Historical Overview: Playable Female Athlete Characters in Sport Simulation Videogames

Historically, female athletes have been marginalized in both the fields of sport and videogames, and there is limited work that examines how female athletes have been represented in sport simulation videogames. In this article, this gap is addressed by tracing the history of playable female athlete characters in sport simulation videogames from the 1980s to the present. Unlike esports, which are sporting competitions, sport simulation games represent an element of sport such as gameplay or management. Playable athlete characters are important in these games because they are at once the equivalent of protagonists in a film or novel and are also the avatar through which videogame players interact with that storyworld. To illustrate the key insights that can be drawn from the study of such characters, the trajectory of playable female athletes in sport simulation games is traced across three periods: 1980-1995, 1995-2010, and 2010-2023. Analyzing this history through the lens of hegemony and intersectionality illuminates the general arc of playable female athletes within the sport simulation genre and also demonstrates how representations of female athletes in videogames register historical trends from the fields of both sports and videogames.