Fans Take Videogame Damsels Out of Distress, Put Them in Charge

[merithyn]

I've been saying this forever.

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Playing "Donkey Kong" this spring, Mike Mika's 3-year-old daughter Ellis asked him why it is always the mustached Mario who saves Pauline, the damsel in a pink dress who gets kidnapped by a gorilla.

The game has no option for the girl to save the boy. It just works like that, the dad told his daughter. "She was bummed out," he says.

So Mr. Mika, a 39-year-old videogame developer in Emeryville, Calif., hacked the classic game's software to make the damsel into a heroine who saves the plumber Mario. He published his version, dubbed "Donkey Kong: Pauline Edition," online, where it has been downloaded more than 11,000 times since it was posted in March.

From Damsel to Heroine

See images of videogames before and after they were hacked to turn the damsels into heroines.

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Many videogames have long followed the same guy-centered theme: Girl gets in trouble; boy goes on a quest to save girl. Since few of those titles have broken that story mold, a niche of gamers with programming skills makes it their mission to write their own.

With a few redrawn pixels and well-placed lines of computer code, the women crying out for rescue have become the ones who save the day. One gamer turned the namesake character from "The Legend of Zelda," a princess saved by a guy named Link, into a sword-bearing warrior. (The game's creator called it "Zelda Starring Zelda.")

Another made Princess Peach, a different kidnapped friend of Mario, throw her own fireballs as she fights her way through a Mushroom Kingdom to save the plumber.

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Nintendo
In the original Super Mario Bros. game Mario saves Princess Peach.

Even the lipstick-lined Ms. Pac-Man started as a hack of the popular arcade game about her male counterpart.

The hackers do the gender switch by tapping into code from the games. They tend to focus on older titles because the programming and graphics are simpler than modern ones.

There is some debate about how far the hackers should take their artistic license. Some change a lot throughout the game, adding pink color schemes, feminine fonts and even new mystical capabilities, such as the ability to turn into a mermaid for underwater fights. One remade "Super Mario Bros." into "Hello Kitty Land."

Nicholas Elias Wilson, a videogame developer in the Los Angeles area, opted to change as little as possible when he turned Princess Peach into the protagonist in his version of "Super Mario Bros."

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Nicholas Elias Wilson
In the revised version of the game, the princess is the star.

"People asked me why I didn't change 'Super Mario Bros.' to 'Super Peach Sisters,' " he says. But he didn't want a game that was unequal. "I wanted to have the same game, but now you can play as the girl."

Kenna Warsinske, a 27-year-old recent Portland State University graduate who hacked the Zelda game, said she got tired of waiting for Nintendo 7974.OK +0.94% to make the princess the game's real star. "Every time they would release a new Zelda game, I would check if Zelda was playable and it never happened," she says.

Anita Sarkeesian, who started a Web-video series in which she critiques the way women are portrayed in videogames, says the hacks play into a larger issue.

"It is sad that they have to do that in the first place," she says, adding that in the decades since many of these games were originally released, there have been few substantive female protagonists. "That's a long stretch of time not to expand the industry and representation of women in a substantial way."


ZELDA

Copyright lawyers disagree on the legal implications of changing characters in the games.

Reggie Fils-Aime, president of American operations for Nintendo, which makes the Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong games, says the company doesn't want people using its intellectual property in this way, but supports the message. To show "there are strong female characters—I think that's a wonderful story," he says.

Nintendo says it will feature a female lead in its coming "Bayonetta 2," about a witch who shoots guns and uses magic to dispatch foes.

Laurent Detoc, president of North American operations at game maker Ubisoft Entertainment SA, UBI.FR -0.10% says that his company tends to follow what consumers buy and that it has created some games starring women, including a version of its popular "Assassin's Creed" action games.

But he says the company could do better. He says his wife challenged him as to why his company's female-focused "Imagine" games allow girls to play detectives, reporters, zookeepers and family doctors—but not president of the U.S. As for female-focused games, he says: "Should we do more of them? Yes."

Videogame developers say women are often underrepresented among their ranks. Ubisoft said 18% of its 7,100-person production team are women, as are 27% of its top managers. Nintendo declined to provide breakdowns of its staff.

It is still rare to find lead female action characters who aren't curiously curvy. Lara Croft, of "Tomb Raider," wore short shorts and a snug navel-baring tank top in earlier incarnations. (She now wears long pants and covers her mid-section.)

"Gaming culture has not changed" over the decades, says Katherine Cross, a Ph.D. candidate at City University of New York who studies the sociology of gender and gaming.

Some don't like changes to classic titles. Mr. Mika, who hacked "Donkey Kong," has received harsh criticism: Someone on the Internet "said it was like I was destroying the Mona Lisa," he says.

One of the most famous videogame heroines actually grew out of a gender hack. In 1981, after the popularity of Namco Ltd.'s 7832.TO -2.04% "Pac-Man," a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students made unauthorized modifications to create a game called "Crazy Otto." It featured a Pac-Man-like figure navigating mazes who, during intermissions, would meet a girl, fall in love and have a child.

The company with the rights to Pac-Man struck a licensing deal with the students, but wanted the game to be focused on the girl.

"They said make it really look female with hair and a bow and a beauty mark and lipstick," says Steve Golson, now 54, who was one of the MIT students. Eventually, they settled on a name: "Ms. Pac-Man."

A Namco spokeswoman declined to comment, saying employees who worked on Ms. Pac-Man have since left the company.

In more modern games, the hackers face additional artistic challenges.

Ms. Warsinske, who hacked the original Zelda game, investigated flipping the script on sequel "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time," the first title in the franchise with 3-D visuals. But it would take more work, such as figuring out how the princess would ride the horse in the game.

"There's the dress conundrum: does she ride sidesaddle?" she says.

[garbon]

Totally true. There are literally no games staring a lead female character who saves a male character...

[merithyn]

Totally true. There are literally no games staring a lead female character who saves a male character...

Doesn't Lara Croft count?

Of course, she was nearly naked when she did it.

[katmai]

Uppity woman.

[Razgovory]

You've been saying that girl on top of the building should save Mario from donkey Kong?  That is a strange thing to have been saying for all these years.  Incidentally in Donkey Kong Mario was a carpenter not a plumber and in the first Super Mario Brothers game Mario is a plumber who saves Princess Toadstool. You can play as the Princess in Super Mario Brothers 2.

[Josquius]

Meh, the target audience is and has always been male dominated. They make what sells.

Seems kind of weird in donkey kong, ignoring gender, that a princess would save a plumber.

[Razgovory]

Meh, the target audience is and has always been male dominated. They make what sells.

Seems kind of weird in donkey kong, ignoring gender, that a princess would save a plumber.

I'm not sure if "sex sells" works on those old arcade games from the 1980's.

Well there is an exception: Dragon Lair.

[The Larch]

You can play as the Princess in Super Mario Brothers 2.

The international version of Mario 2 was not developed by Nintendo. The original Japanese Mario 2 was considered to be way too difficult, so they took a completely different game and overwrote characters from the Mario world on top of them. As the game had 4 characters, they had to pick up two more characters to add besides Mario and Luigi, and it's only because of that that Toad and the Princess became playable.

I'd recommend to watch the videos by Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist critic mentioned in the article. IMO she puts it very clearly and in an eloquent way, and is not vitriolic at all about it. Here they are:

Damsels in Distress part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q

Damsels in Distress part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toa_vH6xGqs

[Josquius]

Meh, the target audience is and has always been male dominated. They make what sells.

Seems kind of weird in donkey kong, ignoring gender, that a princess would save a plumber.

I'm not sure if "sex sells" works on those old arcade games from the 1980's.

Well there is an exception: Dragon Lair.

I never said sex sells.
Its more a case of a male main character.
Sex sells would usally lead to a female lead ala Croft.

[Brazen]

If Lara Croft were a man:


More here, Meri
http://www.cnet.com.au/meet-larry-croft-if-lara-was-a-man-339344728.htm

[Iormlund]

Can't be Lara's equivalent without disproportionate sexual attributes.

[Brazen]

Can't be Lara's equivalent without disproportionate sexual attributes.

You obviously didn't click through the gallery... Though whether they've introduced a physics-correct package-bounce mode remains to be seen.

[Ed Anger]

When playing the old SSI D&D games, the only female characters I created were the Clerics. With names like 'Cunt', 'Twat' or some such shit.

[garbon]

Can't be Lara's equivalent without disproportionate sexual attributes.

You obviously didn't click through the gallery... Though whether they've introduced a physics-correct package-bounce mode remains to be seen.

I did and thought to be the equiv of Lara, he needs a much better bulge and abs.

[Neil]

Typical feminist nonsense.  They want to enter areas that are predominantly male, and then try and ruin it.

Gamers are men and boys, and therefore the main characters in games tend to be men and boys.