OMG Nintendo.com

Eagle-eyed Nikole at GameGirl.com spotted something interesting in the latest issue of Seventeen: video game ads. Now, these are both ads for extremely casual games, Ubisoft's My Word Coach and Activision's Dancing with the Stars. What's even more interesting is the long chain of comments popping up in response to Nikole's post, which asks a simple question:

On one hand I can say this is great for us girls. Finally, games are being marketed towards us. We are a target audience. Suddenly it's okay to be the gamer type and its possible to still be girly. In fact, it's not just okay, it's encouraged. At the same time I could argue that ads like these make it impossible for us to be taken seriously. It's keeping us back by saying we have to be one type of gamer, the shoe shopping, dance show watching kind. Of course there doesn't have to be one right answer.

What do I think? Well, I've weighed in with some off-the-cuff responses in the comments of the original thread section, but you can check out a more considered response behind the cut. If you want to sound off with what you think, drop a comment in the original GameGirl thread, or around here.

The first thought I have reading Nikole's post is that ads like this are new, but the phenomenon behind them is really just as old as Nintendo's presence in America. Give me a few minutes in your average public library and I can dig up the issues of Women's Home Journal from 1990 or so that discussed how women were becoming extremely enthusiastic about Nintendo's then-new Game Boy thanks to its Tetris pack-in cartridge. There were actually articles about businesswomen and mothers developing crippling addictions to Tetris, since they could play it anywhere, and having to eventually throw away their Game Boys or delete PC copies of the game.

Nintendo didn't advertise to these women, of course, but they didn't need to. At the time, Tetris on the Game Boy was a national sensation so big that, given a few more minutes, I could find a picture of then-President George H.W. Bush chillaxin' in the White House as he plays his Tetris on his fattie Game Boy. Dancing with the Stars is legitimately is a national sensation now, so it makes sense Activision would want to entice fans into buying a tie-in game by, well, taking an ad out in a magazine that most girls of certain age read. These are certainly the only people who will give a damn about it, since Activision's Dancing with the Stars is a rebranded DDR clone that makes you use remote and nunchuk motions instead of, you know, a dance pad. There is zero uncertainty regarding whether this game sucks, and anyone who was remotely interested in it would have more fun playing Konami's superior DDR Hottest Party.

Ubisoft's My Coach series isn't exactly a sensation (actually, I have no idea how it sells-- Sardius, do you?), but I remember sitting in at the Ubisoft press conference where President and CEO Yves Guillemot was announcing the line. The explicit point of the My Coach games was to reach out to a growing audience that liked games but wasn't part of the usual gaming fandom-- didn't read the mags or websites, didn't go in GameStops, didn't know what E3 or TGS even were. So, it makes sense that you'd push My Coach games in non-traditional sources, and a print mag with a huge circulation like Seventeen isn't a bad place to start. Certainly, the My Coach line is getting weak reviews, but even Nintendo's own top-quality Touch Generations line of casual games gets a drubbing from critics who, generally, don't want to play it if it's not hardcore.

The ad itself is unfortunate, but attempts to reach out to new, typically disadvantaged or ignored demographics usually are. Hopefully Ubisoft's ad team sees this and thinks about the next campaign. Though, I have to say, I wonder if Ubisoft is running similarly, uh, stereotyped ads in magazines with other demographics? Like, is there a version of this in Maxim that involves a guy worrying he's too stupid to talk about sports? If so, then this moves into the realm of being one of those damned irritating video game ad campaigns that tries to entice gamers by mocking them. This is nothing new or specific to women, but this type of campaign is an embarrassing relic. Ubisoft needs to seriously fire an ad team that thinks this is going to move them into Nintendo's "blue ocean".

Nikole mentions a concern with ads like this causing girl gamers not to be taken seriously. My first question is, by whom? Ubisoft obviously takes it seriously, because it spent money on the ad. Seventeen does, because they decided to run the ad. Activision does, since they spent money on the license, making that damned awful game, and then shopping it around to the people they must've wanted to sell it to from day one. So at least on a corporate level, at least some people believe that girl gamers are worth courting, and they want to do so on girls' own traditional turf. Their actions may seem hilariously embarrassing to more serious gamers, but advertising to women is something none of these game companies can have much experience with.

Glancing over GameGirl's tag cloud, I see a lot of super-hardcore 360/PC FPS popping up, like Bioshock and Halo 3. These are excellent games. They are also relentlessly marketed to the traditional gaming audience, which for the past decade or so has been males between the ages of 8 and 35. This generally male audience is ferociously competitive, highly skilled, and very fond of games built around committing virtual acts of violence-- and also finding ways to play games together, and trying to elevate the story and presentation of games to new levels. I find that how the men in this audience responds to girl gamers has almost nothing to do with what sort of games are presented as feminine. It mostly deals with whether or not the girls are playing their sorts of games-- the ones who don't just aren't part of their mental landscape. For the ones who do, the reactions (and types of guys, as far as I'm concerned) fall into two different camps.

First, there are the open-minded guys. They're playing Halo 3 (just for example) to have fun and frag away, and they don't really much care who they play against. If a girl shows up in the game, then they tend to treat her more or less like every other player, judging her based on skill and how well she works with her team. It's possible they may be so happy to have a female voice interrupting the otherwise-neverending sausagefest of FPS gaming that they'll actually treat her much better than they would just another dude on Live. Hell, there was a story doing the rounds a few months back of a couple that met, fell in love, and married all through the course of meeting together to play Halo 3 regularly.

Now, there are guys who are raging douchebags. If they hear you voice during a Halo 3 game, they're likely to start shouting bullshit like this at you. They believe Jade Raymond could not possibly have actually worked on Assassin's Creed, not because of her track record as a casual games developer but because attractive women obviously cannot comprehend manly games about killing people. When Nintendo produces ads trying to push the Nintendo DS to girls in the UK market, they respond with vociferous anger and mockery. They will tell you that there are no women on the internet, that you can't be a woman who likes games because women are too stupid to know how to read, that you need to get the hell back in the kitchen. This will happen no matter how good you are and no matter what you do. It's blind hate.

The former type of guy isn't going to judge you based on a crappy ad in a magazine he doesn't read, because he probably doesn't know it exists (If he does, he'll probably find it quaintly amusing.) The latter type of guy is going to hate you no matter what you do or what the industry is doing, because he fundamentally doesn't want you in his boys-only clubhouse. Of course, douchebags can't really do anything to force you out of the clubhouse. The industry wants you there (your money is as good as anyone else's), and a lot of male players want you there to liven up the gaming community (they hate the douchebags, too). Anyone who tries to force you out would do so regardless of what Seventeen was or wasn't publishing, and isn't worth paying attention to in the slightest. He'll be especially irrelevant to whatever girl sees that Seventeen ad and decides that My Word Coach looks kind of interesting.

• << prev
• next >>