One writer that has commented extensively on gender in games is media scholar Henry Jenkins. In his essay "Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces," Jenkins explores the ideology of boy's play spaces described in children's literature, as a way of characterizing contemporary forms of representation in digital games. He argues that the conventions of the nineteenth and early twentieth century boy's adventure story have affected the kinds of representation we see in current video games. Platform scrolling games such as Capcom's Mega Man and Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers, according to Jenkins, utilize the iconography of adventure stories. These games allow players to struggle against obstacles, explore fantastic lands, fight menacing enemies, and even die (only to be reborn at the beginning of the level). Above all else these games exhibit thrilling, non-stop action.
In Jenkins'account, the games' levels and worlds follow the set-piece structure of adventure stories, in which all elements are streamlined down to their essential features. The plots and characters are reduced to familiar genre archetypes, defined primarily through their capacity for action. Similarly, the game settings follow the pulp model of the "adventure island," a staple of boy's books and games. The island represents "an isolated world far removed from domestic space or adult supervision, an untamed world for people who refuse to bow before the pressures of the civilizing process, a never-never-land where you seek your fortune."[9] Many video games clearly embody features of the adventure island narrative as described by Jenkins, and therefore reflect established rhetorics of "boy culture."
Significantly, the cultural rhetoric of gender is not restricted to the visual design of the games Jenkins cites. Although it is true that the games share the graphic trappings of comic books, cartoons, and other forms of traditional boy's culture, the gendered rhetoric of these games is embedded in their systemic and interactive dimensions as well. As Jenkins writes, "Each screen overflows with dangers; each landscape is riddled with pitfalls and booby traps. One screen may require you to leap from precipice to precipice, barely missing falling into the deep chasms below. Another may require you to swing by vines across the treetops, or spelunk through an underground passageway, all the while fighting it out with the alien hordes."[10] The action-oriented, stimulus-based interactivity of the game is part of the cultural rhetoric of the boy's adventure archetype. Whether the designers intended to or not, they were reproducing an established rhetoric of gender in the design of the game itself.
Jenkins' work offers a great example of how cultural rhetorics can impact game design. The imaginary spaces to which boys find themselves attracted are not just neutral places of play: they are specifically gendered spaces that invite boys in and keep girls out. The kinds of games Jenkins mentions reflect gendered leisure preferences (thrilling non-stop action; settings outside domestic spaces) even as they perpetuate them, echoing earlier genres of boy's culture that operated in similar ways. Although the games may be new, the rhetoric they embody has been passed down from an earlier era.
[9]Henry Jenkins, "
Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces. " In
From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), p. 279.
[10]Ibid., p. 280.