Just thought I would share an article I relate to about picking/playing female characters in video games. Before I could put words to describe how I was different, I gravitated towards female characters in video games because I felt like I could relate to them more.
Most of my friends questioned why I would pick Chun Li, Sonya Blade, or whatever other female character there was to play. I think this made me a better gamer, because I made sure I was really good with these characters to keep them quiet for questioning my character choices.
I still have this preference to this day because I want to relate to the characters I play, so you'll most likely never see me pick the overly buff, ultra-masculine, alpha male types.
Original source: http://the-toast.net/2015/02/17/leveling-up/
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Rohin Guha’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
“[E]ven though I knew nothing about Peach in terms of stats or character besides her princess status, the mere fact that she offered me the chance to play through the game as a girl felt like such a novel idea that I picked her immediately.” –Kate McCallister, “Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Peach”
When was I eight years old, I would blow air into my dusty Super Mario 2 NES cartridge, push it into the console, hit POWER, and wait for the player select screen to come up. I’d always tap the RIGHT button on the D-pad three times and hit B, and Princess Peach would raise her hand, happy to accompany me on my quest to chuck turnips, pumpkins, beets, and other vegetables at Shyguys and King Wart.
In a culture in which Disney princesses reigned, and even the feistiest – like Jasmine, Belle, or Ariel – were shoehorned into traditional heteronormative gender roles, here was a corner of contemporary culture where I felt encouraged to navigate the world as Princess Peach, equipped with a unique power-up (floating!) that, thanks to the buggy nature of 8-bit NES games, could help the player skip over vast chunks of the level.
When the designers decided to take Doki Doki Panic and skin it with Mario-branded characters, I don’t know if they intended to make some revolutionary statement about the role of women in video game universes. Probably not. According to the physics of the Super Mario 2 universe, Peach’s ability to fly and float owes itself to her billowing skirts. Throughout her storied life, Peach, like even the boldest A-list actress gliding down the Hollywood red carpet, would never find a way to separate her identity from what she wore.
The stupidest thing about the Super Mario franchise is not that Mario’s princess is always in another castle, but rather the fact that, in almost all games in the franchise – except for Super Mario 2 – Mario’s motivation for saving the Mushroom Kingdom hinges primarily on his ability to collect a woman at the end of his quest. The liberation of a make-believe land from a bloated spiky-shelled monster is always tertiary.
D-Pad Dilemma
Queer kids growing up in suburban Michigan towns just want to play video games, like all the other kids they know. We want role models, we want icons, we want to see ourselves represented in the media with which we engage. It’s not asking for the moon. But we don’t want something as commonplace as a videogame player select screen to become a battleground for identity politics. What a cruel morass to thrust upon kids wanting to play video games! That their choices might require a referendum on masculinity.
At nine years old, I want to D-pad my way to Princess Peach because it just makes sense to me.
“You always pick Peach, Rohin. What’s wrong with you?”
The shrill cry always comes from one of my childhood friends. Other friends join in, and lo! a chorus of burgeoning adolescent misogyny is born.
I can’t possibly come back with “You always look like a bag of duck poop, what’s wrong with you?” because I won’t develop my meanness muscle until later in life. Instead I feebly respond, “She’s really cool.”
I don’t know why I picked Peach. Why did you pick Toad? Why did your friend, who I don’t even like all that much, pick Mario, who in the Super Mario Bros. 2 ecosystem has no real special abilities?
The scene shifts. It is years later. You’ll know the setting well: I am hanging out a friend’s house on a Saturday night. We are hopped up on pizza, M&Ms, ice cream, and soda. We are locked in a Goldeneye firefight to the death. A winner is crowned, the losers shamed; we go back to the player select screen.
My friends gravitate to the vast array of playable male characters. Meanwhile, my cursor hovers over one of the two female characters, Xenia. She is a femme fatale – the type that became popular as the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat franchises became blockbusters, inspiring a slew of copycat fighting games. There is nothing remarkable about Xenia, except that unlike all the male playable characters in Goldeneye, she wears very little in the way of clothing. Her character stats are notably weaker than those of her playable male counterparts.
This is a trend that continues for years. When my friends and I had Street Fighter 2 tournaments, I’d always pick Chun Li or Cammy; in Mortal Kombat tournaments, I’d skip over Mileena and Kitana – female playable characters who were programmed from the same Xenia-like prototypical template – and gleefully pick Sindel, probably the most stereotypically female playable character in that franchise, and given the fact that she’s marketed as a Mortal Kombat MILF, still an unconventional choice. Sindel’s most devastating attacks were either her shrill scream or her ability to grab opponents with her hair and slam them against the ground. Life goals: set.
And yes, when we played Mario Kart, I’d always opt, again, for Princess Peach.
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In her essay for The Toast, Kate McCallister also calls herself out on what the pattern of selecting a female character became: “The habit that started with Peach is still a deep-set pattern in my psyche: pick the girl every time.” Her motive for internalizing this gut reaction is obviously different from mine – yet not all that different. Both women and queer men are gravely underrepresented in the video game ecosystem.
At a young age, I learned to take pleasure in the squirming unease of friends and peers who were put off by my penchant for selecting female playable characters. I’d opt for Princess Peach in Mario Kart in part because there was something gratifying in seeing straight-identifying boys suffer when their notions of proper masculinity were challenged.
I didn’t want it to be a fight over identity, not really. But, look, if my friends were going to foist that battle on me, I’d rise to the occasion. I’d show up — pink parasols, turnips and all — ready to kick their asses.
