Why Is That Woman Always Homeless in a Blizzard?

The Strange World of Mobile Game Ads

I play games on my iPad.

Sudoku. Nonograms. Word games. Wordle. Games involving logic, language, numbers, and the quiet satisfaction of placing the correct square in the correct location.

I do not play the games in which I must match three decorative objects in order to restore a neglected mansion while gradually uncovering a family secret.

Nevertheless, these games have apparently decided I am their ideal audience.

Their advertisements appear constantly, and they all seem to take place within the same deeply troubled municipality.

A woman stands outside in a blizzard with a baby in her arms and a little girl clinging to her coat. She has just been thrown out of her home by her husband, who is now inside with the woman he has apparently mistaken for an upgrade.

The new woman is usually thinner, better dressed, and remarkably untroubled by the sight of two children freezing on the front lawn.

The abandoned woman trudges through the snow until she finds an empty house.

“House” may be overly generous. It is generally a collection of three walls with several structural concerns. The windows are blown out. There is no heat. Snow is falling directly onto the bed. A raccoon may already have established residency.

The woman gathers her children into one corner while the temperature continues to drop.

Then I am presented with several choices.

Should I repair the window?

Light the stove?

Patch the roof?

Naturally, the game demonstrates the wrong choice first. The stove explodes. The roof collapses. The baby begins to cry. The little girl looks accusingly at her mother, who has already had a very long day.

At this point, the advertisement announces that only a tiny percentage of players can save them.

Apparently, the survival of this family now depends upon my ability to match three lamps.

The Woman in Peril

Once you begin noticing these advertisements, it is difficult not to see how rigidly formulaic they are.

The central woman is pregnant, carrying a baby, accompanied by a young daughter, or responsible for some combination of dependent children. Her male partner has abandoned her, betrayed her, threatened her, or physically expelled her from the home.

He frequently leaves her for another woman. His obligations to his children appear to end at precisely the same moment that his romantic interest shifts elsewhere.

There is no discussion of custody, child support, property rights, employment, family assistance, domestic violence services, emergency housing, or the possibility that the woman might have a friend with a functioning furnace.

She simply walks into the weather.

Sometimes the woman has gained weight, which the advertisement treats as sufficient explanation for her abandonment. Her male partner reacts with disgust and replaces her with a thinner woman. The larger woman is mocked, humiliated, or subjected to a makeover intended to restore her value.

In one advertisement I saw recently, a larger bride stood in her wedding gown while a bridesmaid used some sort of pump to remove the air from her body so that she would become slender.

This was presented as a solution.

Not only was her body considered unacceptable; it was treated as an inflatable structural defect.

This Is Not an Accident

These advertisements are not simply the work of one unusually troubled storyteller who has unresolved feelings about women, winter, and residential construction.

They are part of a deliberate marketing strategy.

Free mobile games rely heavily on attracting new players. Advertisers test different characters, stories, threats, humiliations, and visual hooks to see what makes people pause, watch, click, and download. The advertisements that generate attention are repeated, copied, and intensified.

Researchers who examined advertisements for games including Project Makeover and Matchington Mansion found recurring portrayals of women as impoverished, humiliated, abandoned, and dependent upon the player’s intervention. The women frequently lacked meaningful agency and were positioned as people upon whom decisions were made rather than people capable of directing their own lives.

A 2025 Sky News investigation similarly documented mobile-game advertising that used domestic abuse, coercion, humiliation, body-shaming, and violence against women to drive downloads. Some of the advertisements bore little resemblance to the games themselves.

The endangered woman was not the story.

She was the bait.

The strategy is emotionally efficient.

The viewer sees a woman and children in danger and feels an immediate urge to intervene. We want to repair the window, light the fire, confront the dreadful husband, and possibly contact several agencies on the woman’s behalf.

The advertisement creates a woman with no power so that the player can briefly experience the power of rescuing her.

Compassion becomes a customer-acquisition tool.

What Happened to Her Agency?

What troubles me most is not that these advertisements portray women experiencing hardship. Women do experience abandonment, poverty, domestic violence, housing insecurity, and economic abuse. Those realities deserve thoughtful and honest attention.

The problem is how female suffering is used.

The woman in these ads rarely makes a plan, seeks help, confronts an institution, protects her legal interests, draws upon a community, or demonstrates any authority over her circumstances.

She does not act.

She waits.

She waits to be chosen by a man. She waits to be rejected by him. She waits for the player to repair her house, improve her clothing, change her hair, reduce her body, and determine what she should do next.

Even the makeover is rarely presented as self-expression. It is rehabilitation. The woman has become socially unacceptable, and her appearance must be corrected before she can regain love, dignity, safety, or revenge.

Her value remains located outside herself.

The story may end with her former partner regretting his decision after she becomes thinner, prettier, wealthier, or more stylish. This is presented as triumph.

But it leaves the original standard intact.

She has not escaped the belief that her worth depends upon male approval. She has simply become better at obtaining it.

The Disposable Mother

There is another message embedded in these stories that deserves attention.

The woman is almost always responsible for the children.

The man leaves the relationship and, at the same time, appears to leave fatherhood itself. He is free to begin a new life with the woman he has mistaken for an upgrade while the mother carries the baby, guides the little girl through the snow, locates shelter, repairs the house, and absorbs the emotional consequences for everyone.

His abandonment is treated as a personal betrayal of the woman rather than a complete abdication of parental responsibility.

She is left with the labor because motherhood is assumed to be permanent and fatherhood is treated as contingent.

The children become visual evidence of her vulnerability. They make her slower, poorer, more frightened, and more urgently in need of rescue. They are not portrayed as people whose father has failed them. They are portrayed as additional burdens attached to the rejected woman.

It is an old story dressed in digital clothing: the woman carries the consequences while the man moves on.

What Are Girls Learning?

No single advertisement determines how a girl understands herself or the world. Children and adolescents are not passive containers into which media messages are poured.

But repetition has power.

When the same story appears again and again, it begins to establish what seems normal, expected, or inevitable.

Girls repeatedly see that a woman’s safety depends upon being wanted by a man.

They see that aging, weight gain, pregnancy, motherhood, or a perceived failure of beauty can result in rejection.

They see women’s bodies treated as public projects that may be mocked, measured, altered, pumped, shaved, dressed, or repaired.

They see male anger portrayed as dangerous but unsurprising.

They see women fleeing violence rather than possessing authority.

They see mothers carrying children through the consequences of men’s decisions.

They see female suffering transformed into entertainment.

Most of all, they see women without agency.

The woman in the advertisement is not represented as a person with knowledge, competence, legal rights, relationships, skills, or options. Her vulnerability is total because total vulnerability makes the rescue more emotionally satisfying.

This matters because media does not merely reflect our ideas about gender. It participates in rehearsing them.

It tells us whose anger is powerful, whose body is negotiable, who gets to leave, who must remain responsible, and who is expected to endure.

Abuse as Set Decoration

These advertisements also use intimate-partner violence with astonishing casualness.

A man raises his fist, shoves a woman out the door, screams at her while she cowers, or threatens her as the children watch. The scene lasts a few seconds before becoming a puzzle involving furniture.

The violence is not explored as violence. It is used as narrative shorthand.

It tells the viewer that the woman is now sufficiently endangered to require intervention.

Real domestic abuse involves patterns of control that may include intimidation, surveillance, isolation, financial restriction, threats, manipulation, physical violence, and the use of children as leverage. Survivors often face complicated questions involving safety, housing, finances, custody, work, community support, and trauma.

In these advertisements, all of that becomes an opening animation.

The woman’s fear creates urgency. Her humiliation creates attention. Her children increase the stakes.

Then the game moves on.

A serious human reality has been reduced to scenery.

Who Is Responsible?

Mobile-game advertising can involve game developers, publishers, advertising platforms, marketing agencies, and outside companies that create and distribute the ads.

That complicated chain can make accountability feel wonderfully foggy.

The developer may say an outside company created the advertisement. The platform may say the advertiser supplied it. The agency may say it produced what performed well with users.

Everyone can point toward another office while the woman remains outside in the snow.

But somebody commissioned the advertisement.

Somebody approved it.

Somebody paid to distribute it.

Somebody reviewed the data and learned that female suffering generated clicks.

And somebody decided to continue.

Advertising regulators in the United Kingdom have already taken action against some mobile advertisements that objectify women or use harmful gender stereotypes. The Advertising Standards Authority has emphasized that advertisers remain responsible for the material used to promote their products, even within the complicated ecosystem of in-game advertising.

The system may be automated, outsourced, and algorithmically optimized.

It is not ownerless.

Women Play Games, Too

Perhaps the most insulting assumption beneath these advertisements is that women must be marketed to through another woman’s degradation.

Women play strategy games, logic games, word games, adventure games, mysteries, simulations, and puzzles. We enjoy challenge, mastery, curiosity, creativity, competition, and problem-solving.

Yet the advertising industry repeatedly presents us with a woman who has been stripped of all capacity to solve her own problems.

She is not designing the house.

She is not negotiating the mortgage.

She is not replacing the window herself.

She is sitting on the floor in a sleeveless dress during a blizzard while a child cries beside her and a thought bubble indicates that she is cold.

Thank you. We had gathered that.

I would like to see a different version of this game.

The husband throws his wife and baby out of the house so he can move in the woman he has apparently mistaken for an upgrade.

The wife does not wander helplessly into the snow.

She marches directly to the office of a very good divorce lawyer.

By Level Five, the lawyer has filed for temporary support, exclusive use of the marital home, custody, legal fees, and a complete accounting of the marital assets.

By Level Eight, his wages are being garnished because he has discovered that child support is not an optional charitable contribution.

By Level Twelve, he is living in a studio apartment with a futon, one folding chair, and a kitchen table positioned three feet from the bed.

The woman he left his family for, who had apparently believed she was getting the house as part of the arrangement, begins to lose interest.

She had signed up for the master bedroom.

She had not signed up for half the rent on a studio apartment overlooking a tire store.

Meanwhile, his former wife and children are back in the house, where the windows are intact, the heat is on, and no one is required to match three lamps to keep the baby alive.

At the end of each level, the player unlocks another financial disclosure.

The final challenge is locating the account he forgot to mention to his attorney.

Only a tiny percentage of players can identify all the hidden assets before the forensic accountant does.

And if the game begins with a physically abusive partner threatening a woman while the children watch, perhaps she does not remain there until the player repairs a fireplace.

She calls the police.

The officers arrive, document what happened, remove him from the home, and connect her with an advocate. She obtains a protection order, develops a safety plan, and begins rebuilding her life with legal and community support.

His behavior has consequences.

The carefully maintained image of him as a wonderful husband, father, colleague, and generally misunderstood man begins to experience some administrative complications.

Now that is a game involving strategy.

The Story We Could Tell Instead

There is nothing wrong with a rescue story.

Human beings rescue and are rescued by one another all the time. We need relationships, communities, institutions, resources, and care. Absolute self-sufficiency is not the same thing as empowerment.

But rescue should not require erasing a woman’s agency.

A more honest story could show a woman frightened and capable.

Wounded and strategic.

Needing help and participating in her own survival.

It could show her drawing upon friends, family, community, legal protections, professional resources, and her own judgment. It could portray children not merely as helpless accessories but as people with emotional lives and rights of their own.

It could show a larger woman whose body is not evidence of personal failure.

It could show an abandoned mother whose life does not end because a man has selected a new girlfriend.

It could even allow the woman to own a coat.

These stories would still contain difficulty. They would still offer transformation. But the transformation would not depend upon making a woman thinner, prettier, more desirable, or more grateful to be saved.

It would involve recovering authority over her own life.

Until then, the mobile-game woman will remain in her roofless house, waiting for someone to match three chandeliers before the next storm arrives.

I remain concerned that no one has yet contacted the building inspector.

Sources

“‘Incredibly Disturbing’: The Misogynistic Tropes Being Used in Mobile Games,” Sky News, March 4, 2025.

“Endure, Join Them, or Leave? Suffering Women in Mobile Game Advertising,” research examining advertisements for Project Makeover and Matchington Mansion.

“Objectification in In-Game Ads,” UK Advertising Standards Authority, May 29, 2025.

“Entertainment: Mobile/App Games,” UK Advertising Standards Authority.

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Janet Nash, MSW, LISW-S, Yoga Therapist, CCTP, is a psychotherapist, writer, and founder of Interiority Wellness. Her work explores mental health, generational healing, creativity, nature, and the quiet ways we find our way back to ourselves.