Sexism, videogames and shenanigans.

Klonoa

Klonoa

Well-known member
Okay, so yesterday I was listening to Donkey Kong Country music in YouTube, and found something interesting in the related videos, a ROM hack of the original Arcade Donkey Kong which makes the player character Pauline, and now Mario is the victim who must be saved. I chuckled at it, even downloaded the patch for the Donkey Kong ROM to try it out myself.

I decided to lurk the internet for a bit more info on this patch, made this year which apparently even got an article in wired as seen here: Why I Hacked Donkey Kong for My Daughter.

TL;DR version of the article: Programmer Mike Mika plays old games with is 3-years-old daughter, and she loves to play Donkey Kong. One day, she played Super Mario Bros. 2 for the NES and loved how you could play as Princess Peach, asked her dad if the same can be done in DK, he said the games were different so no playing as Pauline, this bummed the child a bit so he decided one night to give the game a quick hack. While some people found the patch cool, cute and overall gave positive/support words, other people... well, just proved how stupid can be:

The comments under the YouTube video can, at times, be just as horrific as they are encouraging. While some of the things people have said about my daughter are almost comically inappropriate, they are still downright disturbing. One person wished her “dead” because “it would do the world a favor and be one less feminist in our future.”

My kids are awesome. They are too young to understand any of the things people are saying. And after all, it’s the internet. It comes with the territory. It got me thinking about Metroid. If the internet was more prevalent back when thousands of boys discovered that, all along, they were playing as a woman, maybe Nintendo would have gotten just as much hate mail?

Having kids is incredible. And having a daughter is something special. I get the opportunity to see the world through her eyes. And if this experience has taught me anything, it’s that the world could be just a bit more accommodating. And that if something as innocuous as having Mario be saved by Pauline brings out the crazy, maybe we aren’t as mature in our view of gender roles as we should be.
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It just BAFFLES me, how this little innocent patch a man made for his daughter, a hand-crafted gift so to speak can sparkle all this bile from people, so many vitrolic comments, not only in YouTube, but also in wired where you can see people telling Mike Mika "A future dyke in the making; thanks dad", and among those lines, and not only that, unknowingly, he sparked AGAIN the "sexism in videogames" and gender-role arguement once again, which obviously in seconds degenerates into a flame war full of stupidity.

Why do people over-think stuff so much? I can't just simply grasp how patch for a 30-years-old game for a little girl can sparkle all this. I can't, for the life of mine, understand it.

I didn’t set out to push a feminist agenda, or try to make a statement. I just wanted to keep that little grin lit up on my daughter’s face every time we sit down to play games together.
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Klonoa

Klonoa

Well-known member
kihira said:
youtube comments are the internet equivalent of toilet wall graffiti
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That is true, yes, but still, so much bile...

Back during the earlier days of YouTube (circa 2006) it wasn't this common to see so much insulting, that came later on.

What happened? Is it because the internet became a daily-life tool, and the "safety" of being behind a monitor became so tempting to go, for a lack of a better term, "full retard"?
 
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