Nintendo Attempts to Turn Fashionistas Into Gamers
By Lisha Arino - Jun 17th, 2008 at 4:31 pmNintendo announced yesterday that it’s releasing a game called POP CUTIE! Street Fashion Simulation in September for Nintendo DS. According to the game’s press release, players play the role of an entrepreneur attempting to build a fashion empire from humble beginnings:
Players will start the game as an independent designer with a small shop at a flea market. As players progress, they’ll move into larger boutiques. The competition against rival shop owners culminates in a ‘Fashion Battle,’ where a panel of judges will decide if a player’s style has enough cute or enough cool to become all the rage.
Although it’s never stated explicitly in the press release, it seems pretty obvious that Nintendo’s going to be marketing POP CUTIE! to young women, especially when you consider the company’s recent advertising efforts directed at this demographic. My first reaction to the game was to scoff (and then, after I saw the screenshots, to gag). I mean, really Nintendo? You think fashion and cutesy characters are going to get women to play a game? We don’t need those kinds of gimmicks to pick up a controller. Good plot lines, sweet graphics, and awesome gameplay are enough, thank you very much.
But then I thought about it some more, and realized that although I feel a bit insulted that Nintendo is peddling this sort of fluff in my general direction, the company isn’t actually catering to established gamers like myself, but rather to girls who have never picked up a controller before. This casts the game in a slightly different light.
Although there are plenty of women who play video games, girls and gaming are still seen as largely incompatible. Most people continue to believe that only guys are into gaming, and that girls have no interest in it. So maybe Nintendo is doing more good than harm with POP CUTIE! After all, by making a game that deals with a traditionally female domain–fashion–and accompanying it with cutesy images, Nintendo is encouraging girls who would otherwise find video games “too masculine” to check out a medium that initially alienated them. And then maybe the number of female gamers will rise, they will be less of an anomaly, and there will be less of a need to distinguish “boy” games from “girl” games.
So, is Nintendo playing to gender stereotypes and totally missing the mark, or are they making the gaming world more accessible to players with a pair of X chromosomes?
[...] Games, sexism | Tags: cooking mama, nintendo, super princess peach | 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 [...]
June 17th, 2008 at 6:21 pmI like it. Honestly, I grew up with two brothers and a bunch of boy cousins and didn’t realize until college that I was any anomaly for playing video games. It had never occurred to me that there was anything masculine about gaming in particular, though I’d certainly been turned off by games that were hypermasculine or particularly alienating to my senses (tomb raider and the ridiculous hypersexualization of lara croft– is maybe my earliest memory of a game I had no interest in playing that my brothers loved). There are so many games I love (I spent four hours last night playing Super Mario Galaxy on Wii) but I can’t blame other girls for feeling alienated from games that have appealed to me, so why not cast a wider net to try to get that other crowd? Maybe games like this will even bring in some boys who felt alienated by traditionally masculine games…
June 17th, 2008 at 10:20 pmNothing wrong with Nintendo making different types of games, but I do find it a little irritating that this is seen as a necessary step to introduce girls and women to the gaming world (boys can play fashion games too!).
It seems, however, that the scene of video games is already changing, with the Wii in particular appealing more to traditionally non-gaming crowds, and with games like Mario, Guitar Hero/Rock Band, and of course Wii Sports coming across as relatively gender-neutral. I’m hopeful, also, that the girls of the present and near future won’t necessarily be turned off by traditional video-game fare: not all action games involve ridiculous hyper-sexualization, and maybe we’re empowered enough these days to play games of all “genders.”
Well, I’m back to Super Mario…
June 18th, 2008 at 12:55 am