Perils of the princess: Gender and genre in video games

Western Folklore, Summer 1997 by Sherman, Sharon R

GENDER

The princess may be seen as the female counterpart of the hero. For males, she is that which the hero lacks in all of the games. Like Propp's function VIlla, ONE MEMBER OF A FAMILY EITHER LACKS SOMETHING OR DESIRES TO HAVE SOMETHING, this lack of a princess sets the plot in motion. In an interesting twist to increase its player base, Nintendo offered four different characters for the player of Super Mario 2 to select as the protagonist. Every girl I asked responded instantly that she played the princess in this sequel. Boys, on the other hand, play Luigi or Toadstool.

Mario is called "primitive" by one boy. With the constant advent of new games, new worlds are explored. Male interviewees told me they prefer sports games like Rad Racer or role playing games such as Final Fantasy, in which the player must "take care of' his character-feed him, decide when he needs to sleep, cast spells upon him, choose his weapons and the like. Dissimilar, both games are still perceived by boys as having a goal. In Rad Racer, "you're driving to get to the goal." For girls, driving the car and the action itself are paramount. Patricia Marks Greenfield, in Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games, and Computers (1984), has noted that action is what makes the games popular. The aggressive nature of many games may, some fear, reinforce boys and leave girls behind in the field of computers, a field to which most children are first exposed by video games. Parallel processing and the ability to deal with complex interacting dynamic variables which lead to inductive reasoning add to the excitement, Marks notes. Girls often play games which provide experience-Skate or Die, Rad Racer, BMX Racing or Mike Tysons Punch-out (created long before Tyson was convicted of rape). A game featuring Tyson seemed like a dubious choice for a female. "If I beat him, I'd be happy," remarked one of the girls.

Boys have their connection with the computer reinforced by the now common PC (personal computer) games. The University of Oregon distributes the shareware versions of a few games on the CD-ROM it provides to all students so they can hook up to the Internet. Quake and Doom, two of the most popular video games played on the computer, are violent fantasies. In Doom, players are told to order the registered version: "Act like a man. Slap a few shells into your shotgun..." In Quake, the enemy enters Earth from another dimension through a slipgate device (akin to the transporter room on Star Trek). Players pass through levels and slipgates, combating ogres, rottweilers, zombies, and other enemies who all serve as obstacles in the hero's attempt to complete his "mission" to destroy Quake. The enemies are graphically torn to pieces by some of the available weapons. For most girls, the action in Quake is abhorrent and the plot nothing more than an exercise in aggression.

Both action games and adventure games are experienced differently by females and males. Boys see the option of playing the princess in Mario 2 as strange because "she's the one you're trying to save"; girls see her as the heroine who saves the mushroom people, much like she does in the other Mario games but with a distinct difference-she doesn't need Mario to release her from a spell. One boy remarked, "In 2, you get to be the princess and that's really weird." I asked why. He replied, "Now she's helping you instead of creating the problems, sort of. She didn't create the problem but, you know, you were trying to save her. And now, in Super Mario 2, you're supposed to save the people that live there. Now you get to use Princess Toadstool to your advantage (laughs)." When the female character is chosen by males it is because she can float in the air the longest, but the notion of "using" her may also have sexual connotations. In Mario 2, the unexperienced part of the plot and thus the forgotten narrative element of the princess saving the people is foregrounded in the "weird" scenario of having the princess capable of action. The same boy commented further that "she's wearing some dress out in the middle of...some desert, whereas they're [the males] all wearing some sort of rugged clothes." The female doesn't quite fit as the hero and the boys tend to play other characters. Girls seize the chance to re-gender the hero, reinforce the female's role as savior, and create a new message. In Metroid, the heroic character is female, but the boys did not find that strange, perhaps because she is an alien. "She has green hair, I think," said one. The other remarked, "I picture it as an it." Despite the game booklet's description of the character as female, girls thought the character was male. "He's got an astronaut thing, a helmet." Thus, the same game is discerned differently-the female becomes a green-haired monster for boys and a male action figure for girls. Girl heroines seem to be mere twins of the male in adventure games. Girls noted that the Mario games are `just an adventure for Mario." In Mario 2, unlike the male's "weird" goal of saving the people rather than the princess, one girl stated, "You don't save a princess or anything. You just beat the last guy and it's all a dream and then you wake up." Indeed, according to the game booklet, the game is a dream, a point not mentioned by the boys who expect Mario to continue in his role as savior of the princess.