Perils of the princess: Gender and genre in video games

Western Folklore, Summer 1997 by Sherman, Sharon R

The image is being constantly refined. In 1991, the company introduced Super Nintendo with Super Mario World, followed by Yoshi's Island: Super Mario World 3. In 1996, Nintendo 64 (a system with a 64 bit processor) appeared and added a 3D quality to the games. Each improvement required the purchase of an entirely new game set. Nevertheless, Nintendo, according to advertising on the Internet, "is proclaimed.. .the greatest video game of all time."3 The music is one tie-in to the previous games. But Nintendo 64 has a Mario who takes a nonlinear journey. He can approach the castle, open doors to enter any one of the various rooms, and jump into tapestries or pictures on the wall to come to grips with a different dimension. Unlike the linear 2D Mario, the 3D Mario can look up and down and the player can see Mario's point of view by flicking a control. The media camera can also be made to appear, "reporting live" and "on location," showing the player the media's point of view, and covering the action as if it were a televised competition. Similarly, the player can zoom in and out, like a camera, to see different aspects of the world he inhabits as Mario.

SOCIAL ROLES

In the world of his peers, the expert player exhibits a supremacy which he may not otherwise enjoy. While playing, he may become a hero within his social group. If he knows secret moves and has dextrous skills superior to his friends, others may idolize him for his feats. His audience gazes upon him and the screen as he operates the game, only relinquishing the controls after making an error or using up a prearranged time set by the group so that someone else might play. He acquires social "power," earned by long hours of developing his game skills. In his essay, "The Relevance of Models for Analyses of Traditional Play Activities," Robert A. Georges has noted that "traditional play activities are social events and should be studied as such" (1969b:21). By inquiring into the playing of games as behavior, Georges reasons that "there is no difference between traditional and nontraditional play activities" (1972: 184). The Nintendo gaming situation, as a social event, begs for further analysis.

The video player acts as a storyteller, taking his audience to new worlds of adventure. Georges has argued that "distinguishing between role-based and identity-based behaviors of storytelling participants...is a necessary prerequisite to understanding better what makes all storytellers and their participants paradoxically traditional and unique, and communal and individual, at the same time" (1990:56). Video game players share their identities as Mario characters; they are, at once, acting as heroes in a plot, yet also as individuals, with their self-identities shifting within the social situation. Audience members must fulfill the roles of audience members but they also wish to assume the role of storyteller. These communicative roles illuminate the similarities between gamers and storytellers, especially when seen through the frame of both individual and group behavior.