Perils of the princess: Gender and genre in video games

Western Folklore, Summer 1997 by Sherman, Sharon R

Perils of the Princess: Gender and Genre in Video Games 1

Western Folklore 56 (Summer/Fall, 1997) :243-58

Once upon a time (in 1972), computer programmers created Pong, a table tennis game, often found "inside" of tables in bars and restaurants. After Pong came Pac-Man. A number of other games followed. Soon the games were sold as cartridges that plugged into game consoles hooked up to computer monitors, most of which worked on a system invented by Atari. But home computer graphics did not compare with the developing arcade game market. The video arcade became the perfect environment for the postmodern adolescent. It was a place where the loud noises, flashing colors and rapid "anything can happen now" actions of the screen world mirrored the one in which the games were located. In these ways, the games were similar to pinball. Nevertheless, by 1985, sales were waning and the video game craze seemed to be just another passing fad.

In 1986, Nintendo began marketing a video game system with hand controllers that changed the action and the outcome on the screen, high quality sound, and rapid, vivid, sophisticated graphics. All one needed was a television and a few connectors. But now the player, a product of the first generation to grow up with television, could, in a sense, jump into the screen realm and control a heretofore uncontrollable television-like image and master his or her own fate. This new generation of children was waiting, ready to be, as Nintendo advertised, "playing with power." Video arcades once again flourished as places where children could try out games they did not own at home and could meet with others, learn from each other, and gain status as video game experts.

Like Tommy, who became immortalized as the "Pinball Wizard" by the rock group "The Who" in the late 1960s, a young child becomes the star in a film called The Wizard (1989) created by Universal. In this instance, the film evokes that '60s allusion, an allusion not even known to the children whose market it was targeting, but rather an allusion thrown to the parents in a "you played this kind of game, too" message. As Marsha Kinder effectively demonstrates in Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games (1991), The Wizard introduces Nintendo's third Super Mario game directly to its intended audience of children by cleverly playing upon the power of intertextuality: the children know Mario from his first two games; they know the film's star, Fred Savage, from TV's The Wonder Years; and the film is about a group of children who go "on the road" (much like Dorothy who travels to a wizard) to compete in playing a new game of Mario (at least that is the legend the children have heard on their journey). The National Video Championship competition is held at Universal Studios theme park, which, like video games, has multiple worlds and interactive possibilities. In yet another film, Super Mario Bros. (1993), produced by Jake Eberts, Nintendo creates its own cinematic version of the game.

Scholars have examined market strategies, child psychology, computer literacy, eye-hand coordination, and the intertextual nature of Nintendo. Kinder (1991), for example, masterfully presents the transmedia aspects of the games, and how they link with Saturday morning television programs, films, commercials, and toys, to relate interactivity with consumerism and postmodernism. But another means of analyzing Nintendo lies in an unexplored corner of this intertextual picture, in the realm of folklore, particularly in folk narrative. Narrative scholar Robert A- Georges is the most significant American folklorist to study narrative by taking a behavioral approach (1969a, 1976, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1990). But Georges also used structural analyses in his study of expressive behavior (Georges and Dundes 1963, Georges 1970), and always encouraged his students to apply folkloric concepts to all aspects of human behavior, including games (1969b, 1972). Computer games, such as Mario, fit within the study of both narrative and game, albeit a genre constructed not to be folk narrative but to model it.

Most Nintendo Entertainment Systems or game consoles come packed with a game cartridge featuring a version of the Super Mario Brothers. Thus, most children learn the Mario scenario first. I believe that video games, as exemplified by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers series (among others), often appeal to players because they identify as heroes in a fantasy quest. Although Kinder finds these games to be a surrogate for the father, or patriarchal authority, whom one can best in an Oedipalized drama, one also might link Jung's archetypes with Campbell's structural interpretation of the hero journey or "monomyth." Drawing upon interviews with players,

I hypothesize that the appropriation of mythic and Marchen content and form ensures the success of this arena of popular culture and perpetuates gender stereotyping. Enticing players into an otherworldly dimension, this realm, like the willful suspension of disbelief in narrating, promotes an intense liminal state. The games are captivating to males primarily because players compete with each other and with the machine to "save the princess." They know this narrative well from multiple sources and are eager to actually become the hero in the tale. The heroines, as Teresa de Lauretis explains, are "in someone else's story, not their own." They become "figures or markers of positions-places and topoi-through which the hero and his story move...to accomplish meaning" (1984:109). Nevertheless, as I will discuss, females subvert the male message, changing the object of the game, the gender of the main character whenever possible, and the "message."