“The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom”, when video game heroines assert themselves

It’s the turn of Zelda, the princess who is constantly in trouble in the video games of the eponymous saga, to become the heroine of a video game. In The Legend of Zelda : Echoes of Wisdomreleased Thursday, September 26, the player will no longer embody Link, but his companion Zelda. This had not happened since 1993, with the game Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon released on the very short-lived Philips CD-i console.

Rather than a sword, the princess is equipped, in this 20th opus of the saga (!), with a magic scepter, which allows her to copy all sorts of objects and monsters at will, which she will use to complete the dungeons. Last March, Nintendo had already proposed, with the video game Princess Peach. Showtime ! to change the protagonist and had replaced Mario with the famous Princess Peach.

With this second move to the feminine, Nintendo is therefore following an increasingly common practice in the world of video games: offering players the chance to embody a woman. Because if female characters have always been present, from Mrs Pacman to Lara Croft, we have seen a clear acceleration in recent years.

“It’s true that there is some improvement”says Fanny Lignon, lecturer in cinematographic and audiovisual studies at Université Claude Bernard Lyon I and who directed the work Genres and Video Games (PUM). “It’s better than it was. We increasingly have the opportunity to play men and women… even if there are still some beautiful stereotypes. So we have to look at how these female characters present themselves.”

Playable characters soon on par?

In 2022, the Diamond Lobby site compiled data from 152 majors released during the year. “When we have games where there is only one playable character, we have almost as many games that offer a male player character as games that offer a female playable character. We are at 55% for men and 45% for women. The trend towards diversity in games is therefore more and more marked, even if there are still a large number of games that are predominantly male,” continues the researcher.

According to Fanny Lignon, we owe this development “to players who are increasingly demanding diversity and who are fed up with degrading, hyper-sexualized representations. They aspire to have games with complex, interesting characters. And girls, perhaps more than boys, because very often, it is the female characters who suffer from this lack of complexity. But the situation is changing [grâce à] society, thanks to the demands of players. #MeToo, no doubt, has been there and GameGate, with the reactions it produced and its consequences. I think it’s rather a good thing.”

In the case of Nintendo, for example, we still see gender stereotypes linked to a vision of children’s stories, believes the academic: “The characters offered by Nintendo are more at the level of children, characters from stories, damsels in distress… In Princess Peach Showtime, when we look at the characters she can embody, there are about ten from memory, she has to save a theater, where Mario saves the world, so we’re not playing in the same league already. The game is very good, but it’s not there yet…”.

And The Legend of Zelda : Echoes of Wisdom seems to avoid this pitfall, but this is not the case for all games. Stellar Bladereleased last April on Playstation 5, offers the opportunity to play a female protagonist… but the heroine is very sexualized. “What’s shocking?” Fanny Lignon asks. “That the girl is a bimbo, okay, why not. But this body is completely unsuited to the action that this young woman is made to do. And then there is also the way of showing her in the image: systematically you have chosen angles, you have small low-angle shots that go well, buttocks in the foreground, etc.: everything is done to hyper-sexualize the heroine.”

More and more heroines… still stereotyped

At a time when 48% of gamers in France are female, heroines are still far from escaping the “male gaze”.“There is a preconception, perhaps still among some publishers, that men cannot play a female character,” regrets Fanny Lignon. “But in the name of what? It is the action that makes us identify.”

In recent years, the emergence of independent games has also made it possible to offer new types of protagonists. Less required to please the greatest number, they have been able to break away from the classic “male” protagonist. Since then, triple AAA games have followed in their footsteps. The game Horizon Zero Dawnwith the character of Aloy for example, offers a strong, independent female character, without sexualizing her.

“What is problematic in terms of representation is that even when we have female characters who are complex, who are interesting, there are things that are conspicuous by their absence,” develops the author of Gender and video games. “For example, there aren’t many non-white heroines. There aren’t many middle-aged heroines, or even some that are a bit ugly! We have heroes who are ugly – I’m thinking of Trevor in GTA who isn’t very pretty. There are ultimately still quite a few strong heroines, complex ruins. And what’s missing is variety in representations and roles for women, for men, for others too. That’s what’s the problem in fact, is that there isn’t enough diversity. The fact of being a different skin color, or being older, or being less in line with society’s canons, that just means a bit of variety in representations.”

These representations are all the more necessary since, according to a survey published this year by IFOP, 60% of men playing video games adhere to at least one sexist stereotype. “It’s very enriching to be able to see the world through this secondary skin that we temporarily offer you,” concludes Fanny Lignon. “You have the other’s abilities, with their limits and their skills. It allows you to see the world differently. It’s an opening to see the world in the other’s shoes. And it’s a possibility of empathy too.”