the day, there are plenty of people that like Cole. A close friend of mine is a former football player and Cole is indentifiable to him because how he acts speaks a certain lockerroom mentality. There is an audience for that. But it's problematic in a world with no alternative to him.

Yet the black women of note are still few and far between. There's Alyx Vance, Sheva Almor and what? In the interview I did with the Social Justice and Gaming panel at SXSW, Latoya Peterson of Racialicious.com sort of claimed Fran from Final Fantasy XII as a represenation of a blcak woman. It stunned me in the moment, but I've seen it before when people void of options to relate. It's the same dynamic I think that led many to claim Southern, sax-playing Bill Clinton as a "black president" in the 90s.

So while people want to escape things completely through games, others want to relate to the things they care about. Even in that quest for escapism, gamers are clamouring for realism, even if it's a little odd and telling what things they want realistic and when they crawl back into the "it's just video games/escapism" defense. Say what you want of Lara Croft or Bayonetta, one of their common complaints is how ridiculously unreal they are.There are plenty of women whom are fans of the representations being defended here, though maybe not all loving the mentality men put behind it. But there are a lot of women (and men) that I don't feel can relate to some of the reprensations offered.

I personally thinks things have come along quite a bit from when I was a teenager. That said, it isn't my personal soap box so I'd take my verdict with a grain of salt.

This is a good observation that doesn't get made often enough. Lots of things go on in games that could be considered exploitative, but most people who speak out only speak out about one of them. I know sexism in games bothers me far more than violence, even though in the real world they bother me pretty much equally. If I'm trying to rationalize my inconsistent behavior, I guess I'd say that sexism, by definition, involves a prejudice against one gender. It's motivated by hate, in the "hate crimes" sense of the word. Violence isn't, as a matter of necessity, motivated by prejudice. For me, participating in even an ultraviolent game isn't as uncomfortable as participating in the ogling that many developers seem to think is my primary goal as a male gamer.

The bottom line is that we need more diversity in the development community. I don't just mean more minorities and more women, but also a more diverse group of white men (or Japanese men, as the case may be). I don't want to censor anyone, even if I hate what they're saying--I just want to see other perspectives represented. I think that makes sense from a business standpoint, too. Maybe keeping Lara Croft's breasts huge keeps the white male teenager market strong, but surely there are other markets that could be equally strong if publishers tried to reach out to them.

I think the reason why gore wins out over sexuality a lot of times is both the pure shock value and the ability to have hands on control of the game. You can go to your local coffee shop and see that hot bartista any day of the month, so seeing an attractive woman isn't that unusual. But being the hand of God and laying waste to a barrage of evil soldiers one vaporizing headshot at a time? Now that's not your everyday fodder, and hopefully it's not a part of your everyday routine. 

On a note for sexuality I was actually blown away when it was brought to my attention that men actually think that that hourglass, "perfect" 36-24-36, figure is obtainable without being an Olympic athlete or liposuction...or a video game character. More than that, that men actually use this as a standard to compare all other women in their reality? Strange...but such is life.

I'm not upset, trust me I'm actually pretty traditional when it comes to feministic values, but maybe the reason gore and violence are looked at more than boobs (to put so bluntly) is that we are jaded from the latter.

I'm going to go ahead and guess that the writer of this article is either a foreigner or hasn't spent their entire life in the United States, because the reason for this discrepancy is pretty well-known to most American adults: Our country's founding on Christian values.

Look at the differences between ratings for the American ESRB and the Japanese CERO. There are games like Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 that don't make it into Japan uncensored because of the gore. God of War III got a CERO Z rating - almost as bad as the ESRB's AO. At the same time, a lot of JRPGs (in the past at least) and European games like Indigo Prophecy and The Witcher originally had some sexual content cut for fear of an M or AO rating.

Number one, this country was partly founded by Puritans. Number two, Christianity itself has a certain problem with sex, especially compared with Eastern cultures. That filters into every part of American culture, especially out entertainment and even more so a medium like video games that hasn't quite gained social acceptance yet.

You're comparing apples and oranges. The depiction of women as sex objects/prizes is systemic in all categories of gaming (and other media, frankly), while only certain types of games are flirting with gratuitous violence. Also, there's an argument to be made for having horrific violence in certain games - realism, shock value, etc. Rarely can you excuse the disgraceful way women are treated as some sort of stylistic choice.

Are video games too violent? Possibly, although the extreme examples overshadow the millions of completely tame games on the market. Are video games sexist? Absolutely yes.

@Daniel

Theres a difference between sexualization and objectification.  Its fine to sexualize a character, to make them attractive or to give them a sexual aspect to their personality.  This can lead to interesting power dynamics in stories.  What isn't fine is objectification, when you make a characters body and sex their only notable factors.

@Daniel Sims - I've actually lived in the U.S. from age 3 to the present, and I can assure you that I have a firm grasp on the culture here. I'm agnostic (and a lazy one at that) so I won't pretend to know how religious values have permeated the media across the world.

I'm not arguing with your point, but perhaps can I get some clarification? 

let me just say this: sure, women in video games are generally at least attractive if not ridiculously mis-proportioned. But what if there were a lot more women into gaming say numbers rivaling men? same for the compositions of Dev teams? I think we'd see some of the same things but targeted for women, sure . they might not be as sexually aggressive as men, or how ever you might describe sexual desire. But women are human, and still have fantasy, so why wouldn't we see the same thing, men being stereotyped etc etc. even though most main characters already are, but who cares about that eh? when there are women to ogle at.

I'd argue that a large part of the issue is that gaming is still widely perceived as an activity geared toward children/adolescents. While some parents may let their kids play violent games to varying degrees, sex + children = outrage. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in this context I believe Daniel Sims' reference about American Puritanism is absolutely relevant. And that's without even touching upon what Lucas mentioned above, because I believe another major obstacle is the typical sexist or objective portrayal of females so prevalent in gaming today.