GAME ? ADVANCE

Last year, I was playing my Game Boy Advance (GBA) on the bus when a child pointed to me and asked his mother if I was a boy or a girl. The confusion was not altogether unwarranted: I had recently had my hair shaved at the local barber shop and I was probably wearing one of my brother’s old coats. But the crystalized, pin-sharp part of this memory is what came after. While the mother tried to explain that pointing is rude and so was the question, the child continued: “he has a Nintendo, so I think he’s a boy.”

When Nintendo released the GBA in 2001, they identified their idealized audience in the handheld’s very name. This was a console for boys and the device’s games—where young male heroes like Link and Mario sought to rescue captive princesses Zelda and Peach, respectively—only concretized this demographic. So successful was Nintendo that the gendering of this technology persists today.

Game ? Advance imagines an alternative history for Nintendo’s handheld, one that reflects and invites a different kind of subjectivity. Although scholars often lambast a return to retro aesthetics as facile nostalgia, I see a performative potential inherent in remixing a visual language from an era where gaming was the explicit domain of young boys. I recognize the possibility for a kind of “astonished contemplation” through which we can reinterpret the past and work towards and alternative future.¹ This project wonders: can we even be nostalgic for a home that never existed?

Exclusion and exploitation are not uniquely embedded in Nintendo’s advertising and handheld naming conventions, but rather are part of the larger negotiations of networked contact: “male-to-female connectors configure all electronic information exchange as electrifying heterosexual intercourse.”² The motherboard is a printed circuit board capable of expansion through daughtercards. In computer networking, the terms master and slave describe a communication protocol whereby one device controls another, even while the production of the chips, circuit boards, and capacitors upon which consumer electronics depend are contingent on a history of colonialism.

In remixing the console, I’ve worked to erase every instance of the word “boy” by covering the letters with pastel paints or by scraping the silk screen coating off the aftermarket glass lens. But even this isn’t enough. Due to Nintendo’s sophisticated technical protection measures, it’s impossible to play a game on the GBA without seeing “boy” appear at least once on the loading screen. The Game Boy logo is hardcoded into the system so that the very act of turning it on genders the machine.

Game ? Advance does away with the digital screen altogether and replaces it with a handcrafted textile facsimile. The ability to write my own narrative is not something to take for granted when women have been coding and weaving men’s visions of the future into the electronics of our consumer devices for decades.³ Without a screen my console becomes unplayable—but only insofar as play means exerting control over people and machines.

Instead, I daydream about what a Legend of Zelda game might look like if it weren’t made for boys so used to seeing themselves as the heroes of the story. The screenshot here shows one of the final scenes from the GBA’s The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap in which the hero Link rescues and revives the passive princess Zelda. In my reimagining, Zelda wields the sword and shield, off on an adventure of her own.

Around the time of the GBA’s release at the turn of the millennium, we saw the rise of craft activism or “craftivism,” the feminist reclamation of handicrafts like cross-stitch and knitting. Though not without its criticisms, the practice has somewhat of a utopian underpinning. It is “as much a contemporary memory project that reconstitutes the past as it is a social justice-oriented movement concerned with modifying the present and shaping the future.”⁴ We can mobilize the reclamation of both hardware and crafts to promote an ethics of slowness, reuse, and above all, care—whether that’s care for the planet, care for each other, or care for ourselves through the weaving together of a new future.

Most of the materials that went into the sculpture are reclaimed items that would otherwise make their way to a landfill. The frame uses a damaged, repainted Game Boy Advance shell, a scratched glass lens (that I scratched some more) and low-grade buttons that languish by the thousands in the warehouse of Montreal-based repair parts company, Retro Modding. The rest of the project cobbles together leftover Aida cloth and colored threads from larger cross-stitch projects, fabric flowers from broken hair pins, and colorful foil once used as packaging. I remixed these components in the company of a close friend, Abbie “spoopy” Rappaport during a “crafternoon” where we set aside the things we had to do in service of the things we hoped to do.

Game ? Advance is a backwards glance, but one turned towards an alternative future. It is sentimental and critical, nostalgic and anticipatory, frivolous and recuperative. Philosopher Herbert Marcuse says that “Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the [people] who could change the world.”⁵ Art does more than catalyze thought. It can also inspire the willful daydreams of utopia and can move us to craft a better world for ourselves and each other.

Notes

¹ Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, quoted in José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 5.

² Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 12.

³ See Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Nintendo Capitalism: Enclosures and Insurgencies, Virtual and Terrestrial,” Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue Canadienne d’études du développement 22, no. 4 (2001): 965-996.

⁴ Kristen A. Williams, “‘Old Time Mem’ry’: Contemporary Urban Craftivism and the Politics of Doing-It-Yourself in Postindustrial America,” Utopian Studies 22, no. 2 (2011): 307.

⁵ Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, quoted in Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 20.