When I was in year 6, I had a Tamagotchi and a Digimon. I loved both, the Tamagotchi was cute but the Digimon was cool. Those terms seemed mutually exclusive. I once had a fight with a boy I sat next to in class because ‘the Digimon is for boys’. I nearly hit him.

‘I have both. I’ll play with whatever I want.’

I wanted the best of both worlds, I wanted cute and cool. Why should I have to choose? It was seemingly impossible for an eleven year old girl to find something that catered to both desires. Cute things were too kiddy, and cool things were always solely aimed at boys or girls much older. I got really suckered into everything Pokémon because the characters went on fun adventures and there were some cute Pokémon, but also some very cool ones.

For Christmas that year, all I wanted was a clear Gameboy Color and a copy of Pokémon Gold. I got what I wanted. A couple of weeks earlier even, because my mother used it to bribe me into coming along with her when she left my father that holiday. I poured all my attention into Pokémon Gold the entire coach up to what was supposedly our grandma’s place up in Brisbane. I got so into the game that I almost didn’t care when the bus stopped in Tamworth and my mother took my brother and I to a Women’s Refuge. We spent the first Christmas of the decade in what was essentially a welfare complex full of other split families. I hated it, I’d fight with my brother all the time. The place always smelled like cheap cleaning chemicals. But I had my Gameboy. I focused all my energy onto that.

There was one thing that really bugged me about the game. I could name my character whatever I wanted, but I was always going to be a boy. I named my character Angel because I was eleven and I thought that was super cool. I just pretended my character was a girl.

A few months later, I ended up moving back with my father after my twelfth birthday. I went to the high school I was originally planning on going to, but all of my primary school friends had moved on. It was pretty tough, and I got bullied a lot. People thought it was really immature of me to still play video games and watch anime. I guess you could chalk it up to the intense desire to seem grown up when you’re bottom of the food chain in high school for the first time. I still didn’t care, I had my Gameboy. Now I had Pokémon Red and Pokémon Pinball. I even got a Pocket Pikachu Color for my birthday. I didn’t care if I didn’t really make any friends.

The one benefit of moving back with my father was getting to move back to the same house. As an Air Force brat, we’d moved around quite a bit already and I was pretty keen for some stability (jokes on me, I didn’t get that well until my teens and even then…ugh). The kids in my street, who were about my brother’s age still wanted to hang out. So I’d hang out with a bunch of eight year olds after school and play Pokémon together. One of the boys got a copy of Pokémon Crystal. He told me you could play as a girl. I got very excited, but my father refused to buy me what was essentially a second copy of Gold. So I borrowed my friend’s copy.

When Professor Oak shows up in the introduction and asks ‘Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?’ – I almost had butterflies in my stomach. I can’t even remember what I named my character, I was so excited. The gender didn’t really change the game at all, but it was so exciting to see ‘she’ instead of ‘he’. The game felt more personal.

For Christmas of 2001, my father bought me a copy of The Sims. I knew a few kids at school had mentioned it, but it didn’t really seem like my kind of thing. He said it was really popular, so I gave it a shot. I hadn’t expected the customisation to be so immense, sure I expected to be able to change furniture but almost everything could be tailored to my style! So I made my dream house, and made myself because who doesn’t make themselves in The Sims? I was a cool career gal in a one bedroom house with a chunky grey computer and flamingos on the lawn. I had a pool. I accidentally drowned one of my friends in it. We had a real life fight about it. I thought it was dumb.

Over the next few years, I kind of fell out of playing games and fell into that deep downward spiral of everything Japanese. It kind of went like this

Anime/Manga fan sites

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Anime internet radio

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J-pop

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J-rock

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Visual Kei

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FRUiTS magazine/Japanese street style

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Japanese fashion

I have two main vices. Video games and clothes. They are both expensive, and sometimes I have to choose one or the other. Clothes usually win, because they’re somewhat more practical. In late high school, at the height of my Japanese fashion phase, I wasn’t allowed to shop online. So I had to make do with what I could find in markets or second hand stores to try and emulate the colourful vintage styles. It was pretty tragic in hindsight. But high school is the time to look like an absolute fucking idiot, so I can look back on my self-cut layers and pastel/rainbow combo outfits with a bit of wistfulness.

When I got out of high school, I was soon faced with the dilemma of choosing a different outfit every dang day. It got overwhelming real quick. I stocked up on a lot of Vinnies clothes my first year of college, and did some kind of Mod/late 80s mall mom kind of thing that probably didn’t work as well as I thought it did at the time. It was also the year that my friends bought me a pink DS Lite and Animal Crossing. I wasn’t so into cute stuff any more, but I got right into it. I loved designing outfits with the Able Sisters, buying cute furniture for my house and planting flowers all around town. It was a slightly more involved experience than The Sims and I enjoyed it all that much more.

But I found that playing it on the train garnered some unwanted attention. High school boys would look over my shoulder and ask why I was playing a kids game, why I had a pink DS, why I had a DS at all if I wasn’t going to play ‘real’ games. I’d roll my eyes and turn back to my friendly animal neighbours. Why should I have to justify that?

It made me self-conscious, and eventually I was mad at my friend for buying a pink DS rather than a white or black one.

‘But you like pink! Your phone is covered in rhinestones! It’s totally you!’

I reluctantly agreed. It was cute. I was kind of a girly girl. So why did I get so embarrassed when I had it out on the train? It was no different from having my ridiculously sparkly phone out. So I swallowed my pride, bought a copy of Resident Evil DS and smirked every time someone would look over my shoulder expecting Cooking Mama. I liked Cooking Mama too, of course. But it was incredibly satisfying to juxtapose the femininity of a pink console with zombie head shots. I finally had cute and cool.

There was a game I found by chance, only because I had sometimes looked at the Japanese Nintendo website for upcoming DS games. It was Wagamama Fashion Girls Mode. You might know it as Style Savvy or Style Boutique. I’m gonna call it Style Savvy, on account of its US popularity over PAL markets. Just like Hotel Dusk, you held the DS like a notebook. This was a pretty common feature in a lot of girl-orientated DS games. You designed your player character, you opened a boutique and served customers. The goal was to become the world’s top stylist.

I can’t do this game justice. It’s incredibly addictive. There are over 10,000 items of clothing from dresses to boots, jeans to leg warmers. Style Savvy covered a huge range of fashion sub-cultures, and mirrored real world brands. You had Elegant Gothic Lolita, punk, Gyaru, boho…the list goes on. You could mix and match to your heart’s content. While customers might not always like your Stevie Nicks inspired gothic boho getup, nothing stopped you from putting it on a mannequin and having a random customer coming into your store excitedly asking to buy the whole thing.

It was exactly the kind of game that I was secretly trying to get away from. While I was playing ‘real’ games like Metal Gear and Resident Evil on my other consoles, I was trying to hide whenever I played Style Savvy because it was almost too girly. It was like playing with paper dolls. I was nineteen. How the hell I was I going to explain this to my friends? I didn’t want to lose my cred. So I’d roll my eyes at ‘girl games’ and tried to play only core games.

In 2013, I started working in games retail again after a long stint in apparel. It was a relief, to be honest. But I’d fallen out of touch with portable consoles, since I had never bothered to upgrade my DS when the 3DS came out and my PSP still kind of worked. When we were unpacking the stock for the new store, it dawned upon me that Style Savvy: Trendsetters had been released without my knowledge. HANDBAGS? YOU COULD DECORATE YOUR APARTMENT? MENS CLOTHES? Fuck, the new Style Savvy had it all! We had to write short reviews for the shelves. I wrote one for Style Savvy: Trendsetters. Some people at work laughed at me.

‘Ugh, really?’

‘Dude, you’re missing out…it’s a legit good game. Well the first one is at least. But this one HAS HANDBAGS MAN.’

They’d shrug their shoulders and leave me alone.

See, a funny thing happened with DS games like Animal Crossing and Style Savvy. Men played them. They realised they weren’t just quick pink dollar cash-ins. But the men who played them would be like ‘bro, this game TOTALLY isn’t for me but it’s a really good business sim ok’. They’d have to justify why they played it. Suddenly I didn’t feel so bad. You really shouldn’t have to justify playing anything. Play what you fucking want.

I soon picked up a black 3DS and Style Savvy: Trendsetters and spent all weekend playing it. I won all the fashion contests, I was the fashion champion or whatever. I got the crown. I was the most stylish. But then it felt a little repetitive, so my 3DS gathered dust until Animal Crossing New Leaf came out and the cycle repeated itself. Then I realised I only bought a 3DS for casual ‘girl’ games, and I was ok with that. It wasn’t intentional, but I just didn’t enjoy the core games that were being released for the platform. I preferred playing stuff like that on my TV.

When Tomodachi Life came out last year, I tried to get all my friends onto it to no avail. It wasn’t explicitly marketed to girls, but the very idea of a simulation game comes across as rather feminine. So I settled for making all my friend’s Miis come and live in my wacky apartment. I made Tim and Eric Miis, I made the main casts of Seinfeld, Saved By the Bell and Final Fantasy VIII. Oh and I chucked Danny DeVito in there for good measure.

I loved Tomodachi Life, I spent more time playing it in the first month of release than I had ever spent playing Animal Crossing. It was mainly because there’s a lot of mundane activities and waiting for requests from Miis. It wasn’t super customisable, but I enjoyed the Wario Ware­-esque wackiness of it. But eventually, the simulation game cycle continued and I got a little tired of my Miis asking me the same questions all the time.

But don’t worry, Girl’s Mode 3 Kirakira Co-de just came out in Japan. Now I just have to decide if I’ll buy a Japanese 3DS to play it or wait for the localisation. You might think that sounds crazy, but if I had said that about Xenoblade Chronicles, would it make it any more legitimate? I don’t think so.

BONUS TIME: Here’s the compatibility rating for George Costanza and I.