Playing Dirty: Pretty Pretty Princess
Every other week, Bonnie Ruberg contributes Playing Dirty, a column on sex and gender in video games:
I have made a grave mistake.
Starting up a new game of Twilight Princess last week, I must have suffered a momentary lapse of sanity. I actually thought it would be a good idea -- just this once -- to change Link's name to my own. I'm the player, aren't I? Why shouldn't dialog text be addressed to me? I deserve some attention, too.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Now every time someone speaks to young, heroic Link, they keep calling him "Bonnie." So far, he hasn't really seemed to notice, but it sure makes me feel funny. Girls sweetly bat their eyelashes and say my name. Men entrust me with complicated tasks without questioning whether I can complete them. It's just plain old weird.
Link runs, he jumps, he slashes things: everything he's always done. Except now he does it with a girl's name. In thirty seconds of poor judgment, I've made Link a name cross-dresser.
Not that name gender-bending is new to Zelda. Think about it. It's a series about a boy, titled with the name of a girl. Twilight Princess re-inscribes that tradition on an individual-title level. Granted, we all know that Link is not Zelda, that Zelda expands out to The Legend of Zelda, and that the implications of naming the games after the beautiful, ever-savable princess are as straight (and gender-normative) as an arrow. But that doesn't mean, in effect, we don't still refer to this male game with a female name.
Besides, Link was never the manliest of men. Sure, he's tough in a fight, but those fine features, that blond hair, those slender, stockinged legs: out of context, we might call him effeminate, even pretty. Unlike many other video game big boys, he's often represented as a child, or at least a teen. He's slight, agile -- hardly your typical macho knight in shining armor.
Which is strange because, in other ways, he really is a symbol of masculinity, the archetypal boy hero. When he puts on that green tunic, he's every young man coming into his own. And his story is classically male: boys fights evil, boy saves world, boy gets pretty girl. In all fairness though, Link never really gets his girl, and we shouldn't rule out his symbolic impotence as a factor in his gender-bending.
And if it sounds blasphemous to call Link feminine, to muddle the gender lines of our beloved heros, remember that girl gamers deal with video-game cross-dressing almost every time we pick up a controller. For us, the vast majority of games already include that queer experience of stepping into the skin of someone of a different gender, of playing through their eyes.
Seeing my Link called "Bonnie" may be unsettling to me, but that's not because of the lesbian flirting, or the older men with arms around "my" shoulders, or even the thought of how good Link would look in glam. Those thing sit with me fine. Nope, it's that every time Link gets addressed by a girl's name, I'm reminded of my own gender difference -- the way that I, playing as a boy, become male myself. Ultimately, that's the biggest gender swap of all.
[Image credit: Pikminlink]
Bonnie Ruberg is a writer, researcher, and all around fangirl with a big crush on games. Find more of her work at Terra Nova, Gamasutra, or her blog, Heroine Sheik. She can be reached at .
