Ars Technica has a heart warming story about a father who said, "I'm not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don't get to the be the hero."
His daughter is 3 and a half, a critical year of identity formation as the child begins to explore words they hear and emulate the things they see around them. This father is taking things a step farther by trying to make sure that his daughter doesn't eschew from the more "masculine" activities like being a hero or dressing herself up like a princess and stopping there. For this father, the princess should be the one who goes out and rescues others.
The father, Hoyt, went into the text of the game with a hex editor and, over the course of a few days, reworked every mention of gender toward Link to say "milady" instead of "my lad" or "master."
Hoyt felt that he wanted to introduce video games to his daughter and become it can be so hard to find a stand up hero who is a female in a video game, that he would do it himsself. Maybe a continuation of activities like this will finally give birth to a book like Diamond Age's Young Lady's Primer.
Hoyt put all of his notes up on his blog as well as the patch for the game (it requires some knowledge of xdelta3). I know that I will download it for a certain niece who is just about to start playing video games. Though, at age 6 she has already developed the princess identity and so it may be a bit too late.
A side note to this story is the original english instruction guide for Metroid. This book, and the box, constantly referred to Samus Aran as a male (he, his) instead of a female (she, her). How differently would the series have turned out if this sex change had remained?
