Gaming has always had some sort of gendering as a means for companies to profit off a target audience. Previously as seen within arcades, games were marketed towards adults, but it was normally males. Brought up by Kocurek, gendering had a foundation in arcades as businesses began using the themes of violence and sports, which were considered a male activity. Then as the arcade business began pursuing a change in marketing towards toys, video games had to be gendered more between boys and girls like soldiers and dolls. So, pink games were what girls were given. Eventually pink games died out, but it was quite evident that in magazines like Nintendo Power, males were targeted much more heavily than females. Imagine how games would have progressed if they were only marketed towards girls. Would games be themed differently?

Pink games had barbies and bright colors, which is what we see in Kirby minus the barbies. Character customization might have been all the rage, while violence and sports would have been ignored. However, maybe video games towards females would have failed horribly, due to these restrictions. Like any industry, they would have to branch out towards different topics to get more viewers. It would be impossible to stick with only females and their stereotypes and that is why we find more games trying to be inclusive and diverse today.

Most multiplayer games have some type of female character that can be played, which reminds me of the ever controversial playable female characters in Battlefield V. The argument was that it was not historically accurate to have females fighting in WWII. They didn’t take them out, regardless of the backlash. This does bring up a topic that we have mentioned before in class. It’s the topic of pandering, but I don’t know if we specifically used that word. For example, when Overwatch’s face of the game, Tracer, was pronounced gay through a comic, a lot of people were upset, but mostly because of the whole pushing the agenda of diversity and ruining games in the process conspiracy. It was evident that maybe Tracer wasn’t originally homosexual during the planning of the game and actually was made that way for publicity and expanding their profits into the lgbtq community. Doing this isn’t inherently horrible, but it does just look like companies want a quick cash grab. Going back to the original arcade industry, it seems that it was all about a cash grab. Isn’t that what industry is all about? Money. They want to make the consumer happy, but they have to make profit doing so.

Overall, the act of gendering things might appear convenient at first, but it could be less profitable. It’s much easier to market towards a key audience and age and gender is probably the easiest and broadest demographic to use. It doesn’t completely explain why we see companies branching out. I assume that once they have a solid fan base then they can focus on other groups because there is only so much a fan can give after they bought the game. Even if it is considered pandering, it does satisfy the needs of this modern day and age. There is always a need for representation, but if it’s bad representation, maybe we don’t need it so much.

Works Cited

Cote, Amanda C. “Writing ‘Gamers’: The Gendered Construction of Gamer Identity in Nintendo Power (1994–1999).” Games and Culture, vol. 13, no. 5, July 2018, pp. 479–503, doi:10.1177/1555412015624742.

Kocurek, Carly A.. Coin-Operated Americans : Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade, University of Minnesota Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=4391801.