Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 131 posts

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#61

Post by ceol »

Karunamon wrote: post #45
arrrg wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly am. What has that to do with the comment I made?! Also, I am not aware of any serious attempts inside the Mario franchise to seriously subvert or invert the trope. I see an endless history of portraying women as weak, helpless and passive. Sad, really.

Let's see.. Pretty sure Peach has her own game on which the entire concept is getting the Mario Bros. out of trouble (the name is eluding me right now, it's on the DS). She's personally helped save the world more than once (Paper Mario 2 comes to mind). There are other female characters too.. Timpani from Super Paper Mario has a huge dynamic with the primary antagonist of the game. And if you look outside of that par…

Super Princess Peach is quite possibly the worst game to use as an example of an inversion of the trope. Peach's main power is essentially four mood swings called "Vibes"[0]: Joy, Rage, Gloom, and Calm. Granted, Japan isn't known for being very women-friendly[1], but that doesn't mean we should excuse Nintendo for making Peach's debut gameplay center around her being "emotional".

[0]: http://www.mariowiki.com/Super_Princess_Peach#Peach.27s_.22V...

[1]: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GenderGap_Report_2012.pdf page 9, Japan #101

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#63

Post by Evbn »

Retric wrote: post #55
alanctgardner2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people insist on foisting "software literacy" on the general populace? In terms of skills, financial planning, cooking, interpersonal skills are all more essential than reading and writing code. The writing analogy is off anyways: not everyone can write very well. People would upvote -and buy- a children's story by, say, neil gaiman. This is not the equivalent of a throwaway story made up on the spot.

I get along fine with without cooking skills. Now, cooking skills plus time could in theory save me up to 7k per year if you ignore prep time, but programming skills are worth a lot more than that.

If you are buying food as healthy as home cooked, you are paying more than 7k.

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#64

Post by pseut »

Karunamon wrote: post #12

Reposting and responding to a dead comment by lexarchy: -- > This is a clever hack, but I question the motives of both the father and Ars Technica. Must we erase—or invert—all aspects of yin and yang, simply to appease the gods of equality? You may have heard the French phrase vive la différence, which translates as "long live the difference", but do you know what it refers to? It means "let's celebrate the differenc…

I don't know the father's motives aside from the article, but I have a 4yo daughter and try to do whatever I can to encourage her to have, "I can change/fix that" as her first instinct when she runs into obstacles or problems. Whether there's a "war of the sexes" or not, boys are encouraged to hack way more than girls, so I'm more concerned about my daughters getting encouragement than my son (hypothetically... He's 1 so I don't really know yet).

So I saw the article in that light: a father wanted to hack donkey kong so that he could show his daughter that hacking donkey kong to make the princess the hero is a totally normal thing that she should expect to learn to do as she gets older. Maybe I'm projecting too much onto the story.

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#65

Post by Evbn »

Camillo wrote: post #43

Cool hack, great dad, etc. However, I can't help but point out that one of the most popular video games of the moment, Tomb Raider, has a female protagonist, and hordes (brutish, sexist hordes!) of male gamers are playing it without issue. Maybe it's not such a bad thing to learn to play as a character that is not exactly like you.

Tomb Raider has it's own history with sexism. Nearly no athletic women have a chest like Lara Croft. And I am not referring to chest muscles, which are relevant to an action hero.

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#67

Post by ibrahima »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #5

I will harp on about the importance of code literacy and open source / free software till the cows come home but this is the best example I know: We would never vote up a article where "father writes bedtime story for daughter, Sleeping Prince rescued by Princess". Because it is commonplace because literacy is commonplace, as are pens and paper commonplace and as are the legal frameworks to be allowed to alter the pu…

I think this is not necessarily the best comparison. It would be just as interesting if, for instance, a father found that all desks available were somehow inadequate for his daughter and made one for her from scratch, yet we don't go around telling people they should learn wood working. I think it would be better if more people could code but I think equating it with literacy is a bit silly.

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#68

Post by enneff »

sunnybunny wrote: post #66

My first thought on this was, "Awesome!" And then my second thought was, "Could this guy go to jail for that?" It's so sad that a guy doing something as innocent as this could be faced with fines or prison because our legal system is so screwed up.

How could this be illegal? He's not redistributing the work.
Post reply on HN