Over three decades ago she was stuck sitting atop steel beams waiting for "the plumber" to rescue her, but in 2017, Pauline has risen to the highest public office of New Donk City, the fictional urban backdrop for Super Mario Odyssey.

Internet cretins engaged in a harassment campaign against a woman who worked for Electronic Arts this weekend, flooding her social media and various internet profiles with vitriolic, often misogynistic messages. Her sin, it appears, was working on animations for the game Mass Effect: Andromeda.

According to Overwatch lore, D.va is a pro gamer who serves and inspires her country. In real life, D.va's role is starting to mirror her in-game persona, as she becomes a symbol of hope for women in South Korea.

Super Mario Run, Nintendo's first mobile game, follows the standard Mario formula: Princess Peach gets kidnapped right away, and it's up to Mario to save her. It's for this reason that Chris Suellentrop doesn't want his daughter to play it, as he wrote in an Op-Ed for The New York Times, saying, "the game is rife with stale, retrograde gender stereotypes ... that today are just embarrassing."

The Guardian asked movie producer Yoshiaki Nishimura if Studio Ghibli would ever employ a woman director. His reply, published last week, drew widespread criticism. This week, Nishimura has apologised.

Not everyone was happy with new Uncharted 4 characters like Nadine "Triceps" Ross. In fact, according to director Neil Druckmann, his team had to ask an angry focus tester to leave the room after he freaked out over the game's portrayal of women.

No-nonsense bans for players who are repeatedly racist, sexist, or bullies? Sounds like a pretty fair deal, but a number of Killing Floor 2 fans see the game's strict policy as a step too far. Some are refusing to play the game altogether.

"Calling the derision of Anita Sarkeesian rational debate is an insult to both her and the idea of debating ideas." Writing for The New Statesman, Ian Steadman gives a thorough and well-reasoned rebuttal of many of the most popular arguments raised against feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian ever since she started her Tropes vs Women in Video Games series.

When Hyperdimension Neptunia first made its way West from Japan in 2011, folks weren't too happy with it. "Worthless" and "sexist" and "stereotypical" were the sentiments thrown around, because we were seeing cute anime girls being silly and wearing short skirts. But the stated purpose of the series is to make fun of the games industry, and when I look deeper it seems evident that Neptunia is also lampooning the very pervasive sexist culture and tropes it's been accused of perpetuating. This so-called "sexist" franchise is actually, ahem, anti-sexist.

When you're playing a game as infectiously compelling as Grand Theft Auto V, it can be difficult to take a step back and reflect on all the wanton acts of destruction in which you've participated.

Shortly after Ubisoft upset many Assassin's Creed fans by saying that it had abandoned its plan to have female characters in its new game's co-op multiplayer mode, the company returned with another controversial explanation about the absence of women in its games — this one focused on Far Cry 4.

News that Ubisoft scuttled plans for including female playable characters in the upcoming Assassin's Creed Unity was met by scorn and derision by many video game commentators last night. Now, Kotaku has an official statement from Ubisoft on the controversy.

The next big Assassin's Creed game and the first to appear exclusively on next-generation consoles won't let people play as female assassins in a new cooperative multiplayer mode, Ubisoft said this week at E3. Speaking in an interview with Polygon, Unity creative director Alex Amancio said that while they originally planned to include female assassins, the "reality of production" made adding the additional characters too costly.

Take the boys-club crap of the video game internet, put it in a time machine and… you get a funny/sad comic that might just make it a bit more clear just how awful it is for the women who suffer the harassment of unenlightened dudes.

Alice Mercier isn't the real name of the games industry veteran that reporter Josh Mattingly harassed on Facebook. She isn't willing to give her real name, at least not publicly; she's afraid of the professional repercussions. This is a theme that will come up again and again over the course of our interview, and every subsequent conversation: weighing the toll of harassment against the cost of confronting it.

Reporter Josh Mattingly has apologised for making "inappropriate" comments to a female game developer after they were made public earlier today, saying he was drunk. Kotaku has learned that the journalist involved in this conversation was Josh Mattingly, the founder and CEO of the indie gaming website IndieStatik.

I stumbled across this on my social media feed and was too horrified not to share. If you've ever wondered why male gamers have such a misogynistic reputation, this one-way exchange on a dating website lays it all out on the table. It is ugly. You will cringe.

The game director for Blizzard Entertainment's upcoming Heroes of the Storm has apologized for his treatment of a question about how characters are designed — specifically how multiplayer online battle arena games, of which Heroes is one, tend to hyper-sexualize female avatars.

This local news report has all of the ingredients: sex, teenage girls, the exploitation of them, video games, and a respected university's research. Here to synthesise it all for us is Life Coach Jenn Lee: "This is even worse than watching Miley Cyrus twerk."