Villains and Vixens: The Representation of Female Vampires in Videogames

Abstract

Vampires populate our culture and have become a recurrent presence in fiction and the media. In all cases the inclusion of the vampire has given voice to “socio-culture issues faced in particular times and places; issues that may otherwise remain repressed” (Dillon and Lundberg 2017, 47). This socio-cultural subtext is complicated when the vampire is female, for she is now doubly othered by her gender. Her monstrosity is seen as twofold: as a vampire and as a transgressive woman. While many studies address female vampires in popular culture, their portrayal in videogames has been recurrently overlooked. Games potentially help shape gender attitudes in thousands of players; therefore, it is particularly relevant to examine the varied representations of these monstrous or othered female figures and to understand how they adhere to or challenge misogynistic readings of women and their bodies. In light of this, and interpreting videogames as a narrative medium, this article provides an analysis of significant vampiric videogames and discusses the female vampire in relation to violence against women and postfeminist agendas, following a narrative rather than ludology approach.

The Cultural Impact of Video Games: A Systematic Review of the Literature

“…The rest of the proposals are very unevenly divided between research that involves the creation of a video game through tools such as Roblox or Unity [37] and research that serves to represent and highlight minority cultures [38]; these video games that are not so massive, and with a very specific cultural perspective that is little-disseminated, opens the way to a representation of minorities and cultural peripheries in the video game industry with proposals such as Dominations, or an analysis of the representation of women throughout a long list of games about vampires [39]. Spanish culture is represented in The Foolish Lady, a video game based on a play by Lope de Vega [40].…”