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this is due to the importance creators of the Zelda games place on making the experience feel real, then perhaps this indicates a shift in the dominant attitudes toward and perceptions of femininity. Beauvoir saw a link between the way man defines and portrays woman, and the objective reality both inhabit. Her analysis offers an interesting explanation for why there is an ideal of femininity and what it constitutes. This idea is often exhibited by the way women are portrayed in the Zelda games as well as many other sources, and changes in the portrayals may result from changes in the conceptions of woman and femininity.

Perhaps changes in the reality of Zelda reflect real changes, and if the definition of woman really changes, then perhaps changes in women’s status, perceptions, and relationships will follow.

It’s a Secret to Everybody

20

Getting to Know the World Next Door

ROGER NGIM

One of the casualties in this new age of video games is the instruction manual, those glossy booklets from the 8-bit era that came stuffed into the plastic cases and cardboard boxes with the game cartridges. In addition to their charmingly nonsensical backstories badly translated from Japanese and the goofy illustrations that looked nothing like the pixilated characters on screen, the manuals offered players indispensible information, specifically how to use the controller to jump, duck, punch, kick, aim, fire, pick up, and drop. Without instructions, I could push buttons forever and never once perform a Hurricane Kick (down, down-back, back, then kick) in Street Fighter. But with the manual in my lap, propped open to the list of special moves, I could kick some serious butt. This required splitting my attention between the television screen and the booklet, alternating between being immersed in the world of the game and being jarringly aware of the real-world act of playing a game.

Today’s video games still come with instruction manuals but more out of tradition than necessity, as most games do an adequate job of explaining themselves through built-in tutorials or intuitive game play. Technological advances have given designers the ability to create game worlds so close to our own that we can navigate and function in these spaces without cracking open the manual. Nowhere is the proximity of these worlds more evident than in the release of Nintendo’s Wii, with its wireless controller that operates on naturalistic movements: To throw a bowling ball, step forward and swing your arm. The analog world we have put so much effort into digitizing is returning to the analog.

In a course I taught on games and culture at the University of California at San Diego, we spent quite a bit of time puzzling over the complex relationships between a player, his avatar, the game world he occupies, and the encompassing real world. Such discussions were inevitable given that these vast and vividly rendered new worlds are infiltrating, if not threatening to swallow up, our old one. Complicating matters is the fact that these alternate realities are now full of other people. Whereas a player’s actions once were guided solely by the game’s rules (its algorithms), today gamers are free to contaminate pristine virtual landscapes with the messiness and imprecision of their real-world social behaviors. Imagine Pac-Man scooting down the aisles making racist remarks and hitting on Ms. Pac-Man. As game worlds bestow on its players the freedom to be themselves, games veer sharply away from the utopic.

Actually, games have never been the safe havens we imagine them to be. They are gated communities, tidy and organized but ruled by fascistic neighborhood associations whose bylaws are printed inside the lid of the Monopoly box or written into the code of a computer program. Even when 2-D refugees Mario and Link graduated to three dimensions in the 1990s, the gates swung open only to reveal a new fence in the foggy distance—freedom abruptly ended at an impassable river or unscalable wall. Yet it is these very limitations that both define the game