Picture, if you will, a typical open-world action-adventure game. Imagine a game that has players blasting monsters with magic, platforming around ruined architecture, and delving into a wealth of scattered lore. When you close your eyes, what does the protagonist of that game look like? What is their personality? How do they dress? If you’ve played a game that fits this description in the past, I’d bet that the first image that comes to your mind isn’t a plucky, pink-haired teenage girl with a heart of gold and a great sense for fashion.
That’s exactly what you get with the deceptively radical Infinity Nikki. Developed by Infold Games, Infinity Nikki is the latest installment in the Nikki franchise, a series of free mobile dress-up games that has players creating outfits for its titular hero. The series is a secret powerhouse, racking in tens of millions of active players despite not carrying the mainstream name recognition of Mario or Call of Duty. Much of that is thanks to its popularity with women, who have long flocked to a game that embraces femininity in a medium that has historically shied away from it.
With Infinity Nikki, Infold Games reshaped its winning mobile formula into a full-scale open-world game. It was an immediate hit when it launched in December 2024, quickly amassing over 20 million downloads in its first week — and all without sacrificing its feminine spirit. Now, its success raises a question for the video game industry: Why did it take so long for a game like this to exist when there was such a large audience for something like it? That question opens an interrogation into who games are made for, and how Infinity Nikki cuts against the grain.
Genre and gender
If you were to judge by traditional studies on genre and gaming, you could reasonably come to the conclusion that Infinity Nikki would be a risky financial move. Several research studies through gaming’s history have suggested that women aren’t drawn to games like it as much as men are. In a 2017 study, Quantic Foundry analyzed survey data from over 270,000 gamers to map out genre preferences between men and women. The study found that men accounted for 82% of action-adventure players and 86% of open-world players. A statistic like that might lead one to believe that a game like Infinity Nikki would have a fairly low ceiling when it comes to player base. That wasn’t the case.
Is that proof that research studies like this have been operating on flawed data for decades? Not exactly. At the time, Quantic Foundry acknowledged that the opportunity for games to break from that data was larger 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.”
It’s through that caveat by which we can identify a self-fulfilling cycle that’s long dominated the video game industry, one that Infinity Nikki breaks free from. Surveys and player data have long led us to believe that some games are for “boys” and others are for “girls.” That has been reinforced by design decisions that gender the games we play, whether consciously or subconsciously.
We can look to Laura Mulvey’s theory of the “male gaze” to explain that phenomenon. Though originally coined to dissect cinema’s biases, Mulvey’s critiques echo through modern video games. In her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey explores the subtle ways in which films assume that the viewer on the other end of the projector is male. It’s not just in the way women are sexualized on screen, but in who drives the action, how the camera frames subjects, and how archetypes reinforce status quo gender dynamics. These same concepts can be applied to video games, but shaped around the distinct traits of an interactive medium.
Breaking barriers
You can begin to see what makes Infinity Nikki different when looking at its protagonist, who is unique for a production of this scale. Video game history is filled with female heroes, though they’ve often fallen into a few different boxes built for a male gaze. In her 2013 video series Tropes vs Women in Video Games, Anita Sarkeesian identifies a range of recurring archetypes from the damsel in distress to the “Ms. Male Character.” More studios have moved to remedy that in the past decade, but even well-meaning attempts risk teetering into reversed tropes that reject femininity to make female characters feel like “one of the guys.”
Infinity Nikki avoids that trap. Nikki is the rare video game heroine who is allowed to be compassionate and joyful, while still commanding respect from the inhabitants of Miraland. She’s every bit as powerful as a gun-toting badass like Bayonetta or Lara Croft, but able to intimidate imposing thugs just by dressing them down with her words. Most crucially, she’s proudly fashionable. As the lead of a dress-up game built around crafting outfits, Nikki is allowed to admire elegant dresses, casual business attire, comfortable rompers, and everything in between. In her review of Infinity Nikki, Polygon’s Nicole Carpenter explains where this approach intersects and departs with other 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 game made with the assumption that players are male, and, in turn, Nikki herself isn’t an object created to appeal to that audience. You can concretely see what that actually means when comparing how Infinity Nikki approaches its dress-up gameplay compared to other games starring female leads that are created, whether consciously or not, with a male perspective in mind. In the 2024 action game Stellar Blade, players control a female character named Eve. Dressing Eve up in different outfits is a big selling point of Stellar Blade, just as it is with Infinity Nikki, but there’s a major difference between Nikki and Eve’s wardrobes. The latter can be dressed up in scandalous outfits designed to show off her body. Some accentuate her cleavage with impractical tops, while others include high-riding bottoms that barely cover her pelvis. They are sexy fits born from a man’s idea of what female sexiness looks like.
Infinity Nikki also features what it explicitly labels as “Sexy” clothing items, but they’re completely different from the skimpy outfits we see in Stellar Blade. You’re more likely to find sleek black dresses that completely cover Nikki’s body than a thin strip of fabric that’s only there to keep the game’s rating down. The clothing is built with a female perspective in mind, not a man’s. That has resonated with players, such as content creator Pynk Gamer, who explained why that feels so special 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 more explicit ways that Infinity Nikki pushes back against an industry dominated by male bias, its most radical quality is its genre. As an open-world game, Infinity Nikki rejects the idea that women simply don’t enjoy the genre. While its platforming and action are streamlined, it’s still a complex, systems-heavy RPG that lets players loose in an enormous world dotted with quests, collectibles, and crafting materials. It proves Quantic Foundry’s theory that gender disparity in genre has more to do with how specific games target male player bases.
The fact that Infinity Nikki centers femininity is an important piece of its appeal, but that alone doesn’t guarantee a hit. In an essay about Infinity Nikki for The Gamer, writer Stacey Henley notes that the most important piece of the game’s success comes down to its quality above all else. Henley likens it to that of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film, stressing the importance of making a great work of art first rather than trying to engineer a hit based on skewed demographic data.
“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 theory has proven accurate in the case of Infinity Nikki. It generated over $16 million in profits within the first month of its release and already had gained 20 million downloads in a week. Crucially, that success wasn’t exclusively from female players. Shortly after its release, Polygon’s Ana Diaz reported that Infinity’s Nikki’s Reddit page was filling up with posts from male players who had found themselves enraptured with the adventure. It was an indication that Infold Games had successfully created a game with a feminine perspective that transcended gender barriers.
Even in that reception, though, there’s still a hard reminder that “girl game” still holds a derogatory connotation among players. The Reddit posts from male players became a point of contention in the Infinity Nikki community. Posters like IntrinsicCarp were quick to point out that this style of post only served to reinforce the gender divide in video games by treating the idea of a man enjoying a dress-up game as subversive rather than normal.
“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 post 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 may break down barriers, but the video game industry’s walls will remain up as long as games like it are exceptions to the rules that are treated like punchlines.
This research paper was initially presented at Pipi to Ripley 7: Gender and Sexuality in Pop Culture at Ithaca College on April 18, 2025.
