Teach your daughters well.

Last night, I made a trip to my local Toys 'R' Us because I agree with, if nothing else, their business model: overcharge for most things but mark some things down to an outrageous level of "cheap" so that you attract children and adults alike. They often have old-school DVDs (Fraggle Rock, Inspector Gadget, and that ilk) and Hello Kitty products for next-to-nothing. Clearly, I am all for this system. A good night is coming out with wonderful nostalgia for cheap-seat prices.

As I started into the store, however, I noticed this display. I passed it, came back, left it again, and then finally had to take a picture. (This is the end-cap directly before the boardgame area, just for geography's sake.)
An entire display of boardgames made pink and "girl-friendly." In case you can't see what games they are, we've got Mystery Date, Monopoly (with a makeup-case style organizer), Life, an Etch-a-Sketch, the Ouija board, and Twister.

Now, I am a child of the 80s, and came into my adolescence in the 90s. I remember the old-school layout of Toys 'R' Us before they did unilateral remodels of their stores, when the building was essentially divided into areas like a turf war between two gangs: Boy Toys, Girl Toys, and Baby Toys. In my local Toys 'R' Us in Lombard, Illinois, the Boy Toys and Girl Toys were separated by the Video Game Aisle, a huge double-aisle that made sure you would never get confused as to which "side" you were on. Board games were the very first aisle, bikes the very last, and baby stuff was in the far back of the store. And woe betide the girl who ended up in the Boy toys.

But Toys 'R' Us updated this layout somewhere during my college years, and split the store into "sections" rather than gender. Sure, there is still a distinct suggestion of gender--no one is combining the Barbies with the wrestling action figures--but it's the feeling of "pods" rather than "aisles", and no great chasm between. You can move from the arts and crafts to the baby dolls to the sports toys, instead of the arts and crafts to the books to the baby stuff because no one wants them mixed up with the Girl Toys.

When I took my social communications class in college, we talked a lot about Toys 'R' Us, and my professor expressed pleasure that the Girl Toy/Boy Toy aisle war was over. The issue is that the Girl Toy/Boy Toy war itself isn't.

I've never thought of boardgames as gendered things, or at least didn't until last night. I used to play boardgames with all manner of friends and we never had issue with the fact that they came in nice, gender-neutral boxes. We enjoyed the games for the merit of the games, regardless of our genitalia. But apparently, that is no longer good enough for the modern girl; or more terrifyingly, maybe it never was.

The more we do this to our daughters, though, I think the more we're doing them a disservice. As games go, Mystery Date and Life are both pretty girl-oriented to begin with. My brother used to hate playing Life because it was all about getting married and having babies. There was no way to take the Rockstar career and remain single and childless, unless you were really lucky and never landed on a "It's a [baby's sex]!" square. My sister and I used to make a game of seeing which of us could have so many children that we'd need a second car. Because dammit, life was about getting married and having a brood. Or at least, the game of Life was.

But Monopoly in a makeup case? Twister with pastel spots? Why? Why do we force our girl children to feel trapped in this world of pretty pink things, stick-on jewels, and script lettering? I wish I could have opened up one of the pink Monopoly cases, but instead I had to go online to find out that the entire game is changed. The property cards, the board, the money, it's all pink. And don't worry about Park Place and Boardwalk, because they've been traded in for fictional stores and eateries.

Maybe I'm too easily bothered by this sort of thing, but to my mind, there is a difference between empowering girls to feel like they can be as capable (or more capable) than their male counterparts, and talking down to them. You want to daughter to feel like she can conquer the world? Give her the original Monopoly and let her be a real estate queen. Don't give her game pieces shaped like purses and teach her that the only thing she can accomplish is owning a shopping mall.

As I was in the action figure aisle, a woman and her daughter came up to look at some of the soldier figures. The girl couldn't have been more than six years old. The mom was asking her opinion on a gift for a little boy in their lives, and kept saying things like, "Which one do you think he'll like?"

The daughter finally huffed, "That one. Now can we go to the girl part? This is the boy part, these are boy toys, and I don't like them."

This is how we're raising our children, to understand this line between Boy and Girl that can't be crossed without a loss of identity. I spent my childhood playing with Matchbox cars as much as I did Barbies, building Lego castles as often as I rocked baby dolls to sleep, and I think I benefited from it. I never felt that I was either All Girl or All Boy and never shall the two meet. I would've been personally offended if my mother had bought me the make-up case Monopoly.

But times have changed, I guess, and we're teaching our girls that they're better at text-messaging and shopping, beating it into their heads when they're young. It makes me wonder where they'll be, twenty years from now.

The Princess and the Peach.

My previous post was about video games, too. Clearly, I am just on a roll in this department.

As I said in the previous post, I've been a gamer since the inception of gaming. My most recent system is the Nintendo DS, Nintendo's answer to the next generation of hand-held consoles. I love my DS. The games are unique and a number of them are quirky, but hey, I like a healthy dose of quirk with my gaming. Especially given that the Super Mario Brothers franchise has been healthily recreated for the system.

One of these new Mario games is a game called Super Princess Peach. The plot is simple: Bowser, the great and evil cretin of the Mario series, has kidnapped Mario, Luigi, and most of the Toadstool people. Because there is no one left to defend the Toadstool Kingdom, Princess Peach and a talking umbrella named Perry set off to save the Toadstools and rescue the Mario Brothers.

At a surface level, I was exceedingly excited for this game. I may love the franchise, I may adore Nintendo, but the facts are these: most Nintendo protagonists are male and those who are not tend to be painfully androgynous. (Samus, anyone?) The classic "princess is captured, man must rescue" plot is followed by a number of the games, and even the Mario franchise's newest version--The New Super Mario Bros.--follows this cookie-cutter outline. It's a formula, but the formula works, and I'm not overly offended by it. I mean, it's a video game, and while I would have loved Tetra in Legend of Zelda: Windwaker to be a little more like Shiek in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I can't complain that she's not. It's the nature of the game.

But here is Super Princess Peach, a game that promises to have a female protagonist and give Peach a chance to shine for the first time in Nintendo's history. I want to say that the game was all that I, almost a feminist but not really a feminist, if you catch my meaning, was craving.

It fell short.

For one, Peach's abilities and "powers" aren't the usual head-stomping, fireball-shooting fare. While Mario jumps on creatures, Peach uses her umbrella to smack them, and many of her enemies don't die as much as they are smushed down and wander harmlessly around. (She can jump on the enemies, but the results are not the same.) There are no flowers for fireballs or raccoon tails for thwacking enemies, either. Peach's powers come from emotion. Let me repeat this: emotion. She can cry and drown enemies, get angry and set them on fire, feel calm and restore her strength, and be happy and fly through the air. None of these are actually as effective at hurting her foes as they are at destroying blockades that hinder progress through the stages. But then again, that's all right, given that the enemies are never hard to beat and power restoration gems are, quite literally, everywhere. If you do "die", there's no immediate repercussion other than restarting the level, either; there are no lives, and if you die, you just start over. That's it.

Another of my issues lies in the fact that the entire game is "cute". It's not subtle, either. Even the big baddies are adorable, like the smiling caterpillar in the fire level. Mario games are no paragon of terror, but the ghosts and some of the creatures in the later games were at least a bit menacing. Peach's world is sunny, happy, pastel-colored, and with soft corners. I was shocked in a recent level that spears were being thrown at me because it was the first time that it wasn't something cute and harmless trying to cause my downfall.

The talking umbrella, Perry, is just as ridiculous. Mario never needed a talking piece of rainproofing to help him on his quest. Sometimes, he had his brother, who kicked equal amounts of butt. That was it. Now we have talking umbrellas? Oh, come on. At least give her an animal companion or something else that has a prayer of, well, being menacing to the forces of evil.

I know that Super Princess Peach is and was marketed to girls in the sort of eight to twelve range. I'm all right with that; my cousin, who I think is ten now, got it two Christmases and so did I. But the fact remains that it characterizes girls as emotion-drive "cutiepies" who need help from any and all sources possible, up to and including animated inanimate objects.

I'm not sure I can really tolerate this as a creative movie. Shiek in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a woman taking her own fate into her hands, but she was a.) androgynous for most of the game and b.) not a playable character. Several other popular games have playable female characters or, indeed, female protagonists--Touch Detective and its sequel, Nancy Drew and the Secret of Olde World Park, the Mia Fey level of Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations, a number of the other RPGs available for the system, Trace Memory, and probably others that I've never played--but the fact remains that they all end up tripping over this fatal flaw. I'm a character writer and a character buff and frankly, I love stories and series about and heavily featuring men. But I also want to be able to look at a girl and see more than a cute thing in a pink dress running through puffy worlds of clouds and defeating the big bad lizard with an umbrella.

Don't get me wrong. The game is addictive in a way that only Nintendo can manage. I just wish there was more to it for me to appreciate. Or, barring that, no umbrella.

Adventures in gaming.

I've always considered video games a form of media. They tend to serve the same purpose, and a lot of games end up acting as stories in and of themselves, which is part of the allure of any piece of media. (Well, that and gratuitous violence.) Me, I grew up on the original Nintendo, that innocuous gray box that sat under our television for most of my formative years (we got it when I was five and didn't get a Super Nintendo until I was in the sixth grade). Some of my fondest childhood memories are watching my parents play games like Dr. Mario, Silent Service, The Legend of Zelda, and Duck Hunt. While most first graders aspired to be doctors or vets, I desperately wanted to design the first The Little Mermaid Nintendo game. My friend Eric and I spent tireless days discussing the different levels. I made endless sketches.

But I'm a "grown up" now and with that comes a whole new level of gaming interest. Frankly, I'm still a Nintendo nerd, and as I type this, my DS is sitting about two feet away, complete with my Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass decal and five three-game protective cases with my current conquests lovingly organized. I've got a GameCube and a PSX, as well (not a PS1; it's that old school), and I dream of the day when a Best Buy delivery truck overturns in my presence and I can make off with a Wii. But I digress, because this isn't about the fact that I am devoted to my reputation as a nerd.

This is about gaming in general.

There was a day that the fact that I was a girl and liked video games made me something of an oxymoron. Blame the ex-boyfriend who sat me down and forced me to play a half-hour of Final Fantasy VII, moving me from the girl who occasionally played pick-up games of Dr. Mario with her less-coordinated siblings to something of a game nerd. Over the years, I started to pick up games that interested me, and found that the genres I (predictably) enjoyed best were RPGs, "adventure" games (not in the sort of Indiana Jones vein as much as in the Myst one), and real-time strategy. I could rattle off the games I ended up with, but some of my favorites were in the glory days of Sierra, when King's Quest wasn't a joke and games like Shivers and Phantasmagoria were out there. I loved going through creepy-as-hell mansions, dungeons, museums, ghost towns and finding the right penny to put in the right jukebox to play the right song and then unlock the demon. And no, I'm not kidding.

Somewhere down the line, though, adventure games fell to the wayside. I don't know why, and I'm not going to sit here and try to figure it out. The fact is, there aren't many out there, and the ones that are bank less on the using your brain and more on the "freakout" factor. I went shopping this weekend looking for a good Mac game--more on that in a moment--and decided the best place to look for a good game was Fry's Electronics, the home of every piece of technology you could ever want, period.

I was really disappointed.

In terms of games in general, there really weren't that many "adventure"-style games that weren't rated Mature and promising me, right there on the cover, blood, guts, gore, death, violence, destruction, and terror. I don't want to be scared out of my wits every time I turn on a game, so that ruled most of them out. The others either fell into the category of Myst-style brave-new-world exploration or Nancy Drew adventures, and trust me, I'm not joking about the latter.

What's more, in the Mac section, my choices were limited to real-time strategy games (several of which I already own) and every Sims expansion pack known to man. I'm not kidding. That was the range of game available to me as a Mac consumer.

So here is the question: what happened, gaming industry? Where have all the adventure games gone? I can't imagine that there's absolutely no market for them, and yet the ones that are out there, all ten or fifteen titles, are thriller-style crap that seems to bank more on being Saw: The Game than a legitimate adventure. Never mind the fact that the Mac doesn't even offer a crappy choice of adventure game.

The glory days are over for adventure games, it seems, and just at the time when I have (occasionally) the disposable income to invest in a video game here or there. I ended up buying a game that is based off Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, but I'm not particularly enthused by it. Maybe I'd love it if it were on my Mac. Or maybe I'd love it if we could step away from the low-hanging fruit of adapting a book to a video game (I mean, really?) and focus on original plots again. Remember The 7th Guest? Now there was a game.

Maybe I'm just waxing nostalgic for my youth of gaming. But moreover, I think I'm wondering if the days of clever games have been replaced by first-person shooters and games where you make an avatar of yourself and have it sleep with your best friend, boss, neighbor's wife, or just an Italian-looking stud named Rubio. I miss when my mind needed a challenge, when a game made me shout and scream and pace for the difficulty of the puzzle, and when I really felt satisfied with an ending.

Feels like it was a long time ago.