Redheads and conservative messaging in mobile games

I want to preface this one with an “it probably isn’t this serious”. This isn’t a callout for mobile games, and it’s mostly just a convention. But it’s a pattern I’ve noticed.

As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, mobile games often come with a similar premise. For whatever reason, you have access to a mansion, and you’re responsible for fixing up its grounds or interior. And also the main character or the most important person in their life (and the most prominent in the advertising for the game) is a redheaded woman.

Between Lily (Lily’s Garden), Maddie (Merge Mansion), Katherine (Gardenscapes/Homescapes), Penny (Penny & Flo), and Ruby (Magicabin), I feel like I see a redhead everywhere I look when it comes to mobile games. And sure, redheads are generally over represented in media, with red hair being a popular shorthand for a character who isn’t like, popular, but also isn’t like, too weird. You know. Your average Lindsay Lohan protagonist. A redheaded girl tells you everything you need to know about a character at a glance. She’s desirable but she’s not trying too hard. She’s not too bookish but she also isn’t stupid. Most importantly, she’s up for adventure! Blondes, brunettes, black haired girls, they could have any personality. A redhead, now that’s obvious. She’s just right.

But what has that got to do with conservatism? It’s just tropey writing, right? So, yeah. Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s just that I watched too much Glee as a teenager and it made me weirdly conscious of a prevalence of redheaded people in media despite the fact they make up between 1-2% of the world’s population. But you have to admit, when you add in the conspicuous access the redheads in these games have to mansions, and to secrets hidden by “explorers” and entrepreneurs from the early 1900s and earlier, you may think “hang on, are we just playing games about how cool it is to have old money and be of European descent?”

And around the time you start renovating your third mansion in a game you’re going to think. Hang on. Yeah, we definitely are doing that. It reminds me of cottagecore, a little. As we’ve mostly all heard by now, the cottagecore trend relies on erasing the realities of settler colonialism to create an idyllic aesthetic. Likewise, these mansion renovation games with their redheaded and adventurous heroines are presenting this idyllic world where things that are older are better, and that the diaries and dramas left behind by those who built mansions are of inherent value.

While the past is always useful to study, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s always worth framing and displaying the work of Victorian era Anthropologists the way Gardenscapes and Homescapes seem to think is fun and cool*. I probably also wouldn’t go planting just any flowers I think are pretty in a nature reserve in the Californian hills like Lily’s Garden does (I’ll never be over the reuse of assets that resulted in a suggestion to plant hibiscus in the third storyline because I’m petty.)

Like I said at the beginning - It’s probably not that deep!

But I can’t help but think - why are there so many iterations of this story? Why redheads? Why mansions? Why the recurring themes of royals and inheritances? Instead of refurbishing a massive old house’s rooms into shrines to their former owners, can I pretty please turn it into affordable housing or a community centre? Or would that bring down the neighbourhood property values?

*I could do a whole breakdown of the racism Gardenscapes and Homescapes manage with some of their characters and locations, but I’m not replaying the games for screenshot evidence, and it’s pretty hard to get it online. What I will say is, the level of Orientalism in these games is shocking.