By Ajsa Javor
Video games have emerged as the leading segment of the worldwide entertainment business, with 3.31 billion gamers globally; 446 million in Europe, consequently having considerable cultural influence (De La Torre-Sierra & Guichot-Reina, 2024, p.552-533.) Visual marketing materials built around games (such as game covers) play a prominent role in this influence, as they convey the primary messages about the game, its characters, and its intended audience. Covers cannot therefore be considered neutral visual surfaces: they function as discursive spaces that make norms and hierarchies visible and natural. The messages transmitted by a game cover are particularly important because they influence how children interpret the cultural environment, while identity can also be shaped by such narratives (De La Torre-Sierra & Guichot-Reina, 2024, p.533).
The issue of gender representation is particularly prominent in the video game industry. Previous studies have pointed out that women are underrepresented and often appear in sexualised, passive, or subordinate roles (De La Torre-Sierra & Guichot-Reina, 2024, p.535). These representations are not merely the result of aesthetic choices but reflect and reproduce broader social gender norms.
This contribution examines the representation of women on video game covers in the context of media and cultural governance. It is based on the assumption that video game covers create visual discourses in which the presence of women is not only a quantitative issue, but also a qualitative and structural problem. It argues that the absence of female characters, their marginalised appearance, or their placement in conditionally active roles create meaningful patterns that normalise male-centered power relations. While video game marketing is often viewed primarily as entertainment and commercial promotion, this analysis suggests that game covers also reflect broader cultural ideas about gender and social roles. Therefore, this research examines not only how often female characters appear, but also how they are represented, what visual codes are used, and what function they serve.
Using qualitative analysis and critical discourse analysis, the aim of the study is to explore the underlying meaning structures behind the representation of female characters in contemporary video game advertising posters. Through the analysis of several game genres and titles with different age ratings, the study seeks to highlight how visual marketing contributes to the reinforcement of gender hierarchies. This approach also provides an opportunity to interpret the representational practices of the video game industry in the context of broader social and political issues.
In this context, visual representations on video game covers do not appear as an isolated phenomenon, but rather as part of a broader cultural pattern that resonates with a conservative gender system. The representations identified in the research—in particular, the absence of women, their placement in passive or conditionally active roles, and the aestheticization of their bodies—are consistent with a social narrative that links female value not to individual agency but to functional roles. Female characters in video game marketing rarely appear as autonomous decision-makers or powerful actors, which can be compared to the political discourse that considers women’s self-fulfillment secondary to their responsibilities within the family. In Hungary, this narrative is represented by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who places it in a key position in his political communication.
Since 2014, the Fidesz government has been increasingly consistent in building its political discourse on traditional gender roles (Szabó, 2024, p.882). After his third successful re-election in 2018, Viktor Orbán made the following offer to Hungarian women: if a woman under the age of 40 bears 4 or more children, she can get in exchange more government funding, a preferential credit, and a lifetime exemption from personal taxes (Sata, 2021, p.37). This construction of gender relations is the result of the Fidesz government’s largely family-centric rhetoric, which restricts women’s role to the nation’s biological reproduction (Sata, 2021, p.37). With these laws, Fidesz does not represent a progressive feminist identity, but rather a traditional family-centric position that limits women to the role of motherhood.
This is the current narrative in Hungary, and no one can escape it. It is all over public television, on huge posters in the streets: in order to prevent population decline, women’s main task is motherhood and raising children. This conservative view does not offer Hungarian women any other acceptable alternatives. Women can retire at the age of 40 in Hungary, on the grounds that this gives them more opportunities to be with their families and grandchildren (Sata, 2021, p.45).
The visual communication of the video game industry similarly narrows the space for female representation: women are either completely absent or appear in a form that does not challenge male-centered power structures. The connection between video game covers and Hungarian family policy discourse can therefore be interpreted not as a direct causal relationship, but as a parallel process. In both areas, we can observe restrictions on female fulfilment and a tendency for acceptable forms of female identity to appear within strictly regulated frameworks.
This blog post is part of GAMEHEARTS: Games, Heritage, Arts, & Sport: the economic, social, and cultural values of the European video game ecosystem project. This project has received funding from the Horizon Europe program of the European Union under the Grant Agreements No 101132543 and No 101029543. It does not reflect the views of the European Union and is a publication encapsulated within the project.
References:
De La Torre-Sierra, A. M., & Guichot-Reina, V. (2024). Women in Video Games: An analysis of the biased representation of female characters in current video games. Sexuality & Culture, 29(2), 532–560. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119024-10286-0
Hoque, M. A., Azim, M. S., & Parvin, F. (2025). Gendered pathways of power: Women’s political representation amid democratic backsliding in India, Hungary and Turkey. Women S Studies International Forum, 115, 103269. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2025.103269
Maria_Alberto – pixabay.com. (n.d.). Women feminism Femininity free photo. https://www.needpix.com/photo/download/1839663/women-feminismfemininity-female-fight-rights-portrait-free-illustrations-free-pictures
Sata, R. (2021). In the Name of the Family: The Populist Turn against Gender in Hungary. In M. Mejstřík, & V. Handl (Eds.), Current Populism in Europe: Gender-Backlash and Counter-strategies (pp. 37-52). Heinrich-BöllStiftung. https://cz.boell.org/sites/default/files/2021-05/Current%20Populism%20in%20Europe_FINAL_ONLINE_V2.pdf
Szabó, H. (2025). Is Fairyland for Everyone? Mapping online discourse on gender debates in Hungary. Communications, 50(4), 882-907. https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2024-0007
Leave a Reply