Bryan Smith

B3
2/16/16

Rhetorical analysis
Final Draft
NO GIRLS ALLOWED
The article No Girls Allowed, written by Tracey Lien, addresses the issue of video game
stereotyping. The article is very well written and does a fine job of pulling the reader in by
demonstrating how video game designers have changed their design and marketing strategy to
focus on boys rather than girls. This paper will highlight how Lien used the rhetorical devices of
ethos, pathos and logos to illustrate her point and make an emotional connection with the reader..
Ethos is the literary device that authors like Lien have used in any form of writing, it
focuses on when the author quotes a credible source or person to prove their point. In No Girls
Allowed, Lien quotes people that seem to be professionals in fields they major in. In the
beginnings of her article, Lien explains a marketing technique used by Coors to prove how
marketing can affect the global Status quo. Coors decided it would differentiate itself from its
competition by owning "cold," she says, so that when people think of "ice-cold beer," they think
Coors. It was Coors that said, 'We are the coldest of the cold... "So it actually does a really great
job on two levels," she says. "It convinces you that you need to have a cold beer, and you
actually think this product is superior because it doesn't taste as bad as the competitor, which is
slightly warmer." In this segment of the paper, new concepts are presented to the reader such as
COORS cold beer campaign. Without the viability of these sources that the authors quotes

throughout the paper, the reader could end up doubting the legitimacy of the article itself, this is
why when mentioning a female designer from the industry, she is introduced like so, Game
designer Brenda Laurel started her career at Atari and Activision as a programmer and producer.
She later founded Purple Moon, a studio dedicated to making games for girls, before it was
bought out by Mattel. She says the studios she worked for assumed a male audience, even though
there was no demographic subtlety. Just based off the previous successes of this designer gives
her viability to talk about being a female game designer trying to create games for a nonexistent
market. So all together the author uses this rhetorical device to prove certain concepts like the
Coors marketing strategy by quoting credible people that know more on these topics or ideas.
Logos is the rhetorical device that uses logic to prove an idea. Logos seems to be this
article's main rhetorical device Lien uses is logos. Most of Article is very informational by telling
the reader about the history of gaming itself and why the industry had to focus down on one
market; Lien starts off by informing the reader on the gaming industry's past. This is important
because now Lien can use that new information to support her claim. "Knowing that you have
limited funding, you can't just market shotgun. You can't just go after anybody," says Rodger
Roeser. "You need to have a very clearly differentiated and specific brand because that's going
to play into where you're running your ads and what kind of ads you run. Since the reader was

informed about the video game crash and how the industry was revived; Lien was able to
logically show why the industry had to focus on the majority market which was boys. Another
way the article uses logos is through the explanation and convincing of another marketing
strategy that was used, The industry did the math. Companies like Nintendo aggressively
sought out people who played their games. It began publishing its own video game magazine,
Nintendo Power, which had enormous outreach and allowed the company to communicate with

its customers. Lien used both ethos which was the credibility of Nintendo, and logos which was

the methods of seeking out the players who played their games like Nintendo Power. This
allowed Lien to prove why the industry focused so much on the younger male demographic after
the rebirth of the gaming industry.
Although it is not as prominent in this article, pathos has a huge role in how Lien pulls on
the reader's heart strings. The most effective pathos found in the article focuses on two things,
the programming of the consumers mind, and unequal male and female player markets. Lien uses
the example in the beginning of the article to enrage the reader towards the idea that large
corporate companies use marketing methods that reprogram how we view certain things, that
marketing is so powerful that it can shape our values and beliefs, and we're often not even
aware that it's happening. Coca-Cola's marketing campaigns in the 1920s are the reason why
the modern-day image of Santa Claus is a jovial, plump man in a Coca-Cola Red suit. When

the reader realizes that something as iconic as Santa Claus has been so drastically been affected
by a company Lies can use those emotions to prove her point on how marketing strategies can
affect how people view certain things. The other major pathos device is the unequal marketing
between male and female players "Generally speaking, it did not occur to any of the companies
I worked for that they should be looking at female audiences for games," she says. "It was
always, 'Oh of course girls don't play games.' I got that so many times. 'Of course girls don't play
games, why are we going to waste money on this audience that doesn't exist? Lien uses this

situation to affect the reader emotionally because of the inequality of the situation. The way the
idea of making a game based on a female gaming audience was treated brings the same feeling
of outrage as the first example. Lien used this situation to show how unbalanced the gaming

industry appears to be when talking about a female audience for video games. This allowed Lien
to tie into her next topic.
Throughout No Girls Allowed, Tracey Lien uses the rhetorical devices quite well in the
situations they are placed in. The author was able to use logos, ethos, and pathos together to
create a well-designed article about video game marketing. She used logos to explain to the
reader how the industry ended up focusing on one market for games by telling the history of
gaming so she could prove why the industry focused down on one market. The use of ethos was
used to make the article overall more credible by quoting people from the actual fields. And
finally pathos was to use the reader's emotion to prove the inequality of marketing in video
games and the way people view the medium all together.