Super Mario Gender Gamer

Super Mario Bros. 2 complicates gender stereotypes by allowing the gamer the ability to choose to play the game as either a male character or a female character while still maintaining equal skills in the character’s game play abilities. Having the ability to play the game as the female character Princes Peach and go through the game fighting, throwing, climbing, and jumping over bottomless pits is often seen in our society as beyond a woman’s gender roles and more heavily tied with a males actions. The equal abilities of the male and female characters blur the notions of a difference between genders.

But each character does have a subtle difference in game play abilities. Each character has a different special skill, these different skills could be argued as completely random abilities that could go unquestioned if they were swapped between characters or these special skills could be seen as a social commentary on the appearance of each character. When my older brother and I were children in the early 90’s we loved playing this game. We often played as the Princess because her special ability that differed from the other characters was the ability to have longer hang-time in the air after a jump compared to her male counterparts. Even as a child I rationalized this different ability and contributed it to her wearing a dress that acted like a parachute. Little did I know that by choosing the Princess character I was actually experimenting with (as Schleiner would put it) Gender crossing at an early age by ““wearing” a feminine identity”.

Some Differences between the male characters, Mario, Luigi and Toad can still be recognized in contrast to Princess Peach but mostly at the visual graphics level. The princess’s costume design shoves the fact that she is a woman down the gamers throat. Her wardrobe consists of attributes often associated with the male-gaze ideal of what women should look like with a thin body type, long flowing locks of hair, bright pink dresses, and accented with luxurious accessories, in this case a crown. The male characters have rather average clothing consisting of pants, shirts and hats often seen as a male’s ideal choice of clothes to spend a day in.


A photograph of me documenting alternate and unrelated research on the prequel of Super Mario Bros. 2


Work Cited

Schleiner, Ann-Marie. "Does Lara Croft Wear Fake Polygons? Gender and Gender-Role Subversion in Computer Adventure Games." MIT Press 34.3 (2001): 221-26. Web. 7 Oct 2010. .

Super Mario Bros. 2. Nintendo, 1988.