How Video Games Express Cultural Bias

In the early 2010s, I was working with my design team on Lineage II when I noticed a troubling pattern in video games.

The heroes in popular games were often male characters, while most female characters were typically designed to be rescued. And to make matters worse, these female characters were designed with over-sexualized bodies and skimpy clothes.

Was this how the designers of these characters saw women in their world?

This wasn’t just about artistic choice; it was a sign of a deeper problem in game development. It made me question how much responsibility engineers and developers have in creating digital spaces. Did they know that the digital worlds they make shape society and people’s views?

When I discussed these observations with my male colleagues, they did not understand the importance of a balanced gender representation. Their answers showed me a gap in their imagination: they could not see how their work influenced how our players saw the real world.

While this was happening, violence against women was on the rise in South Korea, and the #I_Am_A_Feminist movement began on social media. However, my male counterparts ignored these trends and continued to design characters as they wanted.

Since that time, there have been concerted efforts to create female characters that break the stereotyped princess in distress. Yet, gender disparity still glares when we look at the teams who design video games. According to The 2024 State of the Game Industry report, only 23{3898e331af1204232834ee4b271ab810d758071928e09067d8268169721bee90} of game developers in the industry are women. To create a more inclusive world, we must create digital spaces that are more balanced, and a good place to start is with those who make those worlds.

Ethical Engineering Shapes Society

Engineers and developers play a vital role in shaping our digital landscape and, in turn, our reality. As creators of virtual worlds, we should prioritize balance, inclusivity, and ethical thinking.

Throughout my career as a leader in the gaming industry, I have pushed for an ethical approach to technology education that’s inclusive for everyone. Designers and engineers must understand the ethical framework in which their skills are used and the things they make.

In these ethical engineering spaces, students are challenged to develop a sense of responsibility for whatever they create. In today’s age, technical skills are not enough, and this applies to technologists from every background—from social media algorithms to artificial intelligence.

Engineering decisions can significantly affect society’s behavior. Our budding technologists need ethical engineering programs to create a better world.

The urgency of the challenge of bias is exacerbated in the era of artificial intelligence. In AI development, human biases are not merely replicated–they are amplified. The datasets and algorithms we use and train can magnify any skewed perspectives, making the perspective of a single engineer or programmer potentially ubiquitous.

Given this, it’s clear why a gender imbalance in tech spaces is dangerous. If we do not create more inclusive tech spaces, we will only amplify the biases that continue to throw our world into chaos.

Rooting Out the Bias

The task is not just to recognize the biases in some digital content but to address the root of the problem: the mindset of those who create these digital experiences. We must cultivate an engineering culture that values diversity, equity, and inclusivity as core design and development principles. This means seeing code as a tool for building systems and as a medium that shapes societal norms.

By combining computer design with ethics, engineers understand the wider impact of their work. But this is just a start. The technology industry must commit to ongoing education and discussion about the ethical aspects of design and development.

This means questioning the status quo, pushing for diverse representation at all stages of development, and making sure decision-making processes reflect the diversity of our world.