3—
The Nintendo Entertainment System:
Game Boys, Super Brothers, and Wizards
It is a whole new medium, an immensely powerful agent for the dissemination of culture. Eleven million of them have been sold in the United States in just over three years, and by the end of the year they are expected to be in nearly 20 million American homes. Nearly 50 million of the indispensable game cartridges are expected to be sold this year alone.
—"The Nintendo Kid," Newsweek
Although many American toy companies claim that home video games are just a passing fad, they are proving to be a new mass medium with extraordinary co-optive power.[1] The first successful totally electronic video game in the United States was Pong, a coin-operated entertainment designed in 1971 by three young electrical engineers working for Ampex—Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney, and Al Acorn. That same year they founded their own company, Atari, which released the game in 1974, selling over ten thousand units; another ninety thousand copies were sold by other manufacturers. Pong was soon installed not only next to pinball machines in the arcades, but also in airports, bus stations, cocktail lounges, laundromats, restaurants, and other public places across America. Because of its compactness, mobility, and decreasing price, by mid-decade Pong was gaining pop-
ularity in the home as well. In 1976, Bushnell, having already bought out his partners, sold Atari for some $30 million to Warner Communications, a conglomerate that could afford to invest in research and development and in more effective distribution for home use. The very next year the company introduced the first successful "programmatic" home video package, the Atari Video Computer System.[2]
Thus the stage was set for the first U.S. boom in home video games, which began in 1979 when Atari, Midway, Mattel, Cinematronics, Sega, and others introduced more challenging games, including some designed by Japanese companies like Namco and Taito. At this point Atari's main competition was Midway, the licensed producer for three of the Japanese-designed top-selling games in the United States: Pac-Man, Galaxian, and Space Invaders. By 1982, books were being published on video games, which boasted of the new medium's ability to surpass movies in the marketplace:
In the United States alone, consumers spend more on video games—about $9 billion a year, including some $8 billion for coin-op and $1 billion for home games—than on any other form of entertainment, including movies and records. One game alone, Atari's awesome Asteroids, earned about as much just in its best year ($700-800 million) than the biggest money-making film of all time, Gone With the Wind , has made in four decades of screenings.[3]
Yet after a three-year boom, with annual sales peaking at $3 billion in 1982, a glut of poorly designed home video games flooded the American market, causing Atari to lose close to $600 million. The plunge, which began in 1983 and fell another 60 percent in 1984, bottomed out in 1985, when video games seemed totally dead.
Nintendo Enters the Market
The first year of the crash, 1983, was precisely when Nintendo, a hundred-year-old, Kyoto-based firm that formerly made playing cards, toys, and arcade games like Donkey Kong, introduced its Famicon, the Family Computer home video game system. Quickly beating out the rival systems of Sony and Matsushita in Japan, Nintendo sold 2.1 million units in the first eighteen months of sales and soon controlled 95 percent of that market, with a 33 percent penetration of all Japanese households. As Fumio Igarashi observed, "With an enormous base of 7 million users, the Famicon considerably outnumbers the 4 million personal computers in current use in Japan"—a fact with tremendous implications for other interactive tie-ins. Igarashi reports:
According to Nintendo, not only securities firms providing stock market quotations but also banks, mail-order businesses, and various types of data-base firms can be expected to link up. Nippon Telegram and Telephone Corp. (NTT), which has seen rough going for its featured new media, the CAPTAIN videotex system, is said to be giving serious consideration to the possibility of linking it with the Famicon network.[4]
Such linkages are made possible by a forty-eight-pin computer cable connector that is on the bottom of every Nintendo set, hidden under an easily removable protective panel.
In 1985, when the U.S. home video game market was at its nadir, Nintendo came to America to revive the craze, spending $30 million in advertising to convince retailers and consumers that their games were different. The potential was still good, for a very high proportion of American youngsters had already played video games and so were prime targets for the revival.[5] Indeed, within five years Nin-
tendo controlled 80 percent of the market, which was back up to the 1982 peak level of $3 billion (just for game cartridges), and a joint venture with AT&T was rumored (along similar lines as those proposed for NTT in Japan).[6] With total sales reaching $5 billion, Nintendo's U.S. income for 1989 represented a 40 percent increase over the previous year, giving the company a 20 percent share of the entire U.S. toy market.[7] By the end of 1989, one out of every five homes in the United States had a Nintendo system; by the end of 1990, the company estimated it would be in one out of three.[8]
The best article on Nintendo to date is by David Sheff, who visited both the home office in Kyoto and the American headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and who is one of the few persons to recognize the scope of their enterprise. Sheff claims that "Nintendo has its sights set on a goal that IBM and its rivals have long assumed would be theirs: the first universal home computer. . . . In American homes, by the end of this month [December 1990], there will be almost 30 million Nintendo sets, as compared with 6 million Macintoshes and 18 million IBM and IBM-compatible personal computers." Thanks to the computer cable connector at the bottom of every Nintendo set, moreover,
Your video game system . . . can be connected to a modem, keyboard and auxiliary storage devices. . . . When connected to a 1 1/2 inch thick gray box that hooks up to the connector (available early in 1991 and expected to cost roughly $150), the Nintendo system becomes a networking terminal. Plug in a phone line, and you'll be able to shop, call up movie reviews, buy pork bellies, do research, make airline reservations, order a pizza. The networks also will allow new forms of game play, such as competitions between Nintendo players throughout the country, and eventually the world.
According to Sheff, Fidelity Investments of Boston has already contracted with Nintendo to provide on-line stock quotations to subscribers, and AT&T is still negotiating; "but the biggest potential business for Nintendo is in multimedia entertainment systems."[9]
The keys to Nintendo's success in the video game market were superior technology and close control over compatible software. Costing somewhere between $80 and $150, their Famicon is a graphics computer with expanded memory and the same kind of eight-bit microprocessor that is used in the Apple IIC and Commodore 64 personal computers, by means of which it can produce excellent fast-moving graphics in fifty-two colors and "handle 64 times more data than earlier systems."[10] This little box, with dual control panels for two players, turns any television set into a machine that can accommodate nearly a hundred highly sophisticated games, which cost from $20 to $55 each and which work only on the Nintendo system.
Nintendo used the "razor marketing theory," introduced into the toy industry in 1959 by Mattel with the Barbie doll—a strategy of focusing on the development and sale of software (whether a game cartridge, a Barbie outfit, or a razor blade) that is compatible only with the company's unique hardware. Moreover, the hardware is purposely kept inexpensive to enhance marketability of the whole system and to generate continuing sales of new software to the same customers. The failure to provide enough software of high quality was what caused Sony to lose the VCR market to VHS (despite its technical inferiority to their own Betamax system) and what led to the 1983 crash of the U.S. home video game market. To avoid repeating this mistake, Nintendo licensed thirty-four independent companies to compete in developing game cartridges of high quality. Thus far the most successful game has been "Super Mario Brothers,"
which, introduced in September 1985, sold over 2.5 million copies in the first four months and which, like the movie Star Wars , has already generated two sequels ("Super Mario Brothers 2" and "3"). Most important, in the American market (but not the Japanese), Nintendo incorporated a patented proprietary chip into each of the games designed by its licensees: "The chip ensures that only cartridges authorized by Nintendo work on its machines. Nintendo also bars its licensees from marketing game titles for competing machines, such as those made by Atari and Tonka Corp.'s Sega Div."[11] This strategy was so successful that it was challenged in the courts. In December 1988, Tengen Inc., a former licensee based in California, brought an antitrust lawsuit against Nintendo, which responded with a countersuit for patent infringement. In 1989 Atari brought a $100 million lawsuit against Nintendo for preventing competitors from making game cartridges that would work on Nintendo's hardware.[12]
These suits have not slowed Nintendo's attempts to expand its share of the market. There are now two successful Super Mario Brothers TV shows: the original nationally syndicated program, "The Super Mario Brothers Super Show," which in Los Angeles is aired on the Fox channel on weekday mornings and on a cable station on weekday afternoons, and currently ranks fourth among nationally syndicated children's programs; and a new NBC Saturday morning show based on "Super Mario Brothers 3" called "Captain N—The Game Master," which is the top-rated Saturday morning cartoon for six- to eleven-year-olds. There is also a magazine called Nintendo Power , which provides tips on how to play the games and previews of new games to come, with a paid circulation of two million; a national game-counseling hot line, which handles fifty thousand calls a week; a network of over 250 fan clubs; and a dazzling array of product tie-ins, in-
cluding a cereal, a fruit juice, and a line of boutique clothes in Toys 'R' Us, in addition to the usual toys, lunch boxes, and activity books. In 1989, Nintendo also introduced a miniaturized portable computer called "Game Boy," which can be hooked up to a friend's system for "a two-player challenge" and which has its own compatible games (the most successful so far being "Tetris" and "Super Mario Land"). Nintendo also offered consumers three super-interactive alternatives to the joystick: a Power Glove, from Mattel; U-Force, from Broderbund Software; and Nintendo's own Power Pad. Each costing around $70, these products promise not only to increase a player's control but also to enhance identification by putting the player "inside the action." Nintendo has also promised consumers a new "Super Computer" to compete with the sixteen-bit system already being marketed by Genesis. Sheff, who saw this Super Computer previewed in Kyoto with "Super Mario Brothers 4," reports:
The game seems three-dimensional, and there appear to be four backgrounds moving at different speeds, with far more objects moving at once. . . . The picture itself is more movie-like, and the background sounds are stereophonic. . . . Instead of using four colors at a time out of a bank of 52, the system can select up to 256 out of 32,763 colors. It produces super-high resolution (twice that of other 16-bit systems). Built in is the ability to create, move and rotate very large, highly realistic characters. Like its more gently powered ancestor, it has the capability for future expansion built in—but this system is ready to hook up to CD and CD-ROM players, laser disc players, modems and other computer terminals.[13]
In developing and promoting such products, Nintendo confidently assures its consumers: "Now, you're playing with power!"
We're off to See The Wizard
Like Saturday morning television, video games teach young players not that movies are obsolete, but that they have a new (though perhaps subordinate) role to play in the ever-expanding system of entertainment. A film like Universal's The Wizard (1989, the directorial feature debut of UCLA film school graduate Todd Holland) provides one concrete model of what that new role might be. Far from figuring video as a dangerous medium (like the films about television that Beverle Houston considered), The Wizard fetishizes video games—both their hard- and software. In fact, the film could be read as a ninety-minute commercial for the Nintendo system—especially for products like the Power Glove (which was a hot seller in the 1989 Christmas season) and "Super Mario Brothers 3" (the third game in the series). Although this game was not yet available in the stores when the film opened in December, by the end of 1990 it had sold seven million copies, which made it the top-selling video game in the U.S. market. Of course, this use of movies as a site of product placement and as an alternative advertising medium is not unique to The Wizard but is a common phenomenon of the 1980s—as has been persuasively argued by Mark Crispin Miller.[14] What is unique here is the centrality of the product promotion, as if designed to teach young spectators that such commercial intertextuality is the cultural norm.
A thirty-eight-page, full-color magazine Pocket Power (published by Nintendo and distributed free at the theater ticket counter) featured a cover story on The Wizard which makes it clear that these products are the real "stars" of the movie. In this advertising brochure thinly disguised as a magazine, one anonymous article tells us that writer-producer David Chisholm "compared the game to the sequel of a big movie
hit. Fans are anxious for it ["Super Mario Brothers 3"] because it is even bigger and better than the original." The magazine also uses the young human stars to endorse the game products, telling us that "the cast were ecstatic knowing they were the first to get a glimpse of Super Mario Bros. 3." The strongest endorsement comes from the best-known child actor in the movie, Fred Savage (star of ABC's hit series "The Wonder Years," which The Wizard 's co-producer Ken Topolsky also produces): "'I never played anything like it before,' said Fred. "I can't wait until it comes out and I can buy it!'"[15]
Other video game magazines, such as the bimonthly Game Player's Buyer's Guide to Nintendo Games , make us see that cinema can play a vital role by preselling young players on stories that are being adapted by Nintendo—that is, by suturing them into identification with its superheroes. Currently, Nintendo has game versions of Predator, Total Recall, Dick Tracy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Top Gun, Platoon, Rambo, Robocop, The Karate Kid, Jaws, Goonies, Friday the 13th, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom . When video game magazines describe these adaptations, they frequently warn players not to be disappointed by the differences (that is, by the loss of the unified imaginary). For example: "Like most Nintendo versions of hit movies, Back to the Future doesn't exactly duplicate the film, but rather strings together a series of arcade-type situations suggested by aspects of the story. You assume the role of Marty McFly, who is thrown back in time 30 years." Or: "Step into Arnold Schwarzenegger's shoes by assuming the role he played in the movie. . . . Predator manages to preserve something of the excitement of the movie, but the connection mainly serves as a pretext for a long series of challenges and difficulties in keeping with the Nintendo tradition."[16] Perhaps this structural difference is one reason why NES came out
with an expensive suturing apparatus like the Power Glove and why Saturday morning TV shows like "Muppet Babies" and "Garfield and Friends" and movies like The Wizard so pointedly combine spectator and interactive modes of positioning: this combination is a powerful draw, particularly with young spectators who still must rely on equilibration to master more advanced stages of operational thought.
The Wizard also promotes Universal Studio's theme parks—both the one in Los Angeles, where a key sequence of the movie is set (and whose pitch is "Live the movies!"), and the one in Orlando, Florida, where (according to a commercial that accompanied the feature) you can "ride a movie." Movie tie-in rides are also in operation at Disney theme parks; one of the best is "Star Tours," designed by George Lucas, in which a small movie theater is transformed into a spaceship that simulates an interactive spectator position for 3-D action sequences from Star Wars .[17] Even the original Disneyland in Anaheim, California, will apparently be undergoing an expensive refurbishing over the next ten years, involving the addition of "a slew of rides based on hit movies—including The Little Mermaid , the Indiana Jones series and the upcoming Dick Tracy , giving Disneyland a more glitzy, Hollywood flavor." The plans include in addition a Muppets stage show and a 3-D Muppets movie, another 3-D movie developed by George Lucas, and a new theme area called Hollywoodland, which will feature simulacra of Hollywood Boulevard and the Hollywood sign, two new rides that "have patrons careening through scenes from the hit movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit ," and rides that have already proved successful in Florida—"the Great Movie Ride, which lets customers travel through recreations of movie classics, and Superstar TV, in which selected patrons will be able to appear in classic episodes of I Love Lucy or the Johnny Carson Show ."[18]
The Wizard helps us to see that most theme parks are structured like video games—with their time warps, their multiple worlds of adventure, and their conversion of passive cinematic spectatorship into interactive play.[19] For example, when the young stars go behind the scenes of one of Universal's biggest attractions, "King Kong" (whose namesake not only is a veteran of two hit movies but also is featured in the current hit video game "Rampage"), they discover a secret passage that lets them warp ahead to the video game playoffs.
Like Star Wars and the "creative play" on "Muppet Babies" and "Garfield and Friends," The Wizard recycles past successes from various film genres. Against a backstory from a family melodrama like Ordinary People , it presents a road movie that works like a kiddie version of Rain Man and The Color of Money , but with a hero who is like the pinball wizard in Tommy and with a climax that comes out of classic gunfighter movies like Shane and Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. (In fact, the little wizard looks amazingly like a young Clint Eastwood, and at one point we even hear the Ennio Morricone musical theme from that Italian trilogy.) Yet these veteran structures are updated—with topical problems like runaways and broken families, current fads like "Super Mario Brothers" and the Power Glove, and postmodernist urban structures like video arcades, theme parks, and the decentered city of Los Angeles. Even though this marketing combination seems to have been made in a computerized heaven, the movie was a box office flop (for reasons we will consider in chapter 4).
Set in Nevada, The Wizard tells the story of a white middle-class ten-year-old boy named Jimmy (Luke Edwards), who was traumatized by the accidental drowning of his twin sister, an event that broke up his family. When his mother and stepfather institutionalize him (because he keeps trying to
Image not available.
Jimmy, Corey, and Haley are set against the warp zones of
"Super Mario Brothers."
Image not available.
Jimmy, Corey, and Haley on the road, in a kiddie version of
Rain Man and The Color of Money . © 1989 Universal.
run away to California), Jimmy is sprung by his thirteen-year-old half-brother, Corey (Fred Savage), who lives with his older brother (played by Christian Slater, who at the time was not yet known as the James Dean of the 1990s) and their father (played by Beau Bridges, fresh from his success in The Fabulous Baker Boys , which, incidentally, also draws on his real-life membership in a famous family starring father and brothers). On the road, Corey discovers that silent Jimmy is a wizard at video games; he also meets a thirteen-year-old Reno girl named Haley (Jenny Lewis), who advises him to take the kid to Universal Studio's theme park in L.A., where he can win $50,000 in the National Video Game Championships. Meanwhile, father and older brother go after the kids, improving their skill at video games along the way and playing demolition derby with a hateful bounty hunter, hired by the mother and stepfather to track Jimmy. They all
Image not available.
Jimmy at the video game championship playoff with previews of
"Super Mario Brothers 3." © 1989 Nintendo and Universal.
come together in L.A. for the championships, where the finalists are confronted with "Super Mario Brothers 3" (a game no one's yet seen) and where Jimmy beats an older arch rival, a video fanatic named Lucas (an homage to George). Lucas is the proud owner of a Power Glove, which enhances not only his eye-hand coordination, but also his stature as an antagonist, by linking him both with Jack Palance's evil black-gloved gunfighter in Shane (whom little Alan Ladd defeats under a young boy's admiring gaze) and with the equally villainous animated Glove in Yellow Submarine (who terrorizes the Beatles on behalf of the Blue Meanies).
Jimmy's victory makes everyone see that he's not a crazy who belongs in an institution. Rather, by mastering new products and the alternative spaces and warp zones of video games, he proves that he (like Marty McFly in the successful Back to the Future series—which is also structured like a video
Image nto available.
The video game championships help to bring daddy home
and to reunite the dysfunctional family. © 1989 Universal.
game) is the consumerist hero of the future. Yet Jimmy is determined to settle with the past (for the filmmakers are determined to go for a tearful melodramatic ending and leave no popular genre untapped): he insists on burying a little box he's been carrying (which contains fetishized photos of his dead twin sister and of his unified family) in that famous desert dinosaur park somewhere between L.A. and Vegas. This site not only enables the filmmakers to cash in on the dinosaur craze, but also implies that the unified nuclear family is an extinct species—though, like the dinosaur, one that can be exploited commercially as an emotionally charged imaginary.
The Oedipalization of Home Video Games
The marketing of video games seems to be geared primarily to those with, potentially, the most intense fear of castration:
to game-boys like Jimmy who are still immersed in the oedipal phase, to incipient teenage mutants like Corey who are about to undergo the catastrophic changes of adolescence, and to powerless men like their father who would like to punch out Mike Tyson (or the villainous bounty hunter) and become superheroes. Newsweek describes the Nintendo craze as
a madness that—like most—strikes hardest at adolescent boys and their young brothers; 60 percent of Nintendo players are males between 8 and 15. . . . Nintendo speaks to something primal and powerful in their bloody-minded little psyches, the warrior instinct that in another culture would have sent them out on the hunt or on the warpath. . . . [Yet] in Japan—where Nintendo games are . . . even more popular than in America—the story themes tend toward cuteness over heroics and gore.[20]
The oedipalization of video games, then, was not inevitable, but was partly determined by cultural coding and marketing decisions tailored specifically to the United States.[21] Several empirical studies have confirmed this strong male orientation in video games both in the arcade and the home—a bias that has helped make the games more popular with boys than with girls.[22] When I asked children whether the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" arcade game seemed to be made for both boys and girls or just boys, one seven-year-old male youngster replied emphatically: "Just boys . . . because boys like Turtles and girls don't, girls won't play them, they like Barbies . . . disgusting!" In a survey of close to two thousand students, from kindergartners through college freshmen, one of the most comprehensive studies of the 1980s showed that "as early as kindergarten, boys and girls viewed videogames as more appropriate to boys."[23]
These findings are disturbing, particularly if the cognitive
value of video games is accepted. For example, although Patricia Marks Greenfield acknowledges that gender may be a causal factor in video game skill (particularly after the age of ten or eleven, when boys generally demonstrate greater ability at iconic spatial representations than girls), she cites studies which demonstrate that video games can help girls catch up with boys in visual-spatial skills or help boys pull even farther ahead.[24] More significantly, she emphasizes the social danger of targeting these games exclusively to boys, since video entertainment is becoming a key "entry point into the world of computers for most children." Fearing that this imbalance "might contribute to the gendering of computers," she concludes: "There is an urgent need for widely available video games that make as firm contact with the fantasy life of the typical girl as with that of the typical boy."[25]
The same concern should also be extended to issues of race and class, for video games (and the movies about them, whose positive human characters are practically all Caucasian) seem targeted primarily for a white middle-class audience, who are also the primary market for personal computers. Although some might claim that video games, like "Sesame Street," are accessible to all classes (particularly in the arcade) and therefore help the economically disadvantaged youngster overcome the inequities of class difference, in practice they might actually increase the gap, for only those who can afford the Nintendo home system and its pricey software gain the full benefit of early training in computer confidence.
The fact that video games were introduced into the United States at a time when fewer households included a father may have contributed to their oedipalization. Video games provide an appealing surrogate against which a son can test his powers—not only do they let the game-boy de-
feat the missing patriarch, but they might even lure him back home for the playoffs (which is precisely the scenario in The Wizard ). As one empirical study of twenty American families with new home video game sets suggests, "Video games have brought families together for shared play and interaction that they have not experienced since the appearance of TV."[26] Yet since the games are presently oriented almost exclusively toward male interests, they probably have the greatest effect on relations between fathers and sons.
Even in those homes (such as my own) where the father is present and nurturing, the games can help boys deal with their rebellious anger against patriarchal authority. For example, when I asked my son, Victor, whether he ever dreamed about video games, he told me that the previous night he had dreamed that he was sad because his daddy spanked him and he was crying, so he became Raphael (the most emotional and rebellious of the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and went inside the video game (the way Garfield had gone inside the TV set) to save the other Turtles, who were being held captive by the villainous patriarch, Shredder. Even David Sheff, although he does not deal satisfactorily with the issue of gender, acknowledges and playfully exaggerates the oedipal rivalry in the Nintendo culture, advising fathers to use tips from Nintendo game master Howard Phillips "to humiliate our kids at Super Mario Brothers 3. . . . Enjoy your revenge. (Of course, you could also share these secrets with the kids, winning their respect forever.) . . . [Or] you could blow your kid away first, then tell him how to do it himself. That would be satisfying, wouldn't it?"[27]
The oedipal dimension of video games accounts for certain choices within its system of intertextuality. One finds a heavy reliance on action genres (the epic, romance quest, and western) in which male heroes have traditionally grown
into manhood and replaced father figures, and on myths (like David and Goliath, Jack and the Beanstalk, and its modern variant, The Karate Kid ) in which little guys beat giants. This oedipal scenario also helps to explain the extraordinary appeal of the comedy Home Alone (the number one box office movie hit during the 1990 Christmas season), where a second-grader successfully defends his home against two adult burglars, maiming and burning them in the process (a plot that undoubtedly will soon be adapted to an equally successful video game). Among Nintendo's current hits, this oedipal pattern is most blatant in "Mike Tyson's Punch-out," where players identify with a tiny boxer named Little MacLittle who challenges increasingly tougher opponents until he finally takes on Tyson; but it is also present in romances like "The Adventure of Link," where players identify with a short sixteen-year-old boy chosen to free the sleeping Princess Zelda and prevent the return of the powerful magician Ganon. Even the Super Mario Brothers were based on a little character from Nintendo's arcade game "Donkey Kong," whom its designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, describes as "a short, indomitable, mustached man in a red cap, . . . a kind of Everyman who rises to heroism in the face of adversity" and whose "insignificance . . . makes him so appealing."[28]
As in most oedipal narratives, women are usually marginal in video games, both as characters and as players. Yet according to Howard W. Moore, executive vice-president of Toys 'R' Us (the world's largest toy retailer and one of Nintendo's primary U.S. distributors), "[Nintendo] went from a core audience of boys from 7 to 14 and expanded in three directions: pre-schoolers, older adults, and girls."[29] By the end of 1990, there were media reports of two-year-old prodigies succeeding at video games, and Nintendo claimed that close to 50 percent of its players were over eighteen and 36 percent were female. Nintendo game master Howard Phil-
lips observed: "Video games are no longer considered toys. . . . They are now an acceptable form of interactive entertainment for people of both sexes and of all ages."[30] Yet the narrative content of the games still reveals a decidedly male orientation.
Although a female does participate in the championship playoffs in The Wizard , her powers clearly do not measure up to those of the male players. Not only is she the first finalist to be eliminated, but she is also ridiculed for her homeliness. Like Jimmy's dead twin sister, the androgynous female is quickly rejected as a site of identification for female spectators. Instead girls are led to identify with Corey's cute love interest, Haley, who is supposedly a video game hustler but is never seen playing the machines. Finding power in her desirability to men, she brags that she inherited her "great legs" from her runaway showgirl mother and gamely foils the villainous detective by falsely claiming that he touched her breast.
In most video games, females are still figured as objects of the male quest—the various sleeping beauties who wait to be rescued by male winners. Even the few exceptions reinforce gender stereotypes. For example, the arcade game "Ms. Pac-Man" offers its female players little more than an oxymoronic title and female masquerade; the voracious dot is merely dressed up in traditional pink gender coding, long eyelashes, and lipstick to create Pac-Man's female twin.
Some of the games structured as ongoing serial combat, like "Renegade" and the popular "Double Dragon," include formidable female opponents, but these characters are rarely as strong as their male counterparts. The latter game, in which two players can fight each other, gives the option of male and female subject positions—though both opponents must identify with the same gender, if not necessarily the same race (for example, one might have a white Linda in
blue against a white Linda in red, or a white Will in blue against a brown Will in white). The structuring of these options can be read in a variety of ways: not only as discouraging violence against women while reinforcing racial conflict, but also as acknowledging the equality of races rather than genders.
Another exception is "Metroid," which Sheff touts highly because the heroic Samus turns out to be a female in warrior drag—another androgynous twin. In this game, moreover, the main object of Samus's quest is to find and destroy the Mother Brain, a plot highly reminiscent of the movie Aliens . While some female players may feel more comfortable playing this game because of its female hero, they are nevertheless positioned to reject the monstrous maternal and to model themselves after the father—which can hardly be reassuring to feminists.
Cleverly designed for the expanded audience, "Super Mario Brothers 2" gives its players four options for identification: for the core audience of males between seven and fifteen, there are Mario and Luigi, veterans of the original "Super Mario Brothers," who have the greatest jumping power; for preschoolers, there's Toad, the tiniest figure, who has the least jumping power but the greatest carrying power; and for females, there's Princess Toadstool, who, despite her inferior jumping and carrying power, has the unique ability of floating for 1.5 seconds—a functional difference that frequently leads my son and his buddies to choose her over the others, even at the risk of transgender identification. Still, as in The Wizard , "Muppet Babies," and Star Wars , the female roles do not go beyond the conventional stereotypes of the female twin or, in this case, the spunky princess.
The expansion of the target audience is not continued, let alone furthered, in "Super Mario Brothers 3," the game fea-
tured in The Wizard . Here players can identify only with Mario, who may undergo many magical transformations, but none that transgresses boundaries of gender. Instead the game emphasizes animal masquerade as a reversible means of subject formation and phallic empowerment: the kings are transformed into animals when their phallic wands are stolen by the seven children of the patriarchal villain, Bowser, and Mario must disguise himself as a jumping frog, a flying racoon, or a tanooki (a badger who turns into an invincible statue) to win back the wands and restore the human kings to power. The action thus focuses on conflicts between fathers and sons, with little Toad and the Princess merely cheering Mario on.
The Super Mario Brothers on Television
Interestingly, the TV adaptations of this game seem to follow "Super Mario Brothers 2" in expanding the potential audience across borders of gender, age, and (even) race—perhaps because in this more established medium these issues are more closely monitored by parents groups and semiofficial agencies. In the most recent episode I saw of the syndicated "Super Mario Brothers Super Show" (aired on the Fox network at 6:30 A.M. on the weekday of October 11, 1990), the protagonists were all four characters from "Super Mario Brothers 2"—not only Mario and Luigi, but also little Toadstool and the Princess—and they were fighting against the villainous turtle Koopas from the game worlds of "Super Mario Brothers 1" and "3." Thus, there were more choices for spectator identification, and any child who owned or had played any one of the three games in the series would be sure to find several familiar characters in the animated TV cartoon. Moreover, unlike other television adaptations of video games I have seen, this series relies heavily on the
soundtrack for its effects, using not only the distinctive music from the video games (which every parent with a Nintendo system would instantly recognize), but also, in this particular episode, Ray Charles's classic version of "Hit the Road, Jack." This song identifies the road movie genre to which this game narrative belongs (and that extends all the way back to epics like the Odyssey and Gilgamesh ); it also reaches out specifically to a black audience, especially since the song proves to be a powerful weapon against the enemy.
As if to extend its intertextuality and broaden its appeal further, the cartoon appears in a show called "Club Mario" (perhaps anticipating yuppie pleasures to come at Club Med), which is cohosted by two dancing, rapping teens (one black, one white, and both evocative of MTV VJ's) who zap from one Nintendo game adaptation to another (for example, from "Super Mario Brothers" to "The Legend of Zelda"). The images are presented on a huge screen (which doubles as TV monitor and video game screen, as in the Nintendo system), and the screen in turn is positioned against an abstract background marked with colorful animated squiggles. Like the inset TV screens in the "Green Ranger" and "Lasagna Zone" episodes from "Muppet Babies" and "Garfield and Friends," this accentuated framing marks both the total constructedness of this "intermediate space of play" and the usefulness of postmodernist intertextuality in mapping and negotiating the terrain.
On the new NBC series "Captain N — The Game Master," the animated heroes are limited to Mario and Luigi, and the villains, spatial configurations, and music all come from "Super Mario Brothers 3." Yet an attempt is still made to reach out to a larger audience by positioning the world of the video game within other, more familiar contexts. Although the episodes usually begin in the ordinary world of animation (in the program that aired on October 20, 1990, for
instance, the setting was identified as Brooklyn and called "the real world"), the heroes find a warp zone that enables them to enter the spatial world of the video game. This double reality is then put within a third spatial realm: a frame where a teenager (the spectator-player in the text) plays the video game in his living room and then enters the TV set (again like Garfield in "The Lasagna Zone"), which is his entry into the warp zone. This three-tiered structure literally dramatizes Greenfield's point that "video games build upon and utilize the visual-spatial skills developed by television."[31] Moreover, it demonstrates to all consumers that an ordinary TV set can become a point of entry into video games, into the super fantasy world of the Mario Brothers, and into the whole Nintendo Entertainment System. It will be interesting to see whether these complex spatial configurations and expansions of target audience are carried over into the Super Mario Brothers movies, the first of which is scheduled to be released by Disney later this year.
Short Circuits and Premature Deaths
Most video games also offer one of the traditional appeals of comedy: protean transformation and resilience as a means of overcoming death. These games position players in ongoing serial combat where they must constantly fight off death and try to acquire new powers that will periodically grant them more lives. In part, then, these games are modeled on life extension — increasing the length of a turn or, in consumerist terms, getting more for your quarter. As in Saturday morning television cartoons, the repetitive, segmented, serial nature of the narrative leads to a disavowal of obsolescence, castration, and death. This structure is apparent not only in games designed in the genre of romance, like the "Super Mario Brothers" and "Zelda" series, or of non-
stop warfare, like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," "Contra," "Double Dragon," and "Renegade," but also in sporting games like "Skate or Die."
The narrative model proposed by Peter Brooks (based on the "master plot" from Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle ) is thus relevant to video games as well. Before and after the game, when the screen is blank and the power turned off, the game world is literally in a state of quiescence, nonnarratability, and death. Between these two steady states, the players are constantly threatened by short circuiting and premature deaths (which indeed are called "deaths"), while their compulsive repetitions are rewarded (for this is the only means of advancing in the game). Spatialized as detours and warp zones, the narrative elaborations serve to postpone and intensify the final gratification: mastering the game. After experiencing the closure of the endgame, the player frequently abandons the cassette and turns to another narrative for new postponements. Yet the hyperserialization both within and across these road games enables the play to be extended over weeks, months, and even years, as players improve their skill and advance from one "level" or "world" or "game" to another. Such a structure is bound to lead to cognitive development, for, like drinking milk or doing daily aerobics, the compulsive consumption of video games appears to accelerate growth.
A Cognitive Perspective on Video Games and Their Commodification
In playing video games where constant practice is essential, little kids like Jimmy (in The Wizard ) on my son, Victor, frequently triumph over older siblings and parents — partly because they have more play time, partly because they are less fearful of making a mistake when others are watching,[32] but
primarily because they are experiencing a major break-through in cognitive development. Although a few researchers have reported that video games can trigger seizures in epileptic children (a finding that was greatly exaggerated in the mass media), most empirical studies have demonstrated that the games have considerable educational and therapeutic value for a diverse range of groups — including adolescents, athletes, would-be pilots, the elderly in old-age homes, cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, stroke victims, quadriplegics, and young children suffering from palsy, brain damage, and Down's syndrome. Moreover, most researchers agree that youngsters seem to be the most skillful players. Patricia Marks Greenfield, who has written one of the best books on the subject, acknowledges:
When I played Pac-Man for the first time, I had watched it played quite a number of times, and I assumed I would be able to play it myself, even if not with consummate skill. But when I started, I found I could not even distinguish Pac-Man, whom I was supposed to control, from the other blobs on the screen! A little girl of about five had to explain the game to me. . . . I think that, as a person socialized into the world of static visual information, I made the unconscious assumption that Pac-Man would not change visual form. My hypothesis is that children socialized with television and film are more used to dealing with dynamic visual change and are less likely to make such a limiting assumption.[33]
This generational gap is the central irony in the popular "Inspector Gadget" TV series (currently in syndication on Nickelodeon): although the adult inspector (like a parodic James Bond) is equipped with all the latest macho hardware, the true winning player in this game of spies is his little niece Penny (together with her underdog, Brain), largely because
of her superior skill with computers. It is probably difficult for most adults to learn how to play these computer video games rapidly for the same reason that it is difficult for us to learn a second language: because our deep structure for language acquisition and for the interlocking systems of various modes of representation is already fixed.[34] Young children, in contrast, are still in the process of creating the necessary circuitry for this new restructuring. While there are video game prodigies as young as two years old (like little Adam Knoedler, who recently received so much media attention), seven to twelve seems to be an optimum age for players.
Piaget's theory of genetic epistemology helps to explain why the core group for video games starts around age seven or eight: namely, "it is precisely at this age that we can place the first period of reflection and logical unification, as well as the first attempts to avoid contradiction."[35] According to Piaget, at this stage the child begins to organize "operational groupings of thought concerning objects that can be manipulated or known through the senses" — a patterning on which the structure of memory is partly dependent.[36] The seven-year-old child also begins to perceive the social need to verify thought, and as a consequence thinking becomes less egocentric and more subject to logical argument and proof. The child's thinking becomes capable of "transitive combinativity, reversibility, associativity and identity . . . all of which characterize logical 'groupings' or arithmetical 'groups.'"[37] Becoming capable of various forms of conservation and categorization, the child is freed from total dependence on immediate perceptions and is able mentally to move fluidly backward and forward in space and time. Perhaps most important for video games, "Before 7 years, one can find only reproductive images, and all of them are quite static. . . . After 7 to 8 years, anticipatory images appear, but they are not
only applied to new combinations. They also seem to be necessary for the representation of any transformation even if it is known, as if such representations always entailed a new anticipation."[38]
Significantly, in Catholicism seven is also the age of First Communion, when the child learns the catechism and Ten Commandments and becomes accountable for his or her sins. It is as if this cognitive ability to imagine and anticipate hell's punishments is essential to the subject's candidacy for both salvation and eternal damnation. Seven is also the precise age in the original "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" comic book when Oroku Saki, traumatized by his brother's murder, begins to be transformed into the villainous Shredder. In both moral systems, then, at seven one apparently develops the ability to make an informed moral choice.
Applebee discusses the impact of this cognitive shift on the child's concept of story in some depth; nevertheless, he acknowledges a major omission in his study: he does not look at "the limits of a child's comprehension and understanding at each age, to find either the level at which frustration ensues, or the performance that can be obtained when the child works in conjunction with a teacher or peer," reminding us that "effective teaching is aimed not so much at the ripe as at the ripening functions."[39]
This ripening process is precisely the area explored by Vygotsky, who departs from Piaget's model of genetic epistemology by introducing a "zone of proximal development," which expands the role of learning in child development and leads him to conclude that "the only 'good learning' is that which is in advance of development." Vygotsky claims that "play creates a zone of proximal development of the child. In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself. As in the focus of a magnifying
glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development." Thus, he maintains, "the state of a child's mental development can be determined only by clarifying its two levels[:] . . . the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers."[40]
The playing of video games, I suggest, provides a similar kind of guidance, accelerating the child's movement between these two levels—that is, across the "zone of proximal development." Critics sometimes charge that video games isolate children from their peers; yet when my son and one or two friends (or his father) play video games together, the players often help each other in just this way. Instead of choosing to play against each other or just to take turns, they may agree to let the one who is most advanced in a particular game do most of the playing so the others can watch and learn new moves, or else they will let the novice do most of the playing while the more advanced player coaches.
Perhaps even more importantly, as investigators such as Greenfield have noted, the very structure of video games contributes to this ripening process as well—by fostering equilibration, by demanding shifting identifications with a wide range of subjects and objects, by forcing children to use the inductive process, by providing an immediate means of verifying hypotheses, by requiring sensorimotor eye-hand coordination and processing of visual information from multiple perspectives, and by developing skills in iconic-spatial representation once restricted to elite technical occupations (such as pilots and engineers).[41] In fact, I have noticed that the better Victor becomes at video games, the more interested and skillful he is at drawing cartoons. As Papert observes, "Learning a physical skill has much in common with
building a scientific theory," and this formal analogy is particularly apparent when the skill is playing video games.[42] Piaget claims that the "actualization" of cognitive development possibilities depends on exercise (that is, self-regulated hands-on experience), interactive problem solving, and the influence of the social environment[43] —a combination that is offered by video games, particularly when validated by a wider superentertainment system built on transmedia intertextuality. His model, however, does not acknowledge the possibility of acceleration, as does Vygotsky's.
Vygotsky's concept of cognitive acceleration through play has been applied to Emily's presleep monologues by Dore (as seen in chapter 1), to television and video games by Greenfield and associates (who argue that both media "augment" skill "in reading visual images as representations of three-dimensional space"),[44] and to computers by Papert. Papert rejects Piaget's assumption about the invariability of cognitive development (that the "concrete operations" of conservation are always acquired around age seven and the "formal operations" of combinatorial tasks around age eleven or twelve), but claims: "If computers and programming become a part of the daily life of children, the conservation-combinatorial gap will surely close and could conceivably be reversed: Children may learn to be systematic before they learn to be quantitative!" Admitting that he is "essentially optimistic—some might even say utopian—about the effect of computers on society," Papert unfortunately extends this optimism even to the consumerist aspects of our developing computer culture (revealing an unlimited trust in the marketplace):
Increasingly, the computers of the very near future will be the private property of individuals, and this will gradually return to the individual the power to determine patterns
of education. Education will become more of a private act, and people with good ideas, different ideas, exciting ideas will no longer be faced with a dilemma where they either have to "sell" their ideas to a conservative bureaucracy or shelve them. They will be able to offer them in an open marketplace directly to consumers.[45]
Nevertheless, despite (or perhaps partly because of) this utopian view of consumerism, Nintendo recently gave Paper's MIT laboratory a $3 million grant to explore the educational value of video games.[46]
Although Greenfield agrees with Papert about the transformative potential of computers, arguing that "video games are the first example of a computer technology that is having a socializing effect on the next generation on a mass scale, and even on a world-wide basis," she does not share his optimism about their consumerist context.[47] Even if video games and television/toy tie-ins help to accelerate cognitive development at certain ages (as her studies have shown), the way they are marketed can still have questionable effects. As she observes in her analysis of tie-ins, for example:
All indications from previous research are that product-based television is a potent selling tool to a particularly vulnerable audience . . . [which] applies, in principle, as much to Sesame Street as it does to Smurfs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles . Although one program is on public television and has an overt educational purpose, while the others are on commercial television and have the overt goal of entertaining, both seem, for better or for worse, to be socializing very young children to participate in a commercial, consumer-oriented society.[48]
Clearly, the acceleration of the child's ripening process has implications for marketing, for with a wider age range certain entertainment products can become more versatile.
Based on the expanding appeal of video games (which "are more sophisticated than male action figures or trucks, but are enjoyed by children as well as teens"), for instance, Standard and Poor advises toy manufacturers: "There is no longer any reason why certain manufacturers should limit themselves to rigidly defined markets such as the under-12 segment or adult novelty products and board games. A blurring of the distinctions among children, teens, and young adults has taken place as children become increasingly more sophisticated and mature in their choice of entertainment."[49] This kind of statement lends support to Susan Willis's argument that "commodities offer the young child a means to articulate his or her notions about the transition to adolescence."[50] Nintendo seems to be well aware of this dynamic, which is why they are developing games and marketing strategies for adults (who now represent almost 50 percent of the market), to make sure that players do not outgrow the games. According to Peter Main, Nintendo's vice-president in charge of marketing: "Our object from Day One was to move beyond the narrow base of the historic video game user—boys 8 to 13—because the 13-year old boy will turn 14 years old, and by that very chemistry passes from our grip."[51]
These marketing implications should not keep us from acknowledging the educational value of video games, however. In contrast to C. Everett Koop, who as U.S. surgeon general attacked video games for creating "aberrations in childhood behavior," the majority of the psychological studies and both of the books published thus far on this subject (Greenfield's Mind and Media and Loftus and Loftus's Mind at Play ) deny that the games are addictive or that they foster aggression and social isolation. As Greenfield observes of the violent content, "The impact of playing a violent video game alone is exactly the same as watching a violent cartoon."[52]
Instead, most of the research emphasizes the value of the games for cognitive development and their potential usefulness for psychological testing.[53]
Most parents who buy a Nintendo system probably assume (or at least hope) that the games will improve their children's visual memory and eye-hand coordination and teach them how to use time and concentration to master a skill. Just as I have linked Victor's video game playing to his passion for drawing cartoons, other parents probably tell themselves that their children will use these cognitive abilities later in playing a musical instrument, excelling in a sport, or succeeding academically. But it is equally possible that these games will lead youngsters to lose sight of certain important distinctions, by reconceptualizing those other activities as merely part of the same superentertainment system—concluding, for instance, that athletes who win gold medals in the Olympics, or writers and scientists who win the Nobel Prize, are performing tasks that are no more important or difficult than winning at video games—a perspective compatible with the postmodernist erasure of boundaries between high art and mass culture.
In this chapter I have argued that, because of the ideological assumptions implicit in the software and marketing of cartridges, video games not only accelerate cognitive development but at the same time encourage an early accommodation to consumerist values and masculine dominance. A similar dual effect is achieved in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle myth, where "glowing ooze" accelerates the physical growth and cognitive development of Splinter the rat and the four baby Turtles and simultaneously bonds them as father and sons, master and disciples, in a male clan of pizza-loving ninjas.
In the case of the superentertainment system, transmedia intertextuality works to position consumers as powerful play-
ers while disavowing commercial manipulation. It levels all ideological conflict within the single narrative of an all-encompassing game. And it valorizes superprotean flexibility as a substitute for the imaginary uniqueness of the unified subject. Nowhere are these dynamics more powerfully demonstrated than in the system of intertextuality constructed around those ultimate sliding signifiers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—a commercial network that rivals the popularity even of the Nintendo Entertainment System. According to Standard and Poor's 1989 survey of the toy industry, the two biggest hits that Christmas were Nintendo home video games and the plastic Turtle figures produced by Playmates (a success that was repeated in the 1990 Christmas season). Their merger in a video game was bound to be a hot seller; far less certain was which system would assimilate the other.