Sexism and the Wow Girl: A Study of Perceptions of Women in World of Warcraft

Abstract

Using both quantitative and qualitative surveys, this chapter discusses sexuality in relation to the game World of Warcraft (WoW). It considers women’s representation in Brazilian specialized games criticism and focuses on the WoW Girl website, the main source of information about WoW in Brazil, which was formed exclusively by women. This work is interested to know how Brazilian players perceive the relationship between sexuality in-game and how they perceive women’s participation in the spaces of opinion formation on games. The hypothesis that permeates this study is that sexuality in Brazil is a complex cultural issue in transformation and, therefore, the understanding of women’s participation in the game and in the specialized critics is controversial and reflects the multiplicity of views on the subject.