Opinion: Nintendo (finally) wins at advertising to women

Posted on 23 Feb 2010 at 12:25

 

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Video game advertising seems to have some funny ideas about what women want from their games. A particularly egregious example of this was the Valentine's Day push for a hot pink Nintendo DSi bundled with a game called Style Boutique.

Despite the game, known as Wagamama Fashion: Girls Mode in Japan and Style Savvy in the US, being explicitly designed for the tweenage market (that's 10 – 12 year olds to the rest of us), it was marketed as an appropriate gift for a grown woman. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to receive a DSi as a Valentine's present (although you'd have to resign yourself to playing second fiddle to a games console for the rest of the day). I'd just really appreciate it if it wasn't presupposed that, because I have a pair of X chromosomes, I'm only interested in games that are (a) about clothes and (b) designed for someone with the intellectual capacity of a (not very imaginative) ten year old.

However, I'm pleased to note that the current TV spots for The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks have done a lot to redeem Nintendo's advertising department in my eyes. They all follow a similar theme – late on a rainy night, a solitary gamer is poring over the latest RPG on their DSi.

That's a scenario any gaming enthusiast will recognise. The interesting point here is that the gamer in question is female. There's no fanfare about this, although several ads in the sequence draw (not entirely accurate) parallels between Spirit Tracks and the last Professor Layton game, a brilliant logic-puzzler which did conspicuously well among female gamers in the UK.

It's that very lack of fanfare that I particularly like here. This isn't a "game for girls". It doesn't rely excessively on ponies, babies, fashion or the colour pink. Instead it's an intellectually demanding game that a woman is just as likely to enjoy as a man.

The advert takes on board a significant point: women often buy, excel at and are immediately comfortable with the more cerebral gaming genres – adventure, RPG, strategy and puzzle. This is something of a gender cliché itself, but one with a ring of truth of that's often lost in a sea of OMG! Pink! female-oriented advertising.

Thanks, Nintendo.

Here's one of those UK ads for Spirit Tracks. It's great to see adverts that treat women as serious gamers, even if they're not a patch on the hallucinatory weirdness of the US advert.

Author: Kat Orphanides