Playing with Fire: Trouble in Super Macho World?

November 16th, 2006, 23:15 Posted By: wraggster

One of the core ideas behind serious games is using digital entertainment to convey ideas and values. In the following article, I take a look at how Nintendo portrays its most famous female character in the recently released portable title, Super Princess Peach.

In Mario’s universe, Princess Peach - formerly known as Princess Toadstool in Western countries until 1996 - has always played the damsel in distress role. Until now, all she did was wait until Mario showed up and rescued her. Arguably, that is not a very active role but, to be fair to Nintendo, that is pretty much what princesses do in traditional fairy tales. In 2005, Nintendo launched Super Princess Peach, a Nintendo DS game where, for the first time, Peach was the protagonist. Rather than been rescued, it was now her turn to rescue Mario and Luigi who were being held prisoners by the evil Bowser.

I first heard of the game through Ian Bogost, who was shocked at what he called “Nintendo’s most politically incorrect game ever.” The reason behind this claim was that Peach’s superpowers are not physical, such as what is commonly found with male characters in the Mario universe. Instead, Peach fights with an unconventional weapon: her emotions. That sounded too weird to be true, so I ran to the nearest store and bought myself a copy.

The player can use different kind of emotional attacks: rage, crying and happiness (along with a sort of neutral emotion called “Calm” which replenishes her energy bar). Each emotion is represented on the interface through a heart that can be activated on the console’s touchable screen. Many game critics noticed the sexism of portraying a female character in this particular way. Ryan Davis, argued on his GameSpot review of the game that it had “some weird sexist undercurrents in the game design”. Similarly, Bryn Williams wondered at GameSpy: “Is Nintendo trying to say that females are all ‘emo’?”

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