For this week’s critical play I played Super Smash Bros, a platform fighting game by Nintendo released in late 2018. The creators of the game include famous Japanese video game designer Masahiro Sakurai and development companies Sora, Nintendo, and Bandai. When first released to the market, the intended audience seemed to be men primarily between 20 and 30s, but its popularity in the U.S. contributed to its incredible growth across various age groups and demographics – from middle schoolers to college graduate young adults. Although such explosive growth was primarily on the Nintendo Switch platform, the game can be played on console devices across the Nintendo family including the Nintendo 64 and DS devices as well as the Wii. In the following, we will dissect what it means to play the game as a feminist and key improvements that can be made to intertwine feminist perspectives in gameplay.
Shira Chess argues how video games can be used as tools for radical disruption of the male-centric toxic gaming culture in modern-day gaming. Along with feminist perspectives tackling gender issues such as lack of representation in media, such perspectives influence game designers to adopt intersectional approaches to designing games which helps drive fairness and equality in the real world. Feminist perspectives in the industry can introduce novel ideological, premises, stories, and designs that fundamentally enrich the gameplay while tackling the misogynistic cultural norms and behaviors upheld by male gamers in the industry for years.
However, I do agree with Chess that a much more radical approach to embedding feminist perspectives in play is needed. For example, with about 30% of all available characters female (namely, around 26 characters as above), Smash Bros does a decent job at representation across the board. However, I would like to argue that increasing character diversity alone is insufficient for transforming the male-centric gaming industry; a more radical overhaul of female character designs, moves/abilities, and agency is needed to dismantle harmful stereotypes and promote feminist perspectives in play. As present in the game, the overly sexualized designs of some female characters remind me of the creepy adult male obsession with anime characters, which simply perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards and blatant objectification.
Furthermore, the female characters generally lack full control over their moves compared to their male counterparts. Consider the basic attacks and combinations players can have. The male characters I played with (Bowser, Ike, Marth) have more potent multi-hit combos, and spiking techniques in their arsenal compared to the female characters’ (Zelda, Peach) lighter stun values and less lethal combo potential. Such an implicit power imbalance due to having less definitive control over the characters attack/defend potential (namely, the “ceiling” of what is possible of damage from one character) causes players to disproportionately select male players over female ones. I would argue the consequence of this is worse than not having said female characters represented in the game at all; the perception that the female fighters have inherent disadvantages only perpetuates harmful stereotypes and reinforces the notion that women are “weaker” and lack the agency to be formidable combatants.
To truly embrace feminist game design, Smash Bros could give female characters more control over their abilities and fighting styles that actively exert feminist ideals. In other words, responding to how gamers view character rankings as above and leveling the distribution of intersectional identities in each bucket by creating characters that actively work against bias’ gamers have of said representations. Imagine if there was a female character that completely defied one’s own expectations and stereotypes; can an ultra-powerful female character who looks extremely innocent cause gamers to confront their own implicit assumptions or biases? She could redefine what strength and ability truly looks like for female characters. Such anti-stereotype symbols in the game can also advance other feminist ideals; such as helping us move beyond westernized beauty standards in such games, designing characters from diverse cultural representations of marginalized power across the globe (i.e., women with hijabs, non-binary characters, characters using a “forgotten language” in modern technology, and more).
