The second Assassin’s Creed Odyssey revealed that you would not solely play as a feminine protagonist but additionally have the choice to romance characters of both gender, I knew that Kassandra was destined to be a queer gaming icon. At least till controversial DLC chapter ‘Shadow Heritage’ got here alongside.
For lesbian gamers dwelling out their fantasy as a badass feminine Spartan wooing ladies everywhere in the Greek islands, being forced into a heterosexual relationship and parenthood would have been an offensive invalidation of their id. Ubisoft mounted this, however how did it occur within the first place?
Unlike BioWare’s model of role-playing and romancing, you aren’t creating your individual personalised avatar of Shepard or Inquisitor in Odyssey. Kassandra is extra on par with Geralt in The Witcher: a personality whose decisions you possibly can form in some ways, however he’s nonetheless straight. It makes you marvel why Kassandra couldn’t have simply been written as queer from the beginning.
“I would rather have the option to play a character as queer rather than no option at all, but I definitely don’t think it’s ideal,” says Leighton Gray, a queer girl and co-creator, co-writer and artwork director of pop courting simulator Dream Daddy. “It feels like the bare minimum, and we deserve better representation than that.”
It’s a working theme for different triple-A publishers that now we have been fast to have a good time for his or her progress in LGBT illustration. Take Life is Strange, the place Chloe’s actual relationship with Rachel had been ambiguous within the first game. For prequel Before The Storm, this turns into express when the 2 women kiss in a single tender scene. Yet you’d even be overlooking the truth that this glorious second for LGBT illustration can be introduced as a selection. Even if statistics present that the overwhelming majority of gamers selected to kiss Rachel, it’s troubling that you could deny its queer characters’ existence.
Freedom of selection is a crucial characteristic of games and ambiguity can supply attention-grabbing interpretations to a story, however making use of these to a personality’s sexual id isn’t simply problematic if it inadvertently means homophobes can decide to disclaim queer experiences. It could even be dangerous in perpetuating the assumption that being homosexual is a selection. This view continues to be held by 31% of British folks, in response to a 2017 YouGov poll, regardless of a mass of scientific proof that claims in any other case.
Of course, it could be a developer’s intention to painting a personality as bisexual – like how the ultimate season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead lets Clementine romance both a boy or lady, an possibility that by the way additionally comes up within the newest episode of Life is Strange 2. But this smacks extra of a copout or a type of playersexuality (that’s when NPCs are drawn to you no matter gender), quite than a honest redressing of bi-invisibility.
We might give Naughty Dog credit score for placing Ellie’s gayness within the highlight in final yr’s E3 trailer for The Last of Us Part 2. Even so, you’d be forgetting that it took a DLC chapter for Ellie’s sexual orientation to come back out within the first game – even the circumstances of her kiss with Riley really has sure folks decoding it as “they’re just really close friends”.
But that was again in 2014. So how is it that, in 2019, outing a personality continues to be thought-about a plot level? It’s not simply games which might be responsible of this – Avengers: Endgame administrators the Russo brothers had additionally hinted {that a} character within the MCU will quickly even be revealed as homosexual. It’s true that folks come out at completely different factors of their lives, however until the story is intending in your character to find their sexuality as a part of their arc, why maintain it hidden solely to retroactively reveal it just like the Overwatch roster?
While lead author Michael Chu had confirmed again in 2016 that Overwatch undoubtedly has a number of LGBT heroes, when it takes six months and virtually three years after launch for Tracer and Soldier 76 to be respectively confirmed as canonically homosexual characters – and solely by way of a web comic – it’s arduous to not see this as pandering quite than significant illustration.
Apex Legends had the great grace to not solely embrace a queer and non-binary character in its beginning roster however affirm this from the outset, even when it’s one thing it’s a must to discover out about from their character bios on the official website. I’m not saying a personality must flash out their queer card the second they’re launched, and goodness is aware of we will do with out offensive stereotypes, but when triple-A builders are comfortable to create fleshed out hetero protagonists like Nathan Drake, Bayek of Siwa, or Geralt of Rivia, what’s stopping them from writing an out and proud queer protagonist?
“I think triple-A struggles with it because there’s this weird, inherent bias logical fallacy that games that cater to the LGBT+ crowd aren’t financially or critically viable, which, if you’ll excuse me saying, is a crock of shit,” says Gray. “It also smacks of something being focus-tested with the wrong groups of people in an industry dominated by heterosexual people.”
It’s a distinction to the indie house the place smaller groups have created among the richest games of current years that discover LGBT themes and illustration, like Gone Home, Night within the Woods and Undertale. That’s to not say there’s no LGBT devs in triple-A, nor are all queer-friendly indie games essentially created by LGBT devs both, though that makes session of paramount significance.
As a bisexual girl engaged on a game about discovering sizzling homosexual dads up to now, Gray admits she will be able to’t converse for the experiences of homosexual males, nor can hetero male co-creator Vernon Shaw. “We spoke to as many people with lived experience and different perspectives as possible, and did a lot of research on gay history and resources for same sex parent couples,” she says.
In the case of coming-of-age/coming-out narrative journey Gone Home, the creators went from simply consulting queer ladies who grew up within the ‘90s to hiring one, Kate Craig, as their envionment artist. “All the devs I know personally, triple-A and indie, are happy to shoot for better, more interesting queer representation,” she says, cautious of the ‘indies good, triple-A foul’ dichotomy. “But for the really big franchises out there, if you told me they were reluctant to include any because it might affect sales, or certain segments of their player base would get up in arms, I’d believe it.”
Craig and Gray agree that consulting with and hiring LGBT devs is one of the best ways for triple-A studios to higher symbolize LGBT communities. But in the end, it’s additionally as much as these studios and their publishers to have the braveness to take satisfaction in that illustration, as an alternative of cowardly burying it within the footnotes or leaving it as much as interpretation.
“If fandom work on the internet, which is so often based around hinted at queer relationships, is any indication, people are so desperate for things that hold a mirror to their experience that we’re all settling for scraps,” says Gray. “Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that games with LGBT+ characters or stories won’t make money, or that the audience for it isn’t out there, because we are and we deserve content that represents us.”
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