Introduction
Paper loops. It bends, winds, and curls, traversing through toner roll and drum until it curves out of the feed, twisting and tumbling onto and off of the tray. Through technology and as technology, paper loops, temporarily creating a noticeable protrusion from its intertwining with other technologies before it flattens back into the operating logics of the technological systems enfolding it. In video games, paper functions as an integral media for play. From in-game representations of paper and printing tools as interface, to paratextual materials like strategy guides and feelies, printed materials facilitated playing video games. With the appearance of paper printing devices such as Nintendo’s Game Boy Printer and Pokémon Snap printing station, however, paper unfurled as a form of playing with printing itself. This form of print play emphasizes public, irreverent, and communal uses similar to and inspired by the Japanese sticker phenomenon of Print Club, or Purikura, photo booths. Predating both Nintendo’s experiments with consolized Purikura and the general rise of Purikura across Japan was a play on printers and paper in video games—a “strictly solo affair” with sticker paper to spare1: the 1995 Casio Loopy (fig. 1). Largely forgotten by dominant narratives of game history, the Japan-only console came uniquely equipped with a built-in thermal printer that would print color stickers and text on a ream of paper stored inside the console. Equally unique is that Casio marketed the Loopy explicitly to women in Japan through gendered visual, procedural, and performative rhetorics.
Figure 1
The console comes housed in a white and pink cardboard box, adorned with an abundance of bubbly pastel hearts and the trademark pink and blue interlinked heart logo. On the front of the box, the Loopy is pictured at a slight angle to capture the console’s various hardware features as well as a fresh sticker emerging from the printer terminal’s mouth. An artist’s rendition of the kinds of stickers that players might print hovers above the console in an eye-catching yellow oval. The console tagline, roughly translated as “the games are fun, the stickers are great,” and bullets emphasizing the kinds of enjoyment players will experience with the console as well as its 32-bit CPU border these images. On the back of the console box, players can find screenshots from various Loopy game software with accompanying descriptions that focus on introducing the games’ stories to curious players. At three and a half pounds and a foot long (roughly the length of a model 1 Sega Genesis console), the hardware features several variations on a typical video game console build. Its four-inch height accommodates both a single controller port centered on the front of the console and the offset “Seal Out” printer mouth. On the back of the console there are A/V and power ports as well as a small knob labeled Contrast with five settings for adjustments to the printer. The power switch and cartridge eject and reset buttons can be found on top of the console just below the game-cartridge slot. These take up approximately half of the console while the other half is reserved exclusively for the sticker-paper cartridge terminal. This terminal is covered with a clear plastic window to check the remaining amount of sticker paper. Inserting sticker paper into the terminal requires releasing the lid by pressing the Open button, which causes it to entirely slide off the console and expose three mounts for aligning the sticker-paper cartridge. Alongside this terminal is a button that causes a small blade to slide across the inside of the printer’s mouth to cut stickers that the console has printed. Booting the console cues a fade-to-blue screen with an outlined CASIO dithering in on a curve from the left and right edges of the television to a brief musical jingle. At the end of the animation, the CASIO outline is filled white and pauses briefly before fading to launch one of the eleven published games released during the Loopy’s time on the market.
Although the Loopy was supported for only just over three years, its legacy as a console marketed explicitly to women in Japan has managed to survive well into our contemporary moment. Its gendered rhetorics were not simply limited to the pink and baby-blue hearts adorning the console’s packaging, yonic faceplate, amoeba-like design, and giant buttons accompanying soft curves, or the commercials and other paratextual materials surrounding the console; instead, Casio coded gender into the gameplay and gameplay devices that the console offered its players.2 Much like the Magical Shop (1995) attachment that players could plug into their Loopy to import and edit screen captures from any RCA video source (cameras, game consoles, VCRs, etc.), the console itself has become something of a palimpsest with many enthusiast collectors erasing and reprinting its history as a cautionary tale to would-be game designers about the supposed consequences of ignoring hegemonic gaming conventions and demographics (fig. 2).
Figure 2
Magical Shop console attachment. (Image courtesy of Clever Geek, https://clever-geek.github.io/)
Yet Rachel Simone Weil, founder of the FEMICOM Museum, an online and physical archive dedicated to the archiving of feminine and feminist technologies and toys, explains that these accounts enact a violence on the player groups and the kinds of video games that could emerge from femme aesthetics. Weil writes, “A lot of pop-historians on YouTube use these artifacts [the Casio Loopy and other bits of girl-game history] to create narratives about how pandering and pink are inherently bad and mindless, citing commercial failure as evidence and ignoring commercial success. These perspectives are usually so short-sighted, one-sided, and unresearched, and they function mostly as a vehicle for trashing femme aesthetics veiled as humor or progressive politics.”3 In contrast with the many antagonistic accounts circulating online, Weil’s research on the Loopy’s synthesis of Purikura, productivity software, femininity, and video games reveals alternatives to a history of video games that privileges masculine aesthetics and identities. Beginning with visits to Japanese collector communities and conversations with the Loopy’s designers in the early 2010s when there was “very little historical interest in the Loopy,” her work unearthed a console that “isn't just a reskinning” or a pink-ified approach to feminine aesthetics, but rather one in which every aspect (including the software) was designed for girls.4 Weil’s insights lead us to ask how we might trouble video game history and challenge its biases by reconsidering femininity within the Loopy’s print and printing. In this short account of the console, we draw on Weil’s work to examine the Loopy from the perspective of its Japanese cultural, demographic, and business contexts, and as a representative media archaeological anomaly in the digital and print material histories of video games. Particularly, we argue, what the putative failures of the Loopy and its digital print hybridity offer is a successfully incisive case study of the gendering of print-based play in game history.
Out of the Loop(y)
The Casio Loopy, for all the ways it has been classified as a “failure,” is a “rupture” in the history of video games,5 a point that becomes evident through a media archaeological reading of the console. According to Lori Emerson, media archaeology works to “uncover a nonlinear and nonteleological series of media phenomena—or ruptures—as a way to avoid reinstating a model of media history that tends toward narratives of progress and generally ignores neglected, failed, or dead media.”6 Laine Nooney’s media “speleology” expands on media archaeology by resisting the impulse to merely “widen” our historic perspective, that is, dig up the names of women and fit them into the historic record as we know it.7 Speleology, instead, “is a phenomenologically imprecise encounter—I can only see so much at any one time. The shape I hollow out here relies on non-continuity and the inability to apprehend the historical field in its wholeness.” 8 Instead of presenting a simple chronology of names (games, consoles, programmers, etc.), we attempt to understand the Loopy through the infrastructure of gender—affecting who plays, what is played, and how play happens on this console. Given its lack of documentation, the Loopy is an admittedly challenging console to provide definitive answers for; yet, its general obscurity presents an ideal opportunity to practice grasping at “the limits”9 of history.
Documentation on the Loopy amounts to a cabinet of curiosities on YouTube ranging from console reviews to Loopy game titles footage, a brief Wikipedia entry linking us to similarly brief entries on various collectors’ databases, and two long-form pieces, including an article in Eurogamer by Lewis Packwood and Weil’s MA thesis. This lack of content succinctly illustrates the conflict at the center of coverage for it, what Weil calls “authoritative language of gaming expertise to conceal gender-based criticism.”10 This language frames the console’s archive, as in YouTuber Ashens’s video dedicated to unboxing, playing, and mocking the Loopy.11 Similarly, retrogaming blog Racketboy relegates the Loopy to “an interesting oddity and side attraction” supposedly notable for its “lavender, pink, and purple color scheme,”12 while RF Generation more harshly assesses that, “While the system claims uses [sic] 32-bit RISC processing, it appears technically unimpressive due to the nature of the software available.”13 The same entry continues, “the Loopy game library is almost a joke in itself … painting, dress-up/makeover, and romance stories are all that were offered,”14 disparaging language unfortunately reiterated as primary source material in the Loopy’s record at the Museum of Obsolete Media.15 Even perhaps the most public-facing piece written about the Loopy to date, Packwood’s aforementioned article, follows this genre of criticism. Packwood decides the Loopy “isn’t particularly good” in the first sentence of his article, a position supported by interviews with some of the console’s engineers, and YouTuber Octav1us who has researched it for her channel.16 His angle on the console, however, at least indulges what could have been great about it, suggesting that, “as a collection of ideas, it’s fascinating, a ragtag novelty that may well have been ahead of its time if it wasn’t so scatty.”17 “Fascinating,” sure, but Packwood’s choice of words such as novelty and scatty engender skepticism.
More fascinating is to take the Loopy at face value as an important digital and print artifact of feminist media history. Weil takes this very “feminist, critical design approach” in her own appraisal of the Loopy within her larger thesis “offering visions of girly retro game culture” (emphasis in original).18 For Weil, curation of the Casio Loopy collection stands out as a perfect representation of her overall aim “to promote the idea of a game culture in which femininity and girlhood are situated as norms rather than aberrations.”19 This reimagined game culture works against “the unquestioned ‘us’”20 who gatekeep retro game nostalgia in ways that shut projects like the Loopy out of the narrative. This “‘us,’” Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux argue, is “historical, geographical, and gendered,” reflecting “an aesthetic paradigm based on the history of North American men growing up in the 80s and 90s.”21 Weil volunteers that she was born in 1984 but remembers the history of video games quite differently: “the arcades seemed to belong to boys, as did video-game consoles. Television and print advertisements for NES [Nintendo Entertainment System] games made this clear, alternatingly taking place in boys’ bedrooms, war zones, and smoky warehouses” (emphasis in original).22 To facilitate a more generatively girly game history that revalues the Loopy, the FEMICOM’s “About” description calls for the “preservation and reimagination of ... the aesthetics of cute within twentieth-century video games.”23
For this reparative rupture, the Loopy’s cuteness becomes crucial. In Our Aesthetic Categories, Sianne Ngai posits what’s compelling about “cute.” She claims upfront that cute as an “aesthetic category[y], for all [its] marginality to aesthetic theory” is one of those “in our current repertoire best suited for grasping how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism.”24 Ngai particularly conflates cute with consumption, calling it “an aesthetic disclosing the surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression, that we harbor toward ostensibly subordinate and unthreatening commodities.”25 As for another wrinkle within that range, feelings for the category of cute are “significantly mediated by gender, sexuality, and class.”26
The Loopy as a “cute” console bears the brunt of a gendered critique that more obfuscates than observes. Such mediation is exactly what Weil works to unveil and undo in her championing of the Loopy against consumerist success stories dependent on domestic sales to justify international release.27 In her account of encountering the Loopy, she reports: “I discovered that much of what I had read online about the Loopy was inaccurate. As evidenced by the proliferation of misleading information such as a photograph in which the Loopy console appears purple (it is, in fact, gray), individuals’ expectations about what a girls’ console is or does can supersede direct observation, especially when that observation is made difficult by factors such as rarity and language barriers” (emphasis in original).28 The observations Weil addresses border on, if not outright aggression, neglect in the realm of video games—at least according to westernized notions. Weil suggests that “it is debatable whether Japanese games featuring cute art styles and female playable characters such as Hello Kitty and Sailor Moon were ‘just for girls’ or if such assumptions arise from incorrectly mapping American views of femininity onto Japanese artifacts.”29 Consider, as crucial counterpoint, Mizuko Ito’s clarification that, in Japan, “‘kawaii culture is not as strongly ghettoized as just for young girls’ but is enjoyed by boys and girls alike.”30 Treating kawaii critically as its own aesthetic category loaded into the Casio Loopy console should deconstruct and differently appreciate its allegedly true story on paper about the gendering of play in game history.
Console, Sticker Maker, and/or Both?
Getting the allegedly true story on the Loopy is a matter of collating what little facts there seem to be available. The Loopy was not Casio’s first foray into the video game console market, but it was certainly their strangest. According to Packwood, the Casio engineers he got in contact with “weren’t able to find exact figures for how many units the Loopy sold in its lifetime: the nearest they could come up with was a press release issued in 1995 that says the expected first year’s production would be 200,000 units. Whether that many consoles were actually made—and how many were eventually sold—is anyone’s guess.”31 The Loopy’s life cycle from there is basically lost to time, as attention spans in the games market shifted to 3D; software development for it ceased in 1996, new game releases in 1997, and hardware production in 1998.32 Tragically, the Loopy’s turmoil is arguably a result of bad timing. It came out one year after the Sony PlayStation with the same 32-bit processing power as the Sega Genesis 32X modeled after the performance of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). That last facet may be what made the Loopy’s downfall so steep. As Dominic Arsenault controversially argues, the SNES actually represented “a conservative cement that resisted game genre experimentation” in the face of a shifting games market.33 Cement for the SNES precipitously became quicksand for the Loopy, as Casio focused their energies on eventually repetitive titles that ran the console’s central gimmick clean out of sticker paper.
The unique selling point of the Loopy’s thermal printer is honestly its undisputed best, regrettably undergirded by other features that only got in its way. Even the more skeptical critics intent on making fun of it admit that its printing functionality is impressive; before and unlike the Game Boy Printer, the Loopy allowed full color prints of rich and relatively consistent quality (fig. 3).
Figure 3
Sticker paper and refills for the Loopy’s thermal printer. (Image courtesy of Rachel Simone Weil, Casio Loopy Collection (archived), FEMICOM Museum, https://archive.vn/20130905030011/http://loopy.femicom.org/)
Each game for the Loopy allowed players to maximize this feature by creating their own adhesive scenes, and the aforementioned Magical Shop attachment only multiplied its possibilities. In the ways that it enabled players to “add text and graphics to still images from TV and film,” the Loopy became “basically ... a meme generator long before memes became widespread.”34 But innovation in 1995 did not come cheap: on top of the ¥25,000 (about $234 at the time) price tag of the system itself, the Magical Shop attachment was another ¥14,800, not to mention the regular costs of more sticker paper refills. Further beyond prohibitive costs were design features that literally won no friends: a controller with an amorphous D-pad for muddy directionality, a nonintuitively arranged button layout, and a single controller port for it.35 Just as solitary was the interchangeable mouse designed very much after the model of Nintendo’s Mario Paint (1992). Octav1us paints the picture for us: “It’s a very lonely console, you know? It feels sad. With [Purikura] you have that public aspect. It’s not just you, by yourself, sat in a room printing out stickers. How sad is that?”36 Of course, what she and others have insisted is that two players probably wouldn’t want to try many Loopy games anyway.
The Loopy’s library is a fascinating collection of promising and frustrating games that largely point to what could have been. According to the Loopy’s engineers, the “console for girls” approach was more discovered than designed:
“People say the Loopy targeted girls, but when we started development of the game console, that was not our intention. However, because many girls liked to play with stickers, and the fact that the Casio electronic personal organizer for children was popular with early teen girls, the first-released software titles included Animelando, which allowed users to design and print girl anime characters, HARIHARI Seal Paradise, which let users coordinate cute animal characters and make one-of-a-kind stickers, and the Wan Wan Aijo Monogatari [Bow Wow Puppy Love Story] role-playing game in which users nurture puppies and clear growth stages to get stickers; the collected stickers would make a story book. Thus, the sales strategy ended up as being targeted at girls when the console was launched.”37
Casio’s marketing campaign for the Loopy feels both refreshingly celebratory of gameplay for girls and yet achingly cynical as a game ploy for their gap in the market (fig. 4). Games for the Loopy only further complicate this contention in the contradictory ways they tell unapologetically girly stories but often confine them to game mechanics that make the system feel like “‘pretty much a sticker maker which was marketed as a console.’”38
Figure 4
Original promotional material for the Casio Loopy and game title Little Romance. (Image courtesy EmuMovies, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvYg-vZ639o)
Ten titles plus the Magical Shop screen capture device were released for the Loopy during its two-year production run. In many of these games, the player occupies a more passive role similar to those found in dating simulators, point-and-click adventures, and visual novels. Printer integration falls somewhere between the business/productivity applications that defined console printers in the 1980s, and the playful iterations on later Nintendo consoles. The printer, and the pleasures of printing and cutting stickers, serves as the central reward for completing many of the challenges found within each game. Like the Game Boy Printer, printing in many graphics design games including HARIHARI Seal Paradise, Anime Land, and Lupiton’s Wonder Palette (all 1995) invites players to create stickers with predesigned art assets. In these games, gameplay primarily occurs by navigating and selecting icon and text choices in a menu to display predrawn pictures, causing changes and animations in the game scene, or cuing dialogue from a virtual assistant. Here, printing serves as a way of memorializing the labor of play, the meaning of which transforms with each game (fig. 5).
Figure 5
Four out of the eleven available Loopy games. (Image courtesy of Quang Nguyen, in Lewis Packwood, “In the Loopy: The Story of Casio’s Crazy 90s Console, Eurogamer , July 15, 2018, https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-15-in-the-loopy-the-story-of-casios-crazy-90s-console)
Anime Land, for example, allows the player to design and customize the appearance of characters and animals. While Anime Land mimics the visual style of certain Shōjo manga from the period, its character customization presents a depth and degree unseen in many other games at the time of its launch. Details such as adjusting eye color and hair length, for example, would not become key options within digital games until several years later. Anime Land, in fact, gave players the ability to design themselves entirely from scratch, a central pleasure of many games today beyond what other titles of the time could then promise.
While this and many of the other titles for the console may not present radical reimaginings of gender norms, they do prominently interface with the cultural expectations facing teenage girls and even present opportunities for responding to these expectations. In Little Romance (1996), we are treated to a traditional dating sim-style game in which the player follows several romantic interests over the course of the plot. In addition to moving each scene forward, players can also choose to print scenes to preserve key moments within the game’s narrative arc. Bow-wow Puppy Love Story (1995) shifts this formula by adapting the dialogue-driven gameplay of Little Romance to brief navigational sections in which the player can walk through various environments and interact with the objects therein to find stickers that can be made into a storybook (fig. 6).
Figure 6
In-game screenshot from Bow Wow Puppy Love Story. (Image courtesy of Rachel Simone Weil, Casio Loopy Collection (archived), FEMICOM Museum, https://archive.vn/20130905030011/http://loopy.femicom.org/)
Finally, I Want a Room in Loopy Town! (1995) combines elements from other titles on the Loopy into an Animal Crossing-esque interior-design game that tasks the player with decorating their room, keeping a part-time job, and assisting with the needs of various townsfolk. Unfortunately, information on printer integration in this last title is scant. Nevertheless, every one of these titles presents us with a picture, on thermal sticker paper, of play otherwise in games for girls in a history that should include them, too, and almost did with the Loopy.
Back in the Loop: Receptions, Reflections, and Continuations (Not Conclusions)
The console’s impact on players and its target market at time of launch is difficult to estimate given the lack of documentation and continued neglect by current mainstream publications and news sites. But this neglect, what Nooney might classify as a part of the how and why of doing history,39 can tell us much about the Loopy’s impact and legacy. In terms of its reception by audiences at launch, we can only (unfortunately) speculate on the situation by examining these limits. Although Casio struggled to enter the computer market, the successes of their handheld consoles and consumer electronics in the 1980s eventually led them to bridge both markets together with gaming watches and calculators that could play games.40 Following their popular Digital Assistant device, Casio achieved success with girls and women from a “Diary” version that included many features also found on handheld consoles at the time. These records suggest that the Loopy was in a position to succeed like those Casio devices before it. At this point, however, records begin to fray and vanish, leaving us to speculation. While we might blame the Loopy’s life span on hardware and software alone, it is also likely that it was simply neglected by gaming outlets and enthusiast historians that implicitly favored specific kinds of games, gaming devices, and gaming history. Given that more extensive records exist for equally obscure and even less successful consoles like the Bandai Pippin, it remains difficult to say whether the Loopy’s alleged failure was simply a result of bad software and poor support, or if it was the product of the gendered infrastructure that dictates gaming history, preservation practices, and the individuals carrying out this work.
Is the Casio Loopy, then, a failed video game console of strange and frustrating promise, or a console failed by the promise of video game history? Its strangeness bears feminist and queer potentiality that bolsters our argument elsewhere that paying attention to all the ways that players interface with the logics of print media in digital games creates opportunities for “us to reject limited conceptions of gamic action and participate in a more playful queering.”41 As the digital game incites the direct output of print media in the case of the Loopy, the subversion of both gaming history and the space of digital play game feels immediately material, turning action inside out. Less becomes more, as passive play in the Loopy yields artifacts of action out of the Loopy. When young Japanese girls make their own comic book out of adhesive scenes from Bow Wow Puppy Love Story, who’s to say they aren’t playing? Less generous questions than this one dog Casio’s console across the years, across the Pacific it never officially crossed, across two widely different cultural contexts. Is it just a sticker maker? Are its games even games? Why care now about a casualty of the console wars that’s no more than a footnoted failure in game history? Because the Loopy is more than that. By presenting the story of its failure as one to learn from, we argue that game studies can do better than to begrudgingly bemoan the history of video games as one designed for and by boys and men. Our speleological approach to the Loopy attempts to reframe that history by printing the Loopy as a moment when the silent history of women in video games disrupted how we had and have understood the historic record. By forcing the issue of recognizing girls and women as a significant part of the gaming market, we can use the Loopy to rethink other consoles, such as the Nintendo DS and Wii, as continuations of the Loopy’s gendered legacy and succeeding because they directly included these audiences.
The Loopy has played a significant role in attempts at recovering the presence of girls and women in gaming and feminist archival projects, such as the FEMICOM Museum. Moreover, the Loopy’s controversial attempt to appeal to girls and women, a demographic of players always present but often ignored at both its time of launch and in the continued writing of gaming history, might be seen as a shaky but necessary step toward handhelds and consoles like the Nintendo DS and Wii, which succeeded precisely because they acknowledged these overlooked players. Massively successful games like Nintendogs, Animal Crossing, Art Academy, Brain Age, and others share much in common with the experimental software lineup that accompanied the Loopy at launch. These popular titles and consoles are, too, a part of the continued reception to the Loopy, perhaps inviting us then to see the Loopy’s reception as ongoing rather than settled, one that invites us to loop back into the past and rethink gender in video game history.
Footnotes
1. ^ Lewis Packwood, “In the Loopy: The Story of Casio’s Crazy 90s Console,” Eurogamer, last modified July 15, 2018, https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-15-in-the-loopy-the-story-of-casios-crazy-90s-console.
2. ^ Octav1us, “CASIO LOOPY REVIEW—WORST CONSOLE EVER?,” June 29, 2018, YouTube video, 15:03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=777tQ5Xguak.
3. ^ Rachel Simone Weil, email with author, February 23, 2020.
4. ^ Weil, email with author.
5. ^ Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xiii.
6. ^ Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces.
7. ^ Laine Nooney, “A Pedestal, a Table, a Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History,” Game Studies 13, no. 2 (2013), http://gamestudies.org/1302/articles/nooney.
8. ^ Nooney, “A Pedestal, a Table.”
9. ^ Nooney
10. ^ Weil, “No Bad Memories: A Feminist, Critical Design Approach to Video Game Histories” (master’s thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2014), 27.
11. ^ Ashens, “Casio Loopy Review | Ashens,” April 8, 2017, YouTube video, 20:33, https://youtu.be/PNWGVtwTkiM.
12. ^ Ack, “Casio Loopy 101: 32-Bit Japanese Console for Girls,” Retrogaming with Racketboy (blog), last modified August 9, 2017, http://www.racketboy.com/retro/casio-loopy-101-32-bit-japanese-console-for-girls.
13. ^ OatBob, “Girly Console Review: Casio Loopy—My Seal Computer SV-1000,” RF Generation, last modified November 17, 2007, http://www.rfgeneration.com/news/classic-gaming/System-Overview-Casio-Loopy-My-Seal-Computer-362.php.
14. ^ OatBob, “Girly Console Review.”
15. ^ Jason Curtis, “Casio Loopy (1995–1997),” accessed October 21, 2019, https://obsoletemedia.org/casio-loopy/.
16. ^ Packwood, “In the Loopy.”
17. ^ Packwood.
18. ^ Weil, “No Bad Memories,” 15.
19. ^ Weil, 15.
20. ^ Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 32.
21. ^ Boluk and LeMieux, Metagaming, 32.
22. ^ Weil, “No Bad Memories,” 1.
23. ^ Rachel Simone Weil, “About FEMICOM,” FEMICOM Museum, accessed October 21, 2019, http://femicom.org/about/.
24. ^ Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 1.
25. ^ Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 1.
26. ^ Ngai, 1.
27. ^ Weil, “No Bad Memories,” 26–27.
28. ^ Weil, 27.
29. ^ Weil, 28.
30. ^ Mizuko Ito, “The Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix,” in Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming, ed. Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Y. Sun (2008; Boston: MIT Press, 2011), quoted in Weil, “No Bad Memories,” 29.
31. ^ Packwood, “In the Loopy.”
32. ^ Packwood.
33. ^ Dominic Arsenault, Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 3.
34. ^ Packwood, “In the Loopy.”
35. ^ Ashens, “Casio Loopy Review.”
36. ^ Packwood, “In the Loopy.”
37. ^ Packwood.
38. ^ Packwood.
39. ^ Nooney, “A Pedestal, a Table.”
40. ^ Video Game Kraken, “Loopy by Casio,” The Video Game Kraken, accessed February 13, 2020, http://videogamekraken.com/casio-loopy.
41. ^ Kyle Bohunicky and Caleb Andrew Milligan, “Reading, Writing, Lexigraphing: Active Passivity as Queer Play in Walking Simulators,” Press Start 5, no. 2 (2019): 51.
The Casio Loopy video game console. (Image courtesy of Quang Nguyen, in Lewis Packwood, “In the Loopy: The Story of Casio’s Crazy 90s Console, Eurogamer , July 15, 2018, https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-15-in-the-loopy-the-story-of-casios-crazy-90s-console)