'Help the Girl!': How mobile games profit from misogynistic tropes

Warning: This article contains descriptions and animations of domestic abuse

Sitting on the sofa over the Christmas break scrolling through social media, an advert popped up that made my bored thumb pause for a second.

Picture this: a cartoon woman is sitting down, cutting her toenails when a man, presumed to be her partner, jumps up from behind her and throws a bucket of dust over her. Laughter ensues, the man clearly happy with the prank.

But that "dust" he threw over her was her dad's ashes.

She runs to a salon for a "makeover", upset, where she washes her father's ashes out of her hair. "Bye, dad," she says as they swirl down the drain. The viewer is given a mock choice of how to proceed - perhaps to give her a haircut, a blowdry, maybe use the straighteners. Instead, a pair of clippers is taken to her head and by the end of the advert the woman is bald, head in hands, crying uncontrollably. Text comes on the screen prompting me to "Help the girl!".

This advert was for "Project Makeover" - a mobile game, where the aim is to "give desperately needed makeovers to help people achieve their dreams" by matching three items in a puzzle and earning currency. It's available for children over 12 to download and play.

Of course, any good social media algorithm worth its salt will serve you more of what you have watched, so over a few days, I saw more disturbing adverts for similar games.

An advert for "Gossip Harbor", an equally candy-coloured, childlike puzzle game, showed a man sitting in bed, picking his nose, clearly uninterested in his assumed wife and daughter, who were perching next to him. When they reach out to him for attention, smack. Text prompts on screen ask whether she should "Leave" or "Endure"? The woman and her daughter then leave and they are seen struggling to walk in the freezing cold. The advert ends with them cowering in a crumbling house, a blizzard blowing in through the window.

Another advert, this one for "Hollywood Story" developed by Nanobit - promising players they can "step into the star-studded streets of Hollywood and carve your own path to fame" - depicted a very different scenario. It showed an unattractive woman trying to trap a man into a relationship by piercing a condom.

A billion dollar industry

They are just some of many examples Sky News has seen of mobile games companies using themes of domestic abuse, violence and the humiliation of women to get downloads, when the games themselves - simple puzzle apps - bear little relation to the narratives presented in the adverts.

Because there's real money to be made in the mobile games market. According to Bryter, just short of half of adults in the UK play games on phones in a market that's projected to reach $2.76bn this year.

Gossip Harbor, Project Makeover and Hollywood Story saw combined downloads of 67.7 million last year, making a global revenue of $367m through in-app purchases, according to digital intelligence firms Similarweb and AppMagic.

It's clearly working, but why use these themes?

"The mobile game space is so competitive… you are having to work very, very hard to get eyeballs in front of your game, and even then you need to get them to download and play the thing," says Isabel Davies, a senior associate at law firm Wiggin, who advises games companies on regulatory matters.

"I can see how games companies might pull some slightly more controversial threads in order to get more of a response out of their advert. It's incredibly disturbing."

Misogyny is something campaigner and social media influencer Eliza Hatch is trying to combat.

She's behind the account "Cheer up Luv" which retells the testimonies of people who have suffered public sexual harassment.

"It's incredibly harmful if you're seeing these things even subconsciously, if you're seeing them actively, you're engaging them when you're downloading these games. What is that encouraging?" she told Sky's Data and Forensics correspondent Tom Cheshire.

"It's encouraging an incredibly negative stereotype about women, it encourages really harmful tropes around gender," said Ms Hatch. "This idea that women need to be saved or women are always in a domestic abuse scenario or being harmed in some way by someone. That can only perpetuate negative stereotypes around gender, negative, harmful stereotypes around women."

Advertising rules

It's the UK's Advertising Standards Authority's job to eliminate those negative stereotypes from the advertising we encounter in our daily lives. Although it may seem that advertisers have free rein, the UK's Advertising Standards Authority enforces very stringent guidelines.

Under ASA guidelines, advertisers must not "...include gender stereotypes that are likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offence".

And the guidelines are ever evolving. Just last month, rules were updated to include body image. Now advertisers must make sure they do not portray particular body types in an irresponsible manner or present an unhealthy body image as aspirational, or exploit people's insecurities.

"We clearly missed the mark"

We put all this to the companies behind the games.

Microfun, the company behind Gossip Harbor, did reply to our request for comment and has since taken down the adverts we raised with them. They said: "Microfun's purpose is to entertain safely and responsibly. In this case, we clearly missed the mark, and we apologise sincerely for any distress that our ads may have caused.

"We have removed the ads in question. They are no longer running, and we have made every effort to ensure that they remain unavailable to view.

"We have been reviewing our policies and procedures, and we continue to do so, in order to ensure that our content is appropriate."

Nanobit, the developer of "Hollywood Story" told us: "We understand your concerns, but reiterate that our advertising materials are intended to be lighthearted, fictional scenarios that do not promote harmful stereotypes or gender-based violence.

"While we regret any offence inadvertently caused, we remain confident that our ads comply with the relevant regulations."

We did not hear back from Magic Tavern, the company behind Project Makeover.

If you or someone you know is a victim of domestic abuse, support is available.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open-source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.