Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Genre and gender
Breaking limitations
Picture, if you’ll, a typical open-world action-adventure sport. Imagine a sport that has gamers blasting monsters with magic, platforming round ruined structure, and delving right into a wealth of scattered lore. When you shut your eyes, what does the protagonist of that sport seem like? What is their character? How do they gown? If you’ve performed a sport that matches this description previously, I’d wager that the primary picture that involves your thoughts isn’t a plucky, pink-haired teenage woman with a coronary heart of gold and an excellent sense for trend.
That’s precisely what you get with the deceptively radical Infinity Nikki. Developed by Infold Games, Infinity Nikki is the newest installment within the Nikki franchise, a sequence of free cell dress-up video games that has gamers creating outfits for its titular hero. The sequence is a secret powerhouse, racking in tens of thousands and thousands of energetic gamers regardless of not carrying the mainstream identify recognition of Mario or Call of Duty. Much of that’s due to its reputation with girls, who’ve lengthy flocked to a sport that embraces femininity in a medium that has traditionally shied away from it.
With Infinity Nikki, Infold Games reshaped its profitable cell system right into a full-scale open-world sport. It was a direct hit when it launched in December 2024, rapidly amassing over 20 million downloads in its first week — and all with out sacrificing its female spirit. Now, its success raises a query for the online game trade: Why did it take so lengthy for a sport like this to exist when there was such a big viewers for one thing prefer it? That query opens an interrogation into who video games are made for, and the way Infinity Nikki cuts towards the grain.
Genre and gender
If you had been to guage by conventional research on style and gaming, you could possibly moderately come to the conclusion that Infinity Nikki can be a dangerous monetary transfer. Several analysis research via gaming’s historical past have steered that ladies aren’t drawn to video games prefer it as a lot as males are. In a 2017 research, Quantic Foundry analyzed survey information from over 270,000 avid gamers to map out style preferences between women and men. The research discovered that males accounted for 82% of action-adventure gamers and 86% of open-world gamers. A statistic like that may lead one to consider {that a} sport like Infinity Nikki would have a reasonably low ceiling in the case of participant base. That wasn’t the case.
Is that proof that analysis research like this have been working on flawed information for many years? Not precisely. At the time, Quantic Foundry acknowledged that the chance for video games to interrupt from that information was bigger than it appeared.
“It’s also easy to read the genres in the chart and pin the cause solely on gender differences in gaming motivations–e.g., women simply don’t like X or Y game mechanic, but there may be a lot more going on,” Quantic Foundry finds. “For example, games on the bottom of the chart tend to not have female protagonists, tend to involve playing with strangers online, and tend to have a lot of rapid 3D movement which can lead to motion sickness (which women are more susceptible to). Low female gamer participation in certain genres may be a historical artifact of how motivations and presentation have been bundled together and marketed.”
Quantic Foundry
It’s via that caveat by which we are able to determine a self-fulfilling cycle that’s lengthy dominated the online game trade, one which Infinity Nikki breaks free from. Surveys and participant information have lengthy led us to consider that some video games are for “boys” and others are for “girls.” That has been bolstered by design choices that gender the video games we play, whether or not consciously or subconsciously.
We can look to Laura Mulvey’s principle of the “male gaze” to elucidate that phenomenon. Though initially coined to dissect cinema’s biases, Mulvey’s critiques echo via fashionable video video games. In her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey explores the delicate methods during which movies assume that the viewer on the opposite finish of the projector is male. It’s not simply in the best way girls are sexualized on display screen, however in who drives the motion, how the digital camera frames topics, and the way archetypes reinforce establishment gender dynamics. These identical ideas will be utilized to video video games, however formed across the distinct traits of an interactive medium.
Breaking limitations
You can start to see what makes Infinity Nikki totally different when its protagonist, who is exclusive for a manufacturing of this scale. Video sport historical past is full of feminine heroes, although they’ve typically fallen into just a few totally different bins constructed for a male gaze. In her 2013 video sequence Tropes vs Women in Video Games, Anita Sarkeesian identifies a spread of recurring archetypes from the damsel in misery to the “Ms. Male Character.” More studios have moved to treatment that previously decade, however even well-meaning makes an attempt danger teetering into reversed tropes that reject femininity to make feminine characters really feel like “one of the guys.”
Infinity Nikki avoids that lure. Nikki is the uncommon online game heroine who’s allowed to be compassionate and joyful, whereas nonetheless commanding respect from the inhabitants of Miraland. She’s each bit as highly effective as a gun-toting badass like Bayonetta or Lara Croft, however capable of intimidate imposing thugs simply by dressing them down along with her phrases. Most crucially, she’s proudly trendy. As the lead of a dress-up sport constructed round crafting outfits, Nikki is allowed to admire elegant attire, informal enterprise apparel, comfy rompers, and every little thing in between. In her evaluate of Infinity Nikki, Polygon’s Nicole Carpenter explains the place this method intersects and departs with different video video games.
“In video games, fashion has always been power, even if it’s not immediately obvious to the average player,” Carpenter writes. “In games like Elden Ring or Destiny 2, players go scorched-earth to find the most powerful gear — a helmet that’s resistant to fire attacks, perhaps, or a chest plate that increases damage dealt. Infinity Nikki takes that idea very literally, eliminating the sort of stereotypical violence traditionally seen in video games while still holding true to the series’ deep, intriguing darkness and shimmering frivolity. Developer Infold Games has created the most earnest (and sometimes absurd) story with Infinity Nikki, centered around a traditionally feminine value — style! — that connects all sorts of different players.”
Infinity Nikki isn’t a sport made with the idea that gamers are male, and, in flip, Nikki herself isn’t an object created to enchantment to that viewers. You can concretely see what that really means when evaluating how Infinity Nikki approaches its dress-up gameplay in comparison with different video games starring feminine leads which are created, whether or not consciously or not, with a male perspective in thoughts. In the 2024 motion sport Stellar Blade, gamers management a feminine character named Eve. Dressing Eve up in several outfits is an enormous promoting level of Stellar Blade, simply as it’s with Infinity Nikki, however there’s a serious distinction between Nikki and Eve’s wardrobes. The latter will be dressed up in scandalous outfits designed to point out off her physique. Some intensify her cleavage with impractical tops, whereas others embrace high-riding bottoms that hardly cowl her pelvis. They are attractive matches born from a person’s concept of what feminine sexiness seems like.
Stellar Blade Sony
Infinity Nikki Infold Games
Infinity Nikki additionally options what it explicitly labels as “Sexy” clothes gadgets, however they’re utterly totally different from the skimpy outfits we see in Stellar Blade. You’re extra prone to discover modern black attire that utterly cowl Nikki’s physique than a skinny strip of material that’s solely there to maintain the sport’s score down. The clothes is constructed with a feminine perspective in thoughts, not a person’s. That has resonated with gamers, corresponding to content material creator Pynk Gamer, who defined why that feels so particular in a video essay titled Infinity Nikki: A Journey into the Heart of Girlhood.
“What Infinity Nikki really embraces the most is the female gaze,” Pynk Gamer says. “When I look at clothing, I love to see the fall of the clothes, I love to see the details of the clothing. I think [Infold Games] captured that essence so perfectly. Whenever I change Nikki’s outfit, I’m looking at the details, at the stitching, at the embroidery … If you decide to climb on a bicycle, it intentionally tells you that Nikki is changing her outfit to make it easier to ride a bicycle in. Things like that show how much attention to detail [Infold Games] has done to make sure Nikki as a character is not being sexualized.”
While these are the extra express ways in which Infinity Nikki pushes again towards an trade dominated by male bias, its most radical high quality is its style. As an open-world sport, Infinity Nikki rejects the concept girls merely don’t benefit from the style. While its platforming and motion are streamlined, it’s nonetheless a fancy, systems-heavy RPG that lets gamers free in an infinite world dotted with quests, collectibles, and crafting supplies. It proves Quantic Foundry’s principle that gender disparity in style has extra to do with how particular video games goal male participant bases.
Papergames
The undeniable fact that Infinity Nikki facilities femininity is a crucial piece of its enchantment, however that alone doesn’t assure a success. In an essay about Infinity Nikki for The Gamer, author Stacey Henley notes that crucial piece of the sport’s success comes all the way down to its high quality above all else. Henley likens it to that of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie, stressing the significance of constructing an excellent murals first moderately than making an attempt to engineer a success primarily based on skewed demographic information.
“Look at the audience of Infinity Nikki — mostly casual, mostly women, seeking games with plenty of customisation options and limited violence, but still with a sense of adventure, mystery, and exploration,” Henley writes. “Not a game for girls. A game, for girls. Game first, audience second. It was the same with Barbie. It was a great movie, one that in this particular instance appealed to a female audience. Think about how you can make a great game, and tilt it to a less-represented audience, don’t think of cliches to pander to a ‘demographic’ you want to ‘tap into’ and then try to jam any square parts of a game that will fit into the round hole you’ve created.”
Henley’s principle has confirmed correct within the case of Infinity Nikki. It generated over $16 million in income inside the first month of its launch and already had gained 20 million downloads in every week. Crucially, that success wasn’t solely from feminine gamers. Shortly after its launch, Polygon’s Ana Diaz reported that Infinity’s Nikki’s Reddit web page was filling up with posts from male gamers who had discovered themselves enraptured with the journey. It was a sign that Infold Games had efficiently created a sport with a female perspective that transcended gender limitations.
Even in that reception, although, there’s nonetheless a tough reminder that “girl game” nonetheless holds a derogatory connotation amongst gamers. The Reddit posts from male gamers grew to become some extent of rivalry within the Infinity Nikki group. Posters like IntrinsicCarp had been fast to level out that this model of publish solely served to bolster the gender divide in video video games by treating the concept of a person having fun with a dress-up sport as subversive moderately than regular.
“The instant a girl game becomes popular it becomes ‘i’m a 25 year old man and i love this game’ ‘hope nobody knows i play this game for girls,’” the publish reads. “This game does not deserve to be relegated to your dirty little secret, even as a joke. You don’t see us saying “tee hee i’m playing red dead redemption how shameful.”
Infinity Nikki might break down limitations, however the online game trade’s partitions will stay up so long as video games prefer it are exceptions to the principles which are handled like punchlines.
This analysis paper was initially introduced at Pipi to Ripley 7: Gender and Sexuality in Pop Culture at Ithaca College on April 18, 2025.