Controversial?
Our esteemed hostess pointed me towards this article at Joystiq. You know, I’m not quite sure what to say about it. It’s nice that developers are starting to get more comfortable with the idea* of including gay characters and themes in games, but among gamers, I’m not sure it’s reached nearly the same level of acceptance. You can just look at the comments:
HighDef Edition Personally if the lead character is gay I won’t buy/play the game. BTW Joe, there was no gay theme in V for Vendetta - gays would like us to believe that - to say see you were watching a gay movie. I will fight for your right to be gay, but I’ll be damned if you is gonna try to convince me that playing a gay game is cool. I love vagina.
GL: Gays should not be in games or movies, it makes our society look weak and since we have become politically correct with all of this, other countries frown upon us.
Steven: I’d prefer stories that I can relate to. I can’t relate to gay people.
Not all the comments are like this — some are supportive of including gay characters and themes in games. But there’s a whole lot of homophobia, racism, and sexism out there in gaming. My cousins, way back when, tried to get me to play Starcraft with them on Battle.net. Wall-to-wall smack talk. Most of it along the lines of “gay!! u cheeter faggot!!!1″ And then there’s the whole teabagging thing in online first/third person shooters.
See, the thing is, I’m tired. I don’t see me on TV or in movies much. I very rarely see me in video games. I’ve never seen a game where the main character is gay. I see plenty of homophobia.
- In Neverwinter Nights, there were romance conversation trees, but all of them were het. Would it have been so hard to make queer relationships even possible? At all?
- There’s the famous cross-dressing sequence in Final Fantasy VII, but it’s meant to be funny — Cloud doesn’t like it a bit, and when he finally reveals himself as a man, he and Tifa and Aeris have to threaten to castrate Don Corneo to make up for the lack of manliness earlier.
- I haven’t played Bully, so I couldn’t say what the deal with the boys kissing is, but from what I read, that’s not exactly a relationship.
- In The Longest Journey, April’s landlady, Fiona, is a kinky lesbian woman, but she’s a minor character with not much at all to contribute to the plot.
It feels like the gaming industry has assimilated the idea that the prime target demographic is the 15-35 white American male. Everything’s** marketed to them, and does nothing to challenge the casual bigotry in the gaming community. There are rarely even options to play a female character instead of a male one. Even in games where it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference, like Halo. How hard would it have been to put in an option to play a female Master Chief, with a woman’s voice? (Of course, if they had, we’d have been subjected to battle armour with boobies, but baby steps, baby steps.)
I play games despite the lack of women, the lack of queer people, the lack of brown people as protagonists. Is it really so much to ask that the straight white boys step out of their comfort zone for just a little bit?
* Not the actuality, just the idea.
** I know, there are exceptions, but this really is the rule. The Sims are a major exception — I didn’t like it much as a game, but I loved that queer relationships were treated the same as het ones (almost; if you were a gay couple, you couldn’t get married), with children arriving by adoption rather than birth. You’ll note that a large number of women play The Sims.
March 12th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Great post!
One of those quotes made me chuckle: “Steven: I’d prefer stories that I can relate to. I can’t relate to gay people.” — so, what, you can relate to being a ninja? Or a wizard? As for GL — Dinesh D’Souza… is that you?!
I’m not much for babysteps, but since it’s obvious that the poor, underrepresented 15-35 year old white males would simply have a meltdown if they didn’t see themselves in the games, I would be contented for the moment with more diverse sidekicks. If we could get the people who comment at Joystiq to play a game where the most trustable, ass-kicking member of the party is gay, then maybe it would be a first step to being a little more conscientious about their behavior. (Ok, I’m grasping, I know).
But even that’s a stupid way around a problem that would be overcome easily enough if, as you said, we could just pick to be a woman, and they did away with all of the stupid logical testing for conversation trees based on gender. If you were playing a woman and you wanted to hit on another woman, the option would present to you — just like you could hit on a man.
(An interesting aside: Whenever I play games like NWN, when I *do* get to select my gender and I play a woman, I don’t seem to get the flirting options. Sometimes guys hit on me, but I never get the option of just walking up to a dude and asking him to do a little dance for me. Maybe I just haven’t been trying hard enough, but it seems that the writers are fixated on the female-as-passive structure in their dialogs, even if the female in question is about to single-handedly save the world, she’s still a shrinking violet on the dance floor.)
…Because the problem is that it’s more work to program in purely hetero flirt interactions. Game writers would find themselves with a little more time to actually flesh out their stories and patch their plotholes if they weren’t working to maintain strict heteronormative interactions. The whole Fable 2 gay dustup was just laziness on the part of the writers.
Naturally, if the industry decides to create a real, honest-to-goodness gay game, that will be a great push forward. But in the meantime, just giving its people some choice would be nice.
March 13th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Gee… I think it might be fun to play a Bushi hitting on another Bushi… and I’m het. Might be the only way I’d play a male (in a game where I get a choice. I always play females if I get a choice).
March 14th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
[...] The Stupid, It Burns Controversial? [...]
March 15th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Great post. It reminds me of a time before Final Fantasy XII wasn’t out and the rumor was that the main character was gay. Gamers freaked. It made me feel ashamed in so many ways. I even fit the bill of a stereotype gamer. A white 20 year old male. But I do want to see gay games made. The point of story isn’t necessarily to make someone connect on every possible level to the character. I would even argue it’s more interesting when a story takes a character very, very different from the player/reader/ect and makes them connect on a basic human level. Games have the power to make the player empathize in a way no other medium can. It’s sad to see this power wasted.
Fable did try something. I had a relationship in the game with the male school teacher. But it almost felt like it was a secret joke. An easter egg. I guess it’s some progress.