"Video Games and the Choice to be Gay" Transcript
05 Nov 2021
The GAYming Agenda (Thumbnail)
Extra Lives: Gays, Games, and Toxic Masculinity (Working title)
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Auto-transcribed by YouTube, downloaded by tobi-cat from YouTube Archive video.
Thanks to LVence for tracking down and highlighting various sources.
Additional thanks to Verity Ritchie (aka /u/verilyb) and augustjune for finding various sources.
- Grοѕso, R․ (2019, Fеb 18). Qυeer Cһаraсters іո Gaⅿinɡ - A Brieꬵ Historу [Article]. https://techraptor.net/gaming/features/queer-characters-in-gaming-brief-history
- νеrіlуbitсһie. (2021, Seρ 3). Hοѡ Biѕeхυаlity Chaոɡeԁ Video Gaⅿes [Video essay]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZGkxUTbDqw
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Sep 23, 2020
Teased on Patron as "Extra Lives: Gays, Games, and Toxic Masculinity".
Nov 05, 2021
First published.
Dec 07, 2023
Privated post-callout.
May 8, 2024Channel deleted
Nov 05, 2021
Dec 03, 2023
Is being gay a choice? According to mainstream video games… probably.
PATREON : [link]
Thumbnail art by: Xelgot
https://xelgot.artstation.com
#LGBT #Hades #VideoGames
00:00 Introduction
03:27 Part 1 - Groundbreakers
13:36 Part 2 - Homo-Optional
30:46 Part 3 - Glass Ceiling
45:30 Part 4 - Political Identity
Victory whenever I'm playing OverWatch I've started gravitating toward Soldier 76 when my favorite killer robot with PTSD Bastion is impr practical I didn't play as soldier for the first few years the game was out though but then blizzard the company behind OverWatch revealed that Soldier was gay and well I st a gay video game Daddy but did you know that gay characters have actually been in video games for over 30 years the first known game to feature a queer character at least in the West Was moonmist in 1986 more games like this popped up with queer characters in the years to come mainly for the Apple 2 and the Commodore 64 circuits Edge and and Caper and the Castro among them Nintendo even got in on it with Berto a character from the American version of Super Mario Brothers 2 who in The Game's manual was described as a man who likes dressing up and going by the name of Beretta they've of course done everything they can to pretend that this never happened ever since because well Nintendo is going to Nintendo however despite Japan's seemingly inherent social conservatism most of the time queer characters were actually purposefully censored for the West mostly removing bits of dialogue from NPCs in games such as Fantasy Star 2 or Streets of Rage 3 in America only adventure and computer games made direct references to queer characters early on but they were often stereotyped the first speaking role for a gay character for example was in the FMV game Dracula Unleashed but the character was an over pervert so and that's kind of how it stayed for a long time in Western gaming even in the late '90s when the industry became dominated by the hyper heterosexualization of characters like Duke Nukem and Laura Croft the closest we really came to queer representation was straight boys saying that hulking female villains in beat him up games were transgender or cloud and address with some very minor examples in computer games that use the presence of a queer character to market the game as edgy an adults own we mostly didn't exist in the world of pixels and polygons the modern video game industry as a whole was only about 18 years old but it was about to go off to college and start to [Music] experiment [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] Part 1 - Groundbreakers early queerness in video games GES wasn't really a thing anybody was asking for Mario saving Princess Peach from Bowser was less of a dramatic or narrative option and more just a reason to have you play the game believe it or not early video games had relatively little to do with romance options in the era of sides scrollers and Platformers the Advent of the RPG and turn-based fighting games meant that narrative games didn't have to be done with text commands anymore there was a story sure and yes if romance was a thing it was going to be heterosexual and nobody was really fighting for queer rep in these games because queer communities had other priorities at the time namely survival and when it did come to queer representation activists were pushing for being seen in much more visible media like television and movies so no gay developers and Gamers and activists weren't really pushing for queer representation in whatever jrpg you remember playing even though we did show up to show our support when the siren called [Music] through the gaming generation of Xbox and Playstation 2 there was a period of experimentation this is back when moving with one thumb stick and aiming with the other was a revolutionary new mechanic this also was roughly the same time that home computers became a ubiquitous necessity in households the early 2000s era of game development was when the industry was really figuring out how gaming was going to transition to a high fidelity visual experience especially now that games could store audio information much more clearly than before leading to game development that was able to record dialogue that matched the encroaching photo realism retrospectively developers might have argued that each game they produced was highly calculated but it seems to me that nobody was really sure of what would be a hit and what would sink these five maybe 10 years were met with an influx of games that were indicative of an industry that was still trying to figure itself out before the giant corporations started telling them what needed to be popular a large chunk of the industry kept trying to use mascot branding to sell e-rated games and wacky characters most of whom would wind up in obscurity a sizable chunk was trying to capitalize off of the success of Doom and Duke Nukem and other gritty hyper violent video games in an appeal to Gamers who had freshly aged out of needing their parents to buy games for them very few were trying to push video games into the realm of interactive realism which is where the industry believes games need to be today but before the major gaming companies really began to corporati there were a few really weird ways that these developers began pushing the envelope and though it may be a microtransaction machine these days few people remember just how much of an impact the Sims had on the gaming world it was a create your character RPG RTS without a story there was no narrative no plot no Victory conditions there were only game mechanics any story that existed was created by the user and the objective just exist buy expensive stuff own property get promoted in your career things that are still only possible in video games for Millennials who needs her retirement plan I've got six mansions and a husband in The Sims it's not that games like this didn't exist before this it's just that they were simple straightforward either text command based or Choose Your Own Adventure and they always had a a continuous driving objective The Sims had no objective there was no reason to play the game aside from having a good time by all accounts on paper there was no reason for anyone in management to sign off on this game it was too simple to be bankable the growing video game Market was leaning towards action Challenge and violence but it turns out people really liked being able to live in a house and have several friends and have a job where you could get promoted into being an astronaut and somehow in this game it managed to be possible for two sexy ripped pixelated men to totally get naked and get in the same bed together was it design oversight someone slipping in a code the design philosophy of the game was to be as unrestrictive to players as possible so maybe it was just always intended to be there granted same gender marriage was impossible but you could form romantic attachments to and move in with same gender characters but the chief significance about gayness in The Sims was how little the game cared about whether you did it or not it was just there what's even more absurd is the blending of childlike animations mechanics and all-around sense of mischievous fun with actual video game Tunes having sex or at least the euphemism The Sims uses for sex woohoo in fact in more recent Sims games with the addition of more age brackets even gay teenagers can woohoo and yes gay marriage has been added to later games and even more customization around gender and gender Expressions choosing a male or female body type and selecting either or both sets of gendered clothing I have to wonder how things would be progressing without the sims' lir approach to gender pairings knowing how parent company EA feels about games needing to be as safe as possible to make a profit I don't know whether they'd be so open about this same approach if they had to choose now can we really be aware of the doors The Sims opened up would we have gay characters in narrative games now if it wasn't for this everyday life simulator 4 years later you could find this same attitude toward gay coupling though in an adventure game Fable branded itself as well leading up to release they said it would be many things to many people legendarily but it was not which sucks because even without the weird lion's head promises it was still a fun ROM kind of Half Baked but fun we couldn't do everything lead designer Peter malanu said we could but one thing you could do was be gay in retrospect it seems a little problematic you the heroic protagonist never spoke nor did you have a name and anyone who is available for marriage was a procedurally generated villager who was generally half as tall as you but still this is a world where homophobia didn't exist that was nice the second game was more or less the same but with additional Parenthood mechanics and very inconsistent rules about condom use but like I said this depiction did run a little bit shallow there's generally no impact to being gay what's whatever and while the fantasy is nice the trilogy of games does follow a bloodline so canonical heteronormative Conformity is to be taken for granted would have been a bit nicer to have some queerness addressed by the plot wouldn't it maybe even queerness being related to the plot one could argue well what were we going to expect for gays in video games what were you looking for Games built around gayness what kind of libtard nonsense is that it's not like straightness is a driving component of any video games so Kratos an ancient Greek Spartan can literally lay so many women he breaks the furniture but we can't have one game where being gay impacts the plot for some reason this was a much taller order actually get a fully written gay character who has meaningful contributions to a plot much less a fully voiced one and perish the thought of it being a protagonist thus Rose the first copout of gays in gaming the gay NPC not even the fem NPC who has a few auspicious dialogue interactions in an RPG outside of The Ambiguously Camp Final Fantasy Hench villain we did begin to see a rise of core cast secondary characters who were either coded as queer or who very subtly outed themselves given the right dialogue options which given that at this point marriage equality was still very much Up For Debate in America the fact that we even got this was a pretty pivotal step but many of you may be surprised to know that one of the earliest high-profile examples of this came out of Star Wars yes before St Abrams dained to give us an exactly 3 second long lesbian interaction Lucas Arts served up this angsty angry claw out Catgirl who if shown Mercy after attacking the main character can be recruited and if said main character is a woman can be flirted with and if you don't show her mercy another NPC alluded to be her ex-girlfriend gets really mad at you later later on Johan's queerness is subtle and she can be sensitive about it if you pick it up too soon but if you follow through with enough dialogue options she does open up as a vaguely established romantic option but only for other ladies queer rep wasn't a main staple of the nights of the Old Republic series or BioWare as a whole until Dragon Age many years later but every other queer character in a video game would inevitably follow in Johan's footsteps the NPC in fact it seems shocking at all that even an illusion to a johani romance would be in nice of the Old Republic 1 given how queer characters were relegated to being Side characters played up for laughs but it's been a long 20 years a very very long 20 years and in that 20 years the landscape of video games both in terms of player bases accessibility tropes technology development and business has shifted remarkably quickly with the growing attention of prestige directed at video games there's been an increasing demand to see a greater spectrum of identities represented in games and for better and For Worse the industry leaders trying to attract new players and tap into new markets have been trying very hard to have queer inclusion without alienating a very dedicated though questionably sized fan base that loves to scream over the team chat so the game industry is trying to give representation without biting the hand that they think feeds them which is leading to a new problem and all new cop-outs to have gay representation while avoiding having anything that might be construed as outright gay [Music] Part 2 - Homo-Optional representation from about the year 2000 and onward video games went through huge changes specifically on the scope of what a game could depict and how much information could be written into a game photorealistic textures combined with increased processing power in consoles allowed immersion to be a much more significant element of gameplay experiences furthermore the amount ount of storage space on diss allowed the branching narrative style of text Adventure Games to easily translate into fully rendered 3D environments and this transition happened very quickly in branching narrative games entire sections could become inaccessible due to decisions you make dialogue options going this place before another place solving certain puzzles and morality choices could determine whether a character died earlier or was a recurring character like johani Knights of the Old Republic released in 200 3 was an early example of a guided narrative with branching options but other Studios like Bethesda were pioneering open world games like Daggerfall in 1996 and the much beloved Mora wind in 2002 however in all cases these games were massive in scope so much so that most of the game would never be played by most Gamers this is significant because this is where queer representation could be hidden in plain sight it would have made sense for queer characters to be more easily found in platform games which would take much less time to build and whose Focus would be gameplay mechanics rather than narrative ones for instance what would it matter if a fighting game roster had a character who was mentioned to be gay in the character bio most people never read that stuff and yet in this world of massively expansive and expensive choice-based RPGs was where we found our first major representation and where we still find the overwhelming majority of our representation today game exact read the room and realized that gays flocked to tabletop gaming and nerd culture like you wouldn't believe and the gaming industry also learned that the gays will flock to stores to buy copies of a game if a friend of theirs told them that there was a gay character somewhere in there thus set a precedence for the most annoying one-foot in instances when it comes to queer depiction in media see immersion-based games function best where the player's own personality is a component of the gameplay experience you're a soft sensitive love conquers all type there's dialogue options for you you're a No Nonsense any means necessary mercenary type there's dialogue options for you I do think it's hilarious though that developers allowed options to commit genocide and war crimes before they let us say yes homo this opened the door for them to sneak in queer representation to tap into a queer audience without explicitly offending The Fragile sensibilities of big tough heterosexual true Gamers if gay romance is an option then there's an option to ignore it this is creating a very weird precedent in gaming and well is something I'm becoming annoyed with see if you have a character creation screen and you create a black character is that developer committing to a game featuring black representation no they're simply giving you the option the game will not actually portray a black experience instead we look to the side characters and Quest companions for that diversity which itself is problematic as most of these games take place in science fiction or fantasy settings Mass Effect is a culprit of this you run into the problem where you have science fiction properties where aliens are meant to be an analogy for ethnic people whereas the humans are the shoin for euroamerican culture in fact it isn't until Mass Effect 3 that the game clarifies that yes non-american cultures do actually exist in humanity the thing about having a gay romance option in a game though where you can choose what gameplay experiences you have is that but I don't think we can actively qualify that as representation the funny thing is we actually got queer representation since the beginning of bioware's progressively complex mission to present sex scenes to Gamers on the brink of discovering masturbation by having two rendered models of lifeless marionettes and painted on underwear clipping into each other like I said johanni and Star Wars but Liara of Mass Effect who is from an all female species is a romance option for both genders of the player character this Carries On In in Mass Effect 2 where there is once again a couple of lesbian exclusive ladies and no it's not her and not her either which culminates in Mass Effect 3 where there are a whopping five bisexual or lesbian romance options next to one bisexual romanceable man which is laying the groundwork for another odd situation in Mass Effect 3 there are more bisexual women than there are straight ones which isn't me saying we need less lesbians or bisexuals in gaming it's me saying that developers are dangling Les lesbians on a string to titilate straight men bisexual women are especially appealing to developers because they're under the impression that straight men fantasize about male female female threes but only when they have impossible ways to ask ratios it's not representation if it's exploitation and this is an ongoing problem in BioWare content across Mass Effect and Dragon Age because even when they pat themselves on the back for having gay and lesbian inclusive characters in Dragon Age Inquisition they still have have a much higher ratio of bisexual women and a large cast of exclusively straight men Mass Effect Andromeda is an exception to this Rule and is the crowning highlight of the series no I will not be taking questions but when it comes to BioWare is it really representation if you can opt out of it despite the number of queer characters in BioWare games it's outstandingly easy to make a playthrough that simply does not have queer characters in it at all in Dragon Age you can kill zervan before you talk to him you can kill Anders at the end of the game maybe he's flirted with you by then and both Dorian and Sarah are optional recruits in the core Mass Effect yes there's Liara and other assari but other queer characters are generally out of the way or unessential and for queerness you have to dig for it unless you're playing Andromeda and everyone is very keen to let you know that they want your space pants in order for it to qualify as representation I feel like it needs to do more than just let us queer Gamers choose to see ourselves seeing ourselves is important but it's also important to be seen by others representation role in activism doesn't end with making queer content intended to be seen only by queer people representation has the additional goal of normalizing otherwise Fringe identities and bear in mind even Suburban gays were considered On The Fringe not that long ago and identities cannot be normalized if they're unseen by hegemonistic conforming audiences or when they're depicted fetishistically choice-based sexuality has a lot of weird implications too primarily the old tune that being gay itself is a choice claiming that real life people choose to be gay probably isn't going to be what most people take away from a gaming experience but I don't know how long the rest of you have been living on this planet but people really do seem to have an aversion to thinking rationally especially when it comes to straight cisgender communities bear in mind this is the same group that set California on fire with a gender reveal pipe bomb however given just how common it is for homophobes to believe that being gay or trans is a choice I'm not sure that we need to reinforce that idea another problem with choice-based romance options is that the sexual orientation of the protagonist is never really called to attention neither by other elements within the game nor in the ways these relationships pan out well ignorable queerness in video games condones queer eraser while pretending to Champion our rights take for instance the character Dorian from the Dragon Age series leading up to and following the release Dorian was pushed as a milestone for gaming the first fully voiced exclusively gay man to be in a major RPG when you first meet torian you can point blank tell him you don't want him around and he'll leave forever same with Sarah the exclusively lesbian character who got considerably less press despite the fact that she's basically the only likable and interesting character in the game I feel in order to qualify as representation there needs to be an unmissable unavoidable queer character confrontation other games have gotten around this by having queer Side characters very small roles granted The Witcher three while gratuitously heterosexual opens up one of the first story quests by seeking out help from a hunter who was involved with a local Lord's son who ended up committing suicide because kill your gays later on geralt encounters a gender fluid elf as part of a mandatory Quest but both of these instances only last about 5 minutes so that also kind of sucks because once again it's not that it's ignorable but it's certainly forgettable funny thing The Witcher 3 spends a significant amount of time following Siri geralt's adoptive daughter and while playing as her there is a dialogue option to out herself as a lesbian which the world of The Witcher is a little bit homophobic so approaching that so casually feels a little forced which reflects another weird problem around choice-based sexuality and gaming if you're queer in any way in the real world things are different it's not always about discrimination in fact some things are better like not having your parents ask you when you're going to get married or give them grandchildren well we used to have that congratulations to gay rights for removing our abilities to set boundaries with our parents there is a different albeit subtle social feedback while in a science fiction atmosphere like Star Wars or Mass Effect it's acceptable to say that this is a period of time when humankind has Shrugged off the Hang-Ups around sexual orientation and yet it still more acceptable to boink an alien than another dude in games like Dragon Age or The Witcher or other medieval set fantasy worlds there's apparently greater creative license to depict extreme homophobia which is actually kind of odd and ironic so Mass Effect takes place in a future version of this world which means that it's a world which has endured racism sexism and homophobia and yet there's a greater acceptance that these are worlds where sexuality would be unrestricted restricted racism has more or less ended and yet fantasy worlds are usually presented to us as other worlds as in their world never underwent mass christianization in fact many of these fantasy worlds involve a form of polytheism whereas in our world the major reason why we have institutional homophobia at least in Roman dri cultures is because of the christianization process which prosecuted Barbarian cultures for relatively liberal viewpoints of who can have sex with whom homophobia in our world is arbitrary but it's even more arbitrary in fantasy worlds which means that every queer character getting their moment where they step up on a soap box to harp about how love is love feels abundantly arbitrary or how their culture has super weird and uncommon ways of giving gay sex the stamp of approval which in spite of the gay persecution in fantasy worlds nobody really reacts to queerness oh look there goes the Inquisitor commander of Legions advisor to Empires unparalleled Warrior and wielder of Arcane Secrets he's going to go take it up the butt from a giant Bullman thumbs up because a huge portion of queer experiences is coping with the way that Society changes its treatment of you either relative to before you came out or to your heteronormative peers your amalgam of gay romance pixels has to explain in great detail why their same-sex affections are valid and Justified but literally nobody else in the game story makes a big deal out of it you could argue that there's only so much content that developers can commit to and that's valid but at the same time if gay representation matters so much to them why don't they put the care into figuring out the little nuances not that I'm calling for more crunch in the industry but depending upon the degree of bigotry in a given video game you would need to record duplicates of entire character interactions to appropriately capture the subtle ways that people treat queer or straight identity which may get impractical but Red Dead Redemption 2 has a specifically built engine for animated horse balls so maybe their attention could stand to be pointed elsewhere in the same way I struggled with Assassin's Creed Odyssey where you have the option of playing as a male or female protagonist and how there was almost no difference in dialogue lines or social treatment of the main characters from one gender to the other while this is great for modern representation ancient Greece was one of the most misogynistic cultur in human history in ancient Greece wealthy homes were divided into two sections so men and women would not interact with each other there was a significant separation of sex equality to the point where ancient helenic myths about the Amazon depicted them so terrifyingly because the concept of a woman warrior was absurd to be historically accurate Assassin's Creed Odyssey would have needed to be two different games and playing as a woman would have added a massive layer of difficulty which would have been a cool way to have an easy mode and a hard mode especially because Ubisoft considered the Cassandra character to be canonical and you know being a straight man of privilege with a good body is pretty much God's easy mode as it is granted it makes a little more sense in Valhalla where Vikings held masculine women a feminite men and queerness in much higher esteem even though Valhalla also has the additional problem of seeing straight and gay romantic interactions as being interchangeable so yes being a gay person and having a experienced homophobia these relatively shallow depictions are a little bit irritating and for me they break the immersion a little bit a weird Saving Grace is a property like Skyrim which is not shy about existing almost entirely detached from this world and you can just walk right up to farcus with an Amulet of Mara and marry the big dumb werewolf boy and adopt kids it's so comically simple there's literally no social Hang-Ups over gay marriages same thing in Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4 it's just a thing you can do NPC companions don't really have a different way of interacting with men than they do with women why would they they're living in the apocalypse we're living in the apocalypse too so what's our excuse but even in science fiction post Utopias this feels a little off in the same way that every non-human species in Mass Effect refers to everything by acronyms derived from English in the same way that feet clip through the ground when a character walks up a ramp we need some kind of connection to this world to remind us that it's based on our world it just feels a little too smooth and maybe this is our future but for us in this world we like our wish fulfillment with a little bit of context that acknowledges the world we the audience live in we after all continue to struggle with problems in queerness and not all of our problems are as the cisat developer management believe about battling homophobia within queer spaces we Face a number of problems that have very little to do with bigotry but rather existing in a world that is primarily designed for baby rearing heterosexual coupling once again Andromeda was much better at setting up this kind of context in Andromeda certain same-sex relationships didn't face homophobia but they did address gay problems specifically in the romance with the exclusively gay character Gil Brody a large portion of it is built around the question of surrogacy and shared parentage and it just feels like the writers spent some actual time thinking about what elements of gay relationship Hang-Ups would carry over into a society that has largely shed homophobia which is the next problem with choice-based queerness queer relationships are different than straight ones not even in a bad way it's just a matter of gender roles even if you pretend that Society has not developed with any pre-existing framework that favors heterosexual coupling over homosexual ones two men interacting with each other romantically is going to be different from the experiences of one man and one woman together which will in turn be different from how things would work with two women or a pairing that involves a non-binary person or a polycule of any size but when you have bisexual characters in games their dialogue lines are exactly identical barring pronouns their treatment of the main character is identical there's no functional difference in how this relationship Works which maybe that's how it'll be in the future but for now most accounts I've heard from bisexual people in relationships is that they can sometimes have vastly different mechanics depending upon the gender of their partner this is true even if they have no specific preference for any gender it's all other people's you just learn to adapt to it differently but wouldn't queer people in narrative games kind of solve all of these problems every single one confrontational representation controlled queer experiences creating a narrative statement on the state of being queer it might not be too far off that we start seeing some of that games which no longer present straightforward insis hetero romantic expectations and more importantly present a kind of queerness you can't look away Part 3 - Glass Ceiling from the main concern that I have when it comes to depicting gays in media in general is can can it be ignored in film and television it's a matter of deconstructing the coding or gauging what value a random gay kiss has to the overarching plot and if it's something that could be hypothetically removed so that it can get screened in Russia or China but at the end of it all I really am having a discussion about visibility in media aren't I how visible are we again can we be ignored many times where we are told something has queer representation the queer people are made invisible somehow we're told that we're presented we are told we're seen and yet we do not feel seen video games are a challenge to this model because in many ways a video game bypasses directorial intent video games in many cases are used to tell nonlinear stories and even when they are linear a game experience can change vastly depending upon how a player approaches certain challenges what pieces of lore are missed or How Deeply a player engages with visual elements giving the player the choice whether or not to engage with the game story and lore is becoming oddly Common Place place in the industry this is abundantly clear in games like the soulsborne franchise details about the world and even the plot are never really clear you can go along in the game and just do what the NPCs tell you to do depending upon what you do and who you speak to in the game you may or may not have a clue as to what's actually going on whereas that's much more difficult to do in linear media where everything you see is the way it is because it was crafted to release information emotions and visuals in a very specific order now it's not impossible to to make something engaging when it's out of order for instance there are films like citizen Cain momento or Pulp Fiction that rearrange narrative chronology so that information can be withheld from the viewer and Things become more clear after the whole film is seen even movies like Black Swan that don't play with the chronological structure accomplish this by both obscuring details and forcing the viewer to question what is and is not reality what did you have some sort of lesy wet dream about me leading to you the viewer you are developing your own opinion of what events are occurring the same is very true of soulsborne style games where World building is done primarily through reading the descriptions of items you pick up scraps of inference and strong hints about the world you're in and this is important believe it or not for framing a discourse about what queer representation in video games can look like because this feeds into the problem of whether a queer side character in a video game can be accurately described as representation and the answer is they usually can't Side characters in films are elements of the story this is true for video games also but story is only one component of a video game and sometimes isn't the primary draw for a video game and can be and maybe sometimes should be ignored completely and if the purpose of representation is to normalize Fringe identities then confrontation is necessary which means queer characters need to be an ongoing and clearly defined element of the narrative which the gamer Bros are going to complain about that but they complain when even optional gay characters aren't just there to be punchline so let them complain let us not give a about the opinions of idiots that said a good way to make a game undeniably queer is to just you know make the main character queer The Last of Us two didn't really make history as the game with the first gay protagonist but it was indeed the first to come out of a major Studio and it was met with an incredibly divided and often harsh response from fans of the first game who didn't like that this game killed off a man for no other reason than the emotional development of a woman how do it feel guys never mind that Ellie as the protagonist was something set up from the prior game and that it wouldn't have mattered if they killed Joel or not these same nuggets wouldn't have had anything nice to say about it anyway and while Ellie's sexuality is certainly an element of the plot it is only tangentially related to the progression of the story as in Ellie's bisexual girlfriend is pregnant from her ex-boyfriend and that is addressed as Ellie goes about her revenge Mission which is the main plot but it's not like her queerness is defined by having to escape an extremist cult that is trying to kill her for being queer surely we're moving past the point where queer characters can only resolve conflicts that relate directly to combating bigotry right and this is the part of the video where we talk about the highs and lows of The Last of Us two's queer rep yes Ellie is out and proud and her queerness has nothing to do with the progression of her plot and honestly that's what we're looking out for at least I am because when it comes to expensive media projects that we're parts of usually our queerness is the plot queer media is about queer people whose queerness is driving conflict of their queer story it's been the only story we're allowed to inhabit in mainstream media since ever but we're moving into a generation of queer creators who are so completely over the gay plot that they're crafting stories in which sexuality is irrelevant where these stories are not queer stories but instead stories experienced by queer people Ellie's on a Revenge Quest it's not even revenge for the gay bashing of a girlfriend it's a more Universal story about The Human Condition for which there are plenty of straight versions but the elements of the story around character and character interactions are slightly modified because one or more characters are queer aby's story falls into the problem of the queer victim Abby is Ellie's rival and a POV character in the game she herself is not gay or non-binary she's just really jacked when you start out with Abby one of the first things you do is save a post-apocalyptic trans man Lev from a post-apocalyptic religious cult that goof figure hates trans people for no discernable reason aby's story is almost entirely built around surviving Ellie but also helping Lev survive this cult who keeps trying to kill him sometimes she has to save Lev from Ellie Ellie doesn't want to kill him because he's trans but as part of her mission to kill Abby and all of her friends still this turns into one of the many instances where because media needs to be so thoroughly framed from and for the perspective of privilege that a story about a queer identity becomes a story that focuses more on antiquer bigotry just like how a lot of blackf framed movies made by white people focus more about the racist people's journey into acceptance coming from privilege it's very easy to make a story about bigotry and focus on the bigoted people's feelings and justifications and there have been other critics of The Last of Us two who claim the game seems to validate queer identity on the ability of queer people to endure suffering which even though Ellie's story isn't necessarily queer she is a queer person and her entire story is about enduring immense amounts of suffering and Trauma gratuitously so it's unfortunate that we have a game in which even if Naughty Dog didn't make the claim themselves Ellie is perceived to be the first gay protagonist in a game and yet this game is so divisive even among the queer Community many of us having lived through the '90s and early 2000s of gay media have reached a saturation point of gay suffering narratives it's difficult to say on one hand that it gets better but on the other hand celebrate a glowering totem of media about gays for whom it certainly does not gays these days are tending to lean towards media that is queerly optimistic or media where queer characters are either triumphant or where emotional growth is achieved in spite of romantic failures that doesn't necessarily mean that the last of us two is bad representation I love that it doesn't give the player a choice other than to play as a lesbian and it's far from a bad game and Ellie's story is still significant even as a queer narrative because regardless of whether we want media that depicts us outside of suffering queer suffering still exists but as I've mentioned the last of us two is far from the first game to depict queer characters in fact when the last of us two swept gaming Awards in spite of the Studio Naughty Dog demanding overtime from its employees which in the gaming world is called a crunch and is exactly what you should not have needed to do if your game won best Direction detractors who said that it shouldn't have won were decried as being homophobic which I feel like a lot of that came from allies who just assumed that if someone didn't like the last of us two it was because you didn't like that Ellie was a lesbian which doesn't really help a discussion of our representation in media because if someone doesn't like the type of representation there's a perfectly valid discussion to be had about how to make it better and by putting it on a pedestal that is beyond reproach you're going to paint the entire fan base as a cult which actively denies any shortcomings the media does have no media is perfect and therefore no media is beyond scrutiny especially because many people saying the last of us two shouldn't have won all of the awards it did we saying that it should have gone to Hades instead but the last of us two stands mostly did not know what Hades was yet and doubled down and called you homophobic some more completely oblivious to the fact that Hades is probably even more gay than the last of us to it was just made by a small studio and has taken over a year to reach the level of cultural permeance it has but Hades is still getting fan art while the media narrative has largely forgotten about the last of us two but make no mistake Hades a game set in the helenic Underworld of ancient Greece is incredibly gay you play as the relatively obscure mythological figure zagas the god of cycles and rebirth son of Hades and pranie and sometimes an altero of dionis though in the game he's just The Sassy Prince of hell with a heart of gold and abs of steel the game story focuses around zagar's quest to escape the underworld and reunite with his long lost mother on the surface and on the way he encounters a number of Olympic and chonic figures from mythology the story both celebrates and subverts a number of tropes in Greek myth and places itself in the historic context of life in ancient Greece before modern home homophobia existed and as a result nobody really raises an eyebrow at instances of queerness and sexual Liberation for instance both Achilles and patrickus are characters here and it's no secret that they're both depressed because they have to live in an eternity in Hell apart from each other there is a significant side quest about getting them to see each other again and then they're happy gays happy gays what a concept I mean they're both already dead so it would be a pretty tough job for writers to pull a kill your Gaze on us and that's situation but Achilles even openly discusses his relationship with Patrick l with other residents of Hell without any push back nobody gives it any thought and nobody questions why Achilles is so attached to another man they're not very good friends they're boyfriends however that's not all zagas himself has a few romanceable NPCs one of them megra is more of a contemptuous hate sex kind of deal Frenemies with benefits and the benefit is that Meara gets to Peg zagas at her Leisure and it's not subtle I thought you'd never ask but I'm glad you did you know what else isn't subtle thanz in some point in your journey upwards you encounter Thanatos the god of peaceful deaths who is not at all happy that zaras decided to leave without saying goodbye and while it's only inferred that they used to be an item it certainly is not just inferred that they want to be this isn't some impulsive thing for me I'll wait for you however long it takes you have no concept of which impulses to act upon and which to keep in check you say you'll wait well let me ask you this what are you waiting for what are you waiting for I'm here already right I find it interesting that the NSA sex relationship in the game is with a woman and the pining romantic you make me feel so not alive Romance is with another man now technically these qualify as romantic options and they don't have any bearing on the main quest of the game however this is one of those games with a secret or true ending where if you complete the social fetch quest of each God you do get the true ending and you can only get this by going through the gay romance because even if you turn down Thanatos which I never have and I'm not sure if you actually can you still have to go through Achilles and Patrick's very drawn out relationship draw and also Theus and aresius but even then in spite of all of this there are many who continue to refute Hades as having queer representation at least the kind of queer representation they want and then proceed to scream at Activision for more queer characters which feeds back into the problem I mentioned when blizzard which is owned by Activision canonically confirmed that the OverWatch characters Tracer and Soldier 76 were homosexual well you'd think it would have generated more of a buzz than it did OverWatch had for a few years been the most celebrated competitive esport in the world and taking the female character most sexualized by male fans and the most stock FPS Call of Duty derive machismo character and making them gay that's quite a move but they were only confirmed to be gay in a cross promotional comic book tyin and there's not any clear references to their sexual orientation in the game itself which back to square one I guess so big studios managed to squeeze in these little ignorable details of queerness and then Med commentators on Twitter queer directed media commentators no less treat it as if we have received a gift that we need to be grateful for never mind the slew of Indie developed games which feature queerness prominently like Hades queer identity has flourished in visual novels dating Sims and pixelated retro style Platformers indie games are usually made by incredibly small Studios and in some cases may be run by entirely queer staff when we talk about representation in gaming sure we've got Ellie from The Last of Us to but we're also going to reopen this discussion about iron Bull and how he somehow makes BDSM even more boring than it was in 50 Shades of Gray we're almost never having a discussion about dream daddy life is strange or Neco jishi which I've never heard of but I'm sure it's wholesome but even though we got a best-selling AAA game that gave you no choice but to play as an out lesbian and protect a trans man in order to finish the game and we got a pro queer indie game that was by far more successful than anyone anticipated the future of queerness in video games is still [Music] uncertain in spite of a very recent Part 4 - Political Identity influx of queer inclusive gaming I don't know if we're on the brink of a queer Renaissance in gaming I don't want to cast any disrespect on many of these developers and Studios but of the examples listed above only naughty dog is considered a large developer due in part to how it at least functions as a subsidiary of Sony the other games Hades visual novels dating Sims are produced by very small very Niche developers these games are in no way Meant to hit the big kind of broad audience sales numbers like The Last of Us was expected to and required to hit Hades was this weird omnisexual anomaly that oversold in a way even super giant Studio neither expected nor were they prepared for in fact towards the end of development Studio heads were convinced that the game would be a massive flop who wants to be trapped in a hellscape where it's functionally impossible to escape who could possibly identify with that scenario but then suddenly we were all trapped at home during a pandemic and we really identified with zagar's attempts to escape hell and yet in spite of some very weird breakout hits like Hades and dream daddy and stardo Valley whose sales numbers by far exceed many AAA games there is a strong reluctance for Studios to commit to these kinds of gameplay experiences not to mention their queer inclusive content and as much as we queer people are represented in indie games and smaller projects a huge amount of the demand for queer rep is on larger Studios which is kind of immediately setting ourselves up for failure it's like expecting the gay Disney princess all over again Studios aren't inherently bigoted Executives operate on two paradigms follow the money and break into untapped markets they do what's popular because it's shown to sell this is indicative of the slew of soft pallet cell-shaded nature focused anime realism adventure games that started popping up about 4 years after breath of the wild if a Trailblazer takes on a new format that ends up doing well you can guarantee that others will follow not even always out of a need to ape on the popularity of a given aesthetic or mechanic but also because smaller developers want to pay homage to inspirational games both of these instances are clear with the torrent of Dark Souls clones all of this is to say yes Studios and developers are interested in representing queer characters if they can make a game that the gays flock to on mass they're more than happy to take our money and specifically in regards to queer representation and women leads there have been marked strides in how well these games will draw in an audience however as we discussed with the last of us two there is a risk associated with this though its grip is slipping boys will be boys sensibilities still dominate a significant swath of the video game spaces there are many cismen who celebrate games that feature women or queer characters in fact some people make a special point of playing the queer romance options in RPGs regardless of the support there is still a loud if not large section of the video game player base who will stage Petty boycotts and spam review sites with one star ratings if a game has a queer character would a AAA Studio risk an original Ip with this kind of boycott diversity when it comes to female protagonists it's difficult to plot a pattern Studios don't seem to be able to pull in much money from exploiting big boobs like with Ivy from The soulcaliber series these days in fact fighting games seem to be the only place it can be pulled off and even then that's probably less about titilation for straight guys and more about serving hot looks for gay men and giving drag queen someone to dress up as which gays happen to be one of the most significant markets for fighting games you'd think Mortal Kombat would have kept their first openly gay fighter around when they released mk11 since they patted themselves on the back to no extent when they released him in mk10 but no one could say that a lack of sexual availability is what triggers the bigoted gaming audiences many blame Ellie's controversial backlash Less on her sexual orientation and more on the fact that she presented a femininity which was not meant to depict her as available for the straight male gaze this was a similar criticism for the Captain Marvel movie as well as the protagonist from another PlayStation exclusive Horizon zero Dawn aloy while sexually ambiguous is still to this day the subject of many digital artists fixing her appearance namely by angling her jawline narrowing her face removing her freckles and darkening her Ginger hair and giving her a smile ladies I'm not sure if you've heard but apparently you really need to smile more but while we have a slew of female protagonists in games where we can try and scrutinize a pattern about marketable representation we really don't have that much data on how to sell queer characters yes as I said we are represented in many smaller games and simulators however when General fans demand more queer representation they're a little bit put off when you recommend Celeste there's this attitude that a video game means less if it's made with pixel art or 2D animations this isn't necessarily A tried and true glass ceiling C Hades but there is a sense of hierarchy among video games this is indicative of Nintendo's decision to release Metroid dread at full price whereas fans slammed them because the game wasn't as graphically intensive as say God of War so when fans demand representation they are demanding representation in games like this but reject represent presentation in smaller games or at least ignore it the Assumption here is that those games don't matter as much because they aren't meant to reach the kind of wide audience that say Call of Duty is meant to but a gay person in Call of Duty that apparently is a larger indication of queer acceptance never mind that Ronald Reagan respecting your pronouns is about the most ridiculous politically charged unnecessary virtue signaling I've ever heard of in gaming which in turn leads gamergate to believe that this is what we queer people want from gaming representation intrusive immersion breaking experiences that don't need to be there hey gamer Bros queer people actually hate that too we don't want Ronald Reagan respecting our pronouns we don't want him anywhere but maybe on the other hand Activision has an agenda to woke wash Reagan ero politics so representation in Celeste or dating Sims regardless of their popularity does not register as representation because these games are not considered to have an audience large enough to consider their depictions impactful By Us by queer people it's us we're the ones putting the hierarchy there we're the ones who demand queer representation but don't show up to put money down for the people who are already giving it to us we seem to have an aversion to supporting smaller Studios or even worse we dismiss some kind of games as simply not being real video games which is a problem through the entire industry but we're the ones asking for something specific in this case it's kind of rude of us to flock to large Studios at the slightest mention of queerness while ignoring smaller developers sometimes even queer run themselves and in some cases queer media will Heap on praise for even the smallest instances of representation like when Lego Avengers included Wiccan and hulkling as playable characters who were not in the story and you could only unlock them at the very very end of the game and they had no effect on the game except to get 100% completion why is gay media more interested in celebrating a straight run Corporation with a board of straight directors and predatory straight management for making a financially calculated bare minimum effort to represent us rather than you know showcasing queer developers and smaller Studios who produce labors of Love aimed at depicting our own stories queer news media does have a phenomenally shallow scope of what it chooses to cover in most cases by the time queer news media broke the story on hades's queer themes the game had already been a top seller on the Nintendo switch for months and yet it's queer media that will lift up BioWare for showcasing yet another gay romance which you can choose to ignore like I said before all of this smacks of the Disney issue all over again where we're begging giant corporations to represent us the difference being there's actually swaths of queer content already existing in the video game space from small independent developers sometimes those games are leagues better than the ones put out by AAA Studios I personally really like the last of us two but I put a hell of a lot more time into winning over the affection of a certain grid ball playing stud in stardew Valley than I did on Ellie's quest for Revenge so instead of begging the triaa Giants to pay attention to us let's help little games like stardew Valley and Hades become giant hits let's support the people who are already supporting us not the ones who think we need to convince them that we're worth their time don't we already do that enough after all it's dangerous to go alone so it's a good thing that for once maybe we don't have to
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