Perils of the princess: Gender and genre in video games

Western Folklore, Summer 1997 by Sherman, Sharon R

CONCLUSION

In the intertextual dimension of myth, Marchen, and video games, the narrative serves as its core. The games reinforce gender roles and blur genre distinctions as the players transit through their adolescent worlds. Much like the narrating session once served up examples of how one travels on a perilous journey to become an adult, video games appropriate the monomythic folkloric kingdom creating a postmodern rechanneling of traditional content elements and structures. Nevertheless, females re-vision the text to make the female central and powerful, akin to what Alicia Ostriker calls "revisionist mythmaking," whereby women appropriate a "tale...for altered ends" (1986:212). Like rites of passage, and areas of marginality, all these expressions of narrative transcend boundaries and have, in Turner's sense, "a multi-vocal character, having many meanings, and each is capable of moving people at many psychobiological levels simultaneously" (1969:129). At the level of psychological analysis, the liminality of the folktale world moves one through the territory of the unconscious and offers wisdom about transitional stages via symbolic language. The games replicate that narrative imagery. In their appropriation of folklore, video games have created Super Myths and Super Marchen for the Super Mario and Princess Toadstool adolescent.

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper appeared in Spanish in Revista de Investigaciones Folkloricas 8 (December 1993): 34-41.

2 Basing his analysis on Propp, Alan Dundes (1964) has suggested that folktales and games bear structural similarities.

3 http://n64games.com. Sega's Genesis and Sony's Play Station are other systems built on the same technology.

Works Cited

Aarne, Antti. 1910. Verzeichnis der Mdrchentypen. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Tiedeakatemien Toimituksia.

Campbell, Joseph. 1968 [1949]. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Bollingen Series 17. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Castaneda, Carlos. 1968. The Teachings of Don Juan; a Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Carroll, Lewis. 1922 [1893]. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Garden City, N. Y: Doubleday, Page.

de Lauretis, Teresa. 1984. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

de Vries, Jan. 1963. Heroic Song and Heroic Legend. London: Oxford University Press.

Dundes, Alan. 1964. On Game Morphology: A Study of the Structure of Non-Verbal Folklore. New York Folklore Quarterly 20:276-88. Georges, Robert A. 1969a. Toward an Understanding of Storytelling Events. Journal of American Folklore 82:313- 28.

. 1969b. The Relevance of Models for Analyses of Traditional Play Activities. Southern Folklore Quarterly 33:1-23. . 1970. Structure in Folktales: A Generative-Transformational Approach. The Conch:Journal of African Cultures and Literatures 2:4-17. . 1972. Recreations and Games. In Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, ed. Richard M. Dorson, 173-89. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. .1976. From Folktale Research to the Study of Narrating. Studia Fen