A detailed content analysis of Nintendo Power issues published from 1994 to 1999 shows that mainstream companies largely ignored the girls’ games movement, instead targeting male audiences through player representations, sexualized female characters, magazine covers featuring men, and predominantly male authors. To help understand why this movement failed, this article addresses the unexplored role of consumer press in defining “gamers” as male. By 1999, however, these attempts collapsed, and video games remained a masculinized technology.
DOUBLE SIDED ZELDA BREATH OF THE WILD CASE PAPER SOFTWARE
In the mid-1990s, a small group of video game designers attempted to lessen gaming’s gender gap by creating software targeting girls.
King and Delfabbro (2019) argue that the unregulated nature of loot box gaming can be predatory toward gamers given that "it may difficult for some users to critically appraise the value of some in-game purchasing options and some vulnerable users may be financially and psychologically exploited by these schemes" (p. While game communities at times view the purchasing of loot boxes negatively (Macey & Hamari, 2019)-given that they would seemingly reduce the competitiveness of the gaming experience as all a player need to do to advance further is to spend more money-the mobile game's public relations team largely gears the game toward those who spend money Perreault, Perreault & McCarty, 2019). Indeed, Tham and Perreault (2021) demonstrates that even when mobile gamers were given the opportunity to acquire loot boxes through in-game advertising, players preferred to spend money-indicating that far from being an ancillary part of the game, loot boxes may be essential to the mobile games that include them. In particular, in the case of Nintendo, by exploring their presentation of an iconic female character, Princess Zelda, we hope to gain an understanding of how Nintendo worked to draw women into gaming while still managing to serve a dominant gaming paradigm that has proven inhospitable to women. Narrative is a useful theory to apply in the exploration of gender in that by looking at narrative shared across time, one can gain insight into that which a society finds appropriate and acceptable (Berdayes & Berdayes, 1998). This study seeks to expose the narrative frames applied in the presentation of Princess Zelda in all Nintendo video ads from 1985 (Nintendo’s first console launch in America) to 2017 with the launch of its newest console, the Nintendo Switch, on track to be the company’s most successful console to date. As a business, Nintendo has always skated a fine line in gaming culture: it has sought to position itself as an inclusive, co-ed, family friendly culture in a media environment pushing ever more deeply into niche emphasis. That said, a few moments in gaming have illustrated rare subversive moments where women have taken the center stage (Perreault, Perreault et al., 2016). Gaming culture has in the past proven itself adverse, if not openly hostile to the presentation and inclusion of women in gaming (Massanari, 2015).
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