Feminist Criticism on Video Game Content:
In general, self identified feminist groups did not have much to say about the video game industry or its methods in these decades. However, the arguments which have dominated feminist criticism about games have existed since at least the era of the NES.
One exception to this general rule was the feminist-spurred protest aganst the selling of Custer’s Revenge by American Multiple Industries. My friend Kate Willaert touches on this point in a Kotaku article on the subject. Groups like Women Against Pornography objected the the portrayals of sexual acts in the game and did legitimately succeed in getting some retailers to not carry it.
Beyond that, in the early 80s there were not many female protagonists but this didn’t seem to bother the majority of female players. I hesitate to give estimates about how much of the arcade playerbase was female, though I’ve seen some numbers. In general though, once both the arcade and home video game crashes hit (these were two different events) games centered around a hardcore audience which was predominantly male, in the child-to-young adult age bracket.
Conventional wisdom in the video game industry became that only those types of players would spend the type of money required to recoup the costs of an arcade cabinet or at retail for cartridge games. The reasons for this lay deep within consumer culture and the position of video games within the toy industry. However it’s a bit beyond my current ability to easily surmise, so just suffice to say that the male demographic became a noted focus when there once had been more marketing directed at general family activity.
While there was some lamentation of the loss of a female player base after no game came to follow up Pac-Man, Frogger, or Ms. Pac-Man in terms of broad appeal, the question of women in games did not become a specific issue again until the success of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo of America was not at all secretive about saying that its target market was 6-12 year old boys, brought about for the reasons of the Crash as stated above as well as their position within the toy market. They were happy for other people to buy their games or for other publishers to have different priorities, but Nintendo did not put any extraordinary effort towards appealing to markets other than the male child.
With the success of the NES came a litany of criticism about the types of players that Nintendo inspired. In what would become a repeated cycle of commentary about video game systems as they reached new heights of success, the major controversies would go as follows:
All of these steps are part of the continuum which honestly does repeat itself over and over again with future consoles. The earlier video game consoles had violent themes, but they didn’t have the representation aspect which was achievable on the NES. Atari 2600 cartridges could certainly drive people to obsessive lengths, but NES games challenged people to slog each game to reach an end. A few female characters and protagonists had appeared on the earlier consoles, but now in a world with realized characters which could differ from each other, some commentators noticed that the most popular games only featured female characters and in a periphery role.
You can take what you want from each of these criticisms, but they are all explicitly tied together. It was a social justification for the reaction to the NES and subsequent consoles, as well as a call to the game industry to change their approach to each of these subjects. However, these were not feminist groups advocating for the change. These were generally concerned individuals - likely some whom would identify themselves as feminist - but not a systematized critique on the medium.
The article “Guns and Barbies: Girls take shots at sexist beliefs about Nintendo” from the February 27, 1990 issue of The Baltimore Sun is a good example of this. More than just highlighting girls who played video games as a counter narrative, they place things in social terms.
“For boys in this country between the ages of 8 and 15, not having a Nintendo is like not having a baseball bat,” says Rick Anguilla, former editor of Toy and Hobby World magazine.
But for many girls a Nintendo is as important to their play as a Barbie doll.
This specific article commented more on the fact that the marketing was missing out on a segment of the population that was, nevertheless, gravitating to Nintendo’s product. The professionals quoted in this piece specifically refute the idea that women were turned off by the violence and were more than driven to compete.
“The competitiveness is different,” said Kate Fenton, who works on a general pediatric floor. “The girls are just as skilled, but they play on an individual basis, competing with themselves. The boys are more likely to gather around, playing round robin in a group, competing against each other.”
The more persistent note was that of representation. More than one report made passing comments about Mario rescuing Princess Peach, which was a well known point of contention within feminist criticism of fairy tales. Few were going to the lengths of calling Nintendo outright sexist, but concern was being shared about the absence of females in protagonist positions.
Some companies, though, saw the market deficiency and took it as an opportunity.
The development of entertainment software like “Little Mermaid” and “Barbie” [for the NES] is part of a larger trend in the video game business toward what’s known as “niche marketing,” or marketing for a specific group whose interests are different from that of the mass audience.
This need for representation was not universally shared among female players though.
Not that the sparsity of female protagonists seems to bother most girls.
“I don’t care what it is running around on that screen,” said Rosetta [Moore, 10], voicing a sentiment that girls seem to share. “I’m the one that’s playing it."
This isn’t easy to quantify. Again it’s part of the greater question of how media and marketing might fit into general society.
The harsher criticism accelerated at a crucial moment of change for the video game industry. As the era of the Genesis and Super Nintendo took off, games started to portray more realistic situations. The characters stopped being purely cartoon-like - to the American eye - and the violence stopped being quaint. The desires of game creators to take on the same style as Hollywood brought in complaints that the interactive nature of this media made it extra harmful to portray certain actions or ideas.
Charges of adverse effects on women in particular were not far behind. This scathing opinion piece on the question in the September 18, 1992 issue of the Sacramento Bee should be perfectly recognizable to those familiar with feminist criticism of games today.
“They’re horrendous,” says Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children’s Television. “It doesn’t take a lot of research to see that the images of women in these games are really negative.”
“They perpetuate myths that women are helpless, need men to rescue them, or are ruthless in business,” says Charren, whose group promotes quality TV programming for children and who has studied video games as well.
Again, the lens of these quotes is not as part of explicitly feminist media but rather the greater movement of encouraging media to support what they saw as positive messages to young children. The organizations and people commenting on the industry came from a background of psychological study rather than an explicitly political standpoint. They pushed for regulation of content in games the same way that children’s television content had been regulated.