As I stated in my earlier blog post it took Game Freak the creation of four games to ultimately implement a gender option for females. Pocket Monsters: Red and Green both released in 1996 with Red as the only playable character. This continued with Pocket Monsters: Yellow, Pokemon Red and Blue and Pokemon Gold and Silver. Despite entering a new generation, and revamping the other games for global release no addition of a female character was seen. Some seem to argue that this is because of the limited space available on a game cartridge, but to that I would consider how Pokemon Gold and Silver added two new typings, over one hundred new Pokemon, had two FULL sized Pokemon regions and yet they couldn’t fit in a female character option? Well in fact, they could. Because with the release of Pokemon Crystal we finally saw the introduction of Kris as the female option for those answering “girl” to “Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?”. But before we get into that, I would just like to point out how the implementation of Kris into Crystal undoubtedly shows how the female option could have easily been implemented into the earlier games. Game Freak simply didn’t prioritize it. Why? Why wouldn’t Game Freak consider an option for girls to be a girl if guys could be a guy? And why would the singular option specifically be a guy and not a girl? I think most of you kind of have a guess as I do, and I’ll likely word it a bit less nonchalant in my paper, but this is a clear example of the assumption and marketing toward men being the sole and majority of players of Video Games. 

Despite the increased number of girls playing Video Games, now coming close to equal in the modern day, most companies seem to have chosen to only market toward boys and young boys when it came to designing their games. In “No Girls Allowed” Lien discusses this stereotype of video games being for boys: “A few aisles over, in the video game section, there is a similar marketing story that Maida has yet to learn. Unlike in the toy aisles, she won’t find an expansive selection of video games for boys and an equally expansive selection for girls. Most ‘girls sections,’ if they exist, are lined with fitness titles and Ubisoft’s simplified career simulation series, Imagine, which lets players pretend they’re doctors, teachers, gymnasts and babysitters” (Lien, 2013). This example clearly shows how the gaming industry chose to market their games. The “girls section” is said to possibly not even exist, and if it does the games are completely different from those epic adventure, fighting, shooting and creation based games boys might play, rather opting for fitness titles? Though it may not relate directly to my paper on immersion I want to explore this a little bit as it should be addressed as to why there isn’t a female option in the first few games, and why Game Freak chose to wait four years at all. It would seem to me that they simply wished to market Pokemon toward a boy audience, and didn’t consider that females would even play the games at all. In the next blog post I’ll discuss Kris more in depth as the first female player character, and how her sisters in being empty characters did her dirty. 

Works Cited:

Lien, Tracey. “No Girls Allowed”. Polygon. 2013.