Mario and Manhood: The Princess

In this final post looking at video games and gender, we’ll examine the portrayal of women in gamer culture.

I gave Princess Peach a hard time in the first post in this series, but the truth is that she has it easier than most other women characters in the gaming world. If men are portrayed unfairly on TV, then women are portrayed especially bad through video games. Like Princess Peach, many female characters are just used as a romantic interest, a plot device, or as eye candy rather than as an interesting or important part of the story. Let’s look at some negative examples of women portrayed in video games.

1. Dead or Alive, specifically the Beach Volleyball version.

2. Duke Nukem “babes” that have to be rescued and are often naked or scantily clad.

3. Most female NPC’s in Grand Theft Auto games.

There are probably many more examples, but that gives you an idea. Women being degraded and objectified has been a problem for probably as long as there have been both women and men in existence. Unfortunately, this trend has made its way into games as well. But what does God say about how women should be viewed and treated?

When God created Eve, he did so to provide for him a helper. People immediately equate this situation with slavery or servitude, but that is not the case. The word for “helper” in the original language is also used in other places when God is called our “helper.” So therefore, being a helper does not imply inferiority. It should also be noted that Eve is the pinnacle of creation, the last thing that came directly from God’s hands before he declared creation to be “very good.”

So if sex and eye candy are the only factors that influence your view of women (you male gamers) then you are missing out. God created women to be more than just sex objects, but to be valued as treasures for every aspect of their being. Unfortunately, some game designers do not seem to understand this concept. There seem to be two ways in which games distort a proper view of women:

Distortion 1. Men and women are not equal and women are simply objects for the men to rescue. Princess Peach is a great example of this. In the early games, what did she even do? We’re given no idea as to what her value was to Mario other than a convenient plot device. This also shows that strong women and men cannot coexist and one has to be saving the other. Luckily, this distortion seems to be getting more rare as male and female characters are given equal importance and depth. One positive example is Mass Effect 1 and 2. Commander Shephard’s recruits are men and women to work together on a team and they all have skills to contribute. They may not all get along, but at least they have equal ground. This is a good picture of how men and women can compliment each other and work together, not to have one rule completely over the other. The women in the subplots are given special significance and depth that many other female characters are not given. However, the women in Mass Effect still tend to be scantily clad, which brings me to…

Distortion 2. Women have to be overly sexual in appearance and/or behavior in order to be interesting (particularly to male gamers). I ask you Bioware, and any other developers guilty of this, is it really necessary to make an alien female character with human female characteristics? Much less to have them dress provocatively? Another example is Halo, who’s beloved Cortana is effectively “naked” as much as a hologram can be naked. If you want to make the A.I. a female, great, but can’t she wear holo-clothes? While Cortana’s image wasn’t quite as gratitous, the point remains that many female characters placed in the spotlight in a video game tend to automatically be sexualized in some way, presumably to appeal to male gamers.

Games tend to depict women unfairly and the messages we receive from entertainment will determine how we treat them in the real world. There’s still a general lack of respect for women in gamer culture and I feel that it is up to the men to not only be discerning about how women are portrayed, but to stand up and protect the dignity and value of women in the real world. Women were created by God as the last and best part of God’s creation and they should be treated as such.

Questions:

1. What other positive or negative examples of women in games can you identify?

2. Who’s the most interesting female character in gaming?

3. Why do big, burly men get lots of thick armor, but the female characters in the same games have less armor and more exposed areas?

That’s it for this look at video games and manhood. Check back soon for a two-week series on Portal and Portal 2. At the end there will be cake.

Mario and Manhood: Another Castle

Any life-long gamer has likely seen this screen. Having Mario fruitlessly chase the princess through castle after castle is probably just a clever plot device to extend the game and reuse some textures, I’m sure. But at the time that game was awesome enough to override any major criticisms. Unfortunately for us all even in recent years, Princess Peach has continued to make a habit of not only getting captured, but being moved constantly from one castle to another. In fact, Princess Peach is overall quite useless. Let’s review what Princess Peach is terrible at:

1. Not being captured easily. Shouldn’t a kingdom have a well-defended border? Does security not notice a giant dinosaur-turtle sneaking in and out? “Hey where ya going with that princess-shaped duffel bag, sir? Ah, you’re good, carry on.”
2. Being a wise and effective leader of Mushroom Kingdom. Let’s face it, there’s Goombas, Piranha Plants, and flying duck/turtles all over the place.
3. Keeping a stable and secure economy. I think even the least educated economists would agree that storing the kingdom’s gold in bricks and underground sewage areas is problematic at best.
4. Enforcing a drug-free society. The shroom-heads are everywhere, they’ve even renamed the kingdom. Sure, even Mario benefits from the funkadelic powers of the mushroom, but is that really how to maintain a high quality of life? What about the children, Princess? WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN????

Despite these obvious character flaws and her propensity for never being in the right place, our brave hero Mario continues to pursue the princess. Thinking back on this vicious cycle and Mario’s determination, I couldn’t help but think of the Biblical story of Hosea. God commanded the prophet Hosea to pursue a prostitute named Gomer and to love her in spite of her past life on the streets. So Hosea took her as a wife and they had children together and raised a family. But eventually she went back to her old ways ran off to other men. Hosea remained faithful and pursued her even though he had to literally buy her back from someone else.

Does this sound familiar? The connection between Mario and Hosea is that they both pursued a woman who was running away, or being pulled away as the case may be. Princess Peach and Gomer were always with another person, always in another place. But in both cases, this is the picture of true commitment in a relationship. They represent what it looks like to love and pursue the woman unconditionally, regardless of her situation or her faithfulness.

(Now, all metaphors fall apart at some point, so clarification is in order. It’s not exactly fair to say Princess Peach is the same as a prostitute. Gomer kept leaving because of her sinful nature, while the princess was just being taken by Bowser. So let’s just say that Bowser represents the princess’ sinful nature, to salvage the comparison.)

Hosea and Mario are just shadows of a deeper story. As is often the case with prophets, God commanded him to do this as a symbol for all of his people. The message is that God’s people are sinful and adulterous, worshiping other Gods and relying on themselves instead of him. We are all Gomer and Princess Peach: sinful, adulterous, useless. Yet God is faithful and will pursue and love us anyway. That’s the good news. We are undeserving of anything, yet God sent Jesus to rescue us from our sin and ourselves. So next time you get stuck in the grind of a Mario game, wondering why in the world can’t the Princess stop being such a useless tool, remember that you’re just as bad, but there’s one who will stop at nothing to come to your rescue.

Questions:

Have you ever tried to pursue something or someone that continually eluded you?

How have you run from God trying to work in your life?

Use these questions or any other thoughts to discuss in the comments! We’ll talk more about masculinity in the next post.