Gamestop it, please.

I had hoped to enter the world of blogging with some sort of epic big bang, where I found something amazingly offensive and just tore it to shreds for your amusement. Sadly, I don’t think that’s going to happen, but honestly, that would be a sort of ridiculous thing to do anyway.  Instead, I’m going to dip into my email and post on something that, over the past two weeks, I have found consistently annoying and just want to vent about.

Okay, so. I’ve been reading Jesper Juul’s book A Casual Revolution, which is an excellent read if you’re into game studies, or simply are interested in their place in culture, or are wondering why you couldn’t pay your mother to play a game of Mario Kart with you as a child but now when you bring your Wii home for Christmas, she insists on setting the thing up in the living room and trouncing you so hard at Wii Sports tennis that you hurl down the wiimote, scream “YOU NEVER LOVED ME!” and run into your room, slamming the door shut after you.

Part of the book deals with the success of mimetic games — games that mimic real life actions, like the aforementioned Wii Sports — and their ability to reconnect people to video games as a medium. They are more accessible; they’re not controlled in some abstract moon language (“QCF and punch? What the hell is a QCF?!”) and they bring the casual/non-gamer back into what Jesper calls “player space.” A few years back the New York Times commented on something quite similar and I quite like it. I’m all for the eroding of the damaging “hardcore gamer” stereotype, though as one might expect, there has been some resistance.

One of the things about the whole situation that gets on my nerves is how companies have suddenly “discovered” the woman gamer market. I mean, there were always attempts at capturing an untapped market, but they were, you know… universally terrible. The rise of mimetics and particularly Facebook and casual games, where women seem to be more able to break in (and where they are the “new hardcore,” whatever the hell that means), has just made the need to market to them all the more salient to game companies. Okay, fine.

Now, do a Google Image search for “Imagine DS” (or, you know, let me do it for you). I recently brought this up with my Digital Games and Representation class. It’s a thorny subject. On the one hand, great! More games for girls is awesome! On the other hand, the gendering of the occupations available in the “Imagine” series is, to me, patently offensive. It’s not that girls should be discouraged from being a wedding planner or a boutique owner if that’s what they want, but there needs to be more options that aren’t quite so… well, gendered. I personally think “Imagine: US Representative” would be interesting, for example. Or “Imagine: Neurophysicist.” It could be just like Trauma Center. Reports from my students who had some exposure to the games that described them as, in a word, “bad” doesn’t help the situation either. It’s not only a gameplay ghetto, it’s a pinkwashed, gendered gameplay ghetto, which is just insult to injury.

This brings me to Gamestop. Because I am an idiot, I registered for their “if we pick your name out of the fishbowl you could win $500!” marketing strategy because, really, $500 is a lot for some spam tolerance. This means I get their weekly circular of deals and whatnot. Okay, fine. But dear readers, I submit to you this little excerpt from their ad for Valentine’s Day week:

Yeah. The text is bad enough — “Nothing says ‘play with this’ better…” — but then the list of things to give your (clearly female) significant other to compel that romantic hand job? Imagine: Fashion Designer World Tour and a virtual puppy. I really just cannot imagine anything nicer. “Oh, thank you, clearly male intended reader boyfriend! You got me an offensively gendered, totally boring DS game! Let’s rub one out for you in front of a roaring fire.” Who says romance is dead?

Anyhow. So that was annoyance week #1. This morning I check my email and as usual, the Gamestop weekly ad has appeared a second time. Sadly, no Valentine’s-flavored hijinks this time. Instead, we go a different route:

Charming. So now, instead of being misogynist, they’re being irritatingly heteronormative-slash-hegemonically masculine. “But wait, Todd!”, you’re saying. They say the costumes look cool! Yes, and then the rest of the copy is about how shameful it is to watch figure skating, with a healthy dose of a dig at the reader’s masculinity being compromised if this fact is uncovered. Good thing you laugh when they fall down! OR YOU MIGHT BE A GAY. Yeah. Then the weekly offer is some nice, butch shooting games to get you back on track, including what I think appears to be a gun-shaped controller. Which you can take in your hand and lovingly stroke.

Wait. Ignore that last part, unless someone recently bought you Imagine: Sniper as a bribe.

Anyhow. I know the masculinity/sexuality link on the second one is a bit tenuous at first glance, but both of these weekly ads seriously got sand in my assless chaps. Perhaps because figure skating and sexuality are on the brain — consider this transcript from Talk of the Nation on Thursday and the discussion, toward the end, of figure skater outfits — I was especially receptive to this sort of idiocy.

What gets me, though, is that the brick and mortar, big ticket game store is quite clearly still relying on an outmoded idea of the core gamer demographic with their clear assumption of a heterosexual male intended reader, their construction of “games to bribe your girlfriend for sex with” as a really irritatingly gendered series of DS games, and the assertion that you’d better shoot some mother[eff!]ers in the face this weekend since you watched that Youtube of Johnny Weir skating to “Poker Face” and had certain cravings.

Maybe that was just me. Hmm.