The title of this post was generated by AI, the content was created by me
The damsel in distress video that we watched for class today reminded me a lot of a book I’ve been reading called Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, which discusses the ideas that in our society men are the default, this causes a gender data gap, and that our collective unthinking and failure to intentionally consider women and their perspectives contributes to this problem.
One of the examples that Perez gives highlights a problem within children’s tv characters;
“A 2007 international study of 25,439 children’s TV characters found that only 13% of non-human characters are female (the figure for female human characters was slightly better, although still low at 32%). An analysis of G-rated (suitable for children) films released between 1990 and 2005 found that only 28% of speaking roles went to female characters – and perhaps even more tellingly in the context of humans being male by default, women made up only 17% of crowd scenes.”
These statistics feel very related to the ideas that the Damsel in Distress video brought up about women being not active participants in games, but a prize or cheap plot device to give the game an objective. When the women are simply a prize, or “the ball” with which men are in a competition over, there are far fewer of them needed in the game- what game needs more than one ball?
As a child I recognized that most video games were designed for boys. My brother played a wide range of games and I enjoyed both playing and watching. The games that I played were mostly games like Mario Kart or Kirby AirRide that are multiplayer and have several options for characters or color differentiation, but many of the single player games that he liked, like Paper Mario or Zelda, didn’t really appeal to me. (I find it interesting that these were the two game series discussed within the Damsel in Distress trope.) I typically liked playing as girl characters because I am one, and there simply weren’t nearly as many female options as male ones. To this day when I go home and play Mario Kart Double Dash with my family, I choose to play as Toadette and Birdo. (I didn’t like playing as the princesses, the only two other playable girl characters out of 20 total- when they lose they loudly burst into tears with the exclamation, “I can’t believe I lost!”)
When it comes to single player games, the main games I played were Harvest Moon and Pokémon games which, by the time I got to play them, gave options to play as either a boy or girl. (Earlier forms of both were also male-centric.) I appreciate that these series saw an opportunity to include young girls and took it because I loved these games. I can only hope that the game industry as well as the movie industry and others recognize that women and girls need representation and role models that they can look up to or even just relate to just as much as men and boys do.
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