I just saw this article on DigitalTrends.com and decided that I might just have to make “Men Behaving Radly!” a reoccurring blog topic.

Mike Mika posted a video of his hacked version of Donkey Kong, wherein he changed the roles of the male and female characters, Mario and Pauline. Instead of Pauline being the damsel in distress, Mika hacked the ROM so that his 3 year old daughter could play as Pauline, the hero. The article says that:

“Mika explained that his daughter sometimes plays as Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Bros. 2 and so she understandably assumed she’d be able to play as Pauline in her current favorite game, Donkey Kong. He told her it wasn’t possible.”

“It’s annoying and awkward, to put it mildly, having to do gender-translation on the fly when Maya asks me to read what it says on the screen,” Hoye wrote at the time, adding, “I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero.”

“As some of you may be aware, this project has recently been subject to a coordinated online harassment effort waged by various online video game forums vowing to “take me down”. I always expect a certain level of harassment when discussing gender issues online. This time however, it’s a more organized and sustained effort than I’ve experienced before.

The intimidation and harassment effort has included a torrent of misogyny and hate speech on my YouTube video, repeated vandalizing of the Wikipedia page about me, organized efforts to flag my YouTube videos as “terrorism”, as well as many threatening messages sent through Twitter, Facebook, Kickstarter, email and my own website.  These messages and comments have included everything from the typical sandwich and kitchen “jokes” to threats of violence, death, sexual assault and rape.  All that plus an organized attempt to report this project to Kickstarter and get it banned or defunded.  Thankfully, Kickstarter has been incredibly supportive in helping me deal with the harassment on their service.

The sad thing is this kind of backlash happens all the time whenever women dare to speak up about gender and video games.”

 “Remember that it’s both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects”

You know if you think about it these two stories of father’s hacking beloved games to change the hero roles actually another example of the damsel in distress trope; where the girls are the damsels (distressed about their games) and the dad’s are the heroes… Just a thought.  –S.