Nintendo’s sexist outreach
Over at Pushback, Lisha Arino is a little critical of Nintendo’s most recent attempt to reach out to women, but concludes that in the end, if it encourages more women to delve seriously into gaming, then it isn’t entirely objectionable. Ignoring the aesthetics for a bit (which I do think are problematic), I think the real problem with Nintendo’s approach to attracting female gamers is that, well, the games themselves aren’t very good. Look at the game Cooking Mama, for example. The object of the game is to cook meals. And as the middling Gamespot review details, there isn’t much depth or challenge in the game. And worse with its cutesy characters and bright colors (with a heavy amount of pink), it is clearly designed to attract girls. The message being that even when it comes to video games, women should only be in the kitchen.
Now, granted, Cooking Mama is a third-party game on a Nintendo platform. And though Nintendo has some control over what is released on their consoles, they don’t have total control. And so it is a little unfair to criticize Nintendo for what another company produced. Nonetheless, Nintendo doesn’t exactly stand out when it comes to reaching out to women with themes and games which aren’t so absurdly gendered. For instance, in 2006 Nintendo released Super Princess Peach, an action-platformer starring the famous Princess Peach (object of Mario’s affections for over twenty years) and featuring gameplay similar to classic two-dimensional Mario games.
The game was…okay. Despite its essentially being a Mario game with a (slightly) different character set, it is terribly easy. Which was actually something of a surprise, seeing as how the last 2D Mario – New Super Mario Bros. – was hard enough to frustrate even this long-time gamer. Worse, the game had all sorts of weird sexist undertones. Watch this trailer:
When Peach is injured, she cries. And when Peach is angry, she lights on fire (read: she has PMS). As the Gamespot review puts it:
Also, there’s something rather sexist about the idea that Princess Peach’s big secret weapon is that she can get really overly emotional at the drop of a hat.
There are other examples of Nintendo’s sexist approach to reaching out to female gamers, and they are infuriating. Both because of the sexism, and because Nintendo is awesome enough to make deep, fun games which appeal to everyone. It simply isn’t necessary to make stereotypically “feminine” games in order to reach out to women. Two perfect non-Nintendo examples are Harmonix’s Guitar Hero and Rock Band; both are deep, accessible, and fun games with a large female following.
Nintendo basically blazed the path for accessible gaming, and did it without relying on sexist stereotypes. There’s no reason to start on it now.
