Are you a Boy? Or are you a Girl?

Most of the people I know have some experience with the Pokemon video game series. My own was mainly gained over the shoulder of my brother, although I inherited the Crystal version second-hand after my brothers had moved on to different games. To a certain extent, I view Pokemon like Harry Potter, as a staple of my generation's childhood. Pokemon affects even people who don't get into it themselves, just through some good ol' cultural osmosis.

So when every game since the one I started on has pretty much opened up by asking the player to choose their gender, one might say that there is a lot of cultural weight behind this set-up.

My mediated artifact was a screenshot of a playthrough Pokemon, asking the player if they are a boy or if they are a girl. This single decision affects how the character's sprite looks for the duration of the game, and at least in Crystal is pretty much the only question that will allow the player to determine their character's identity.

This particular question buys into a binary gender system, seeming to only acknowledge two different genders. In real life, of course, there are people who can't quite so neatly identify themselves, sometimes feeling male, sometimes feeling female, or feeling androgynous or simply confused. Furthermore, even people who can fit their self-identified gender to the binary system have a range of feminine and masculine traits (if we can even clearly define what is "masculine" and what is "feminine") and are not all uniform in their expression of gender.

Unfortunately, this game limits gender expression to two possible sprites. While understandable that video game designers can't supply an infinite number of options for the player, the phrasing of the question does indeed exert pressure on children to fit themselves to a very limited perspective of gender.

The gender question is one of the first in the game, and is the question that determines the most attributes of the player-character. This seems almost to imply that the most important characteristic of a person is gender. After all, why aren't the video game designers giving people different options in terms of the personalities of their sprites, or their family backgrounds, or other possible attributes? Presumably unintentionally, the game has prioritized gender as the characteristic people care about the most.

Media representations can affect not only how other people view certain segments of the population, but also how those people view themselves. Models in fashion magazines exert pressure on the idea of who can be considered beautiful; the lack of representation of certain ethnic groups in early television programming gave them a view of themselves as "outsiders"; and now, I have to simultaneously applaud the efforts to include female representation in storylines and cringe at the assumptions that the media makes in order to do so.

I look back fondly at games like Pokemon and am glad that I was lucky enough to be born in an era of such entertaining cultural staples. However, sometimes, I have to wonder what fingerprints these games have left on my perspective of the world... and whether or not I really want them there.