Do we need more LGBTQ+ protagonists in video games?

[Adeptus Aspartem]

Correction: We need well-written and interesting LGBTQ protagonists.

As countless others have said before me, just crow-barring in an LGBTQ character is just cheap and pointless. All it would serve to do is to check off a list of pre-requisites.

What matters is how much of a character a protagonist is first. If they're LGBTQ, then it's a bonus.

I'd say we just need more interessting characters in general. Even the socio-norm straight white female/male protagonists are usually full of stereotypes and movietropes it's not even funny anymore.

Imo the writing in general is so "meh" that i'm currently not worried about the representation of a certain group than rather of good games/characters in general.

 

[elvor0]

The word "More" implies that there were some to begin with and I have a hard time thinking of any LGBT protagonists in games. Trevor is the only one I can think of at the moment.

the main character from gone home, kanji tatsumi and nNaoto shirogane from persona 4, ellie from the last of us, they are few but they are not non-existant

Wait, how is Naoto LGBT? She's just a crossdresser, that's not exactly LGBT. And Kanji isn't a protagonist.

Fair enough with Ellie though.

the T in "LGBTQ" doesnt involve trasvestite as well as transexual people?

I'm guessing it's because a transvestite is different from a transexual(pre or post op) in that a transvestite wears the opposite gender clothes because they like them as clothes, transexual people wear them because they want to /be/ the opposite sex. The prior has no doubts or sexual "oddities", for want of a better word, because that sounds like I think there's something wrong with non straight people.

So most pre op transexuals are also transvestites but not all transvestites are transexuals.

Frankly the LGBTQ (Q being a brand new one to me, because in Britian it's old lady slang for "Gay", which is of course, reduntant) acronymn could do with some pruning. As in changing Lesbian and Gay to "Homosexual" more letters are going to be added and LGBTQ+ sounds like some gluttonous sandwitch.

Also, what the fuck is the Plus for? I mean what other sexualities are there, Queer now encompases all of them left out by the original acronymn going by the wikipedia definition of it being re-appropriated by the LGBTQ+ with side of fries and a strawberry milkshake folks.

 

[DrOswald]

Yes there should be more.

But this is a particularly tricky one because sexuality and gender identity is not something you can see just by looking at a person (unless the developer goes for offensive stereotypes.) This isn't like including a woman or a black man. Everyone can see it is a woman or a black dude. With a LGBTQ character you have to specifically go out of your way to show that this character is LGBTQ.

It's like the Dumbledore thing. Dumbledore is gay. We know because J. K. Rowling made a point of specifically making it known after the books had concluded. But you would never know from reading the books. It never came up and in most games for most characters it never will come up. So to make the character LGBTQ you have to find a way to work it in appropriate or not.

I mean, is Dr Shen (XCom) gay or strait? Does it matter in any way? Is it even appropriate to bring it up?

So sexuality/gender identity is only really brought up when it is appropriate. And that is in a lot of games, to be sure. Nathan Drake makes out with women, most JRPG's have a love interest, Kratos was married with children, etc. So it could be brought up in games like these where mentioning sexuality is important.

But that is intimidating to do. Even setting aside the fact that most game developers are heterosexual and would therefore be depicting something they have no experience in it is still intimidating. LGBTQ characters are closely scrutinized specifically because there are so few of them. No one cares if you are bad at writing dude hooking up with chick. But people will complain if you are bad at writing dude hooking up with dude.

Anyway, those are a couple of the reasons why I think we see so few LGBTQ characters in games.

 

[Dragonbums]

Nobody needs more of anything in terms of protagonists. However I just like how people flip their shit that their mold of boring, white dude, with brown hair and a stubble is broken by a woman.

I also love the argument of "shoehorned" because it means that white people are a default that can be in any situation, anywhere, at any time for any reason, but everyone else, whether they be a woman, a black person, a spanish person, or asian person needs explicit reason to not only exist- but be there. "Simply because" I suppose is only an excuse white characters can have. Everyone else better write a two paragraph essay for why they need to be there.

I personally would like to see protags of all kinds. Fuck, a game has me interested if the white dude is fucking blonde for shit's sake. That's how uninteresting protagonists in videogames are today.

 

[kasperbbs]

Need? Nope. Want? Well i don't, but i suppose some people might. But does it really matter? Only games that could make some use of it are rpg's and at least Bioware already has some options in their games and perhaps Bethesda too(never cared to find out). Actually i don't care, just give me a game thats fun to play.

 

[A-D.]

Snip for length

Again, no i didnt answer my own question, because cultural expectations are still not something that IS defined as such and can be no other way. Your parents MIGHT expect you to do X, or people in your school might expect you to do X, that doesnt mean you have to do it. Nor would you really be treated less because you choose not to go with the flow.

Secondly, "insulted for being a girl". Okay how's that different from being insulted for being a boy? Which was the point i was making. How is it different from being insulted for having red hair? Green eyes? A crooked nose? Being "ugly"? Being "fat"? If a boy insults a girl in the way of "Ewww, girls are icky, go away", is that sexism? No it isnt and our culture seems to thrive on this stupid hyperbole to make everything about some Ism. Sexism, Racism, Ableism, and all the other shit tumblr seems to throw a hissyfit over. Wanna know how to stop racism? Stop making race an issue. Sexism? Stop treating sex differently. Every anti-racist or anti-sexist person is doing nothing more than keep the topic alive, keep this "evil thing" going. We cant move on, we cant move past it because everything now is racism, or sexism or whatever-ism.

Women dont need to be coddled, or put on some pedestal where they are free from any criticism. They arent exempt from being treated just like everyone else on account of their "feelings". You have a right to be offended by something, you dont have a right to tell the offender to stop talking.

But lets get to the game part, yes games can be about everything. So why do they NEED to imitate reality? What if LA Noire was set in a fictional universe where racial tensions werent a thing? Because in our past there was that problem? Imagine a world, just for a second, where racism was never a thing. Where slavery was never a thing, or sexism, or anything was made an issue of. Now take this world and set it in our past where all these things never happened. A game can do that, its called alternate history, where things may have gone alot differently than what actually happened in our time. We cant just adjust the future in Sci-Fi settings, we can also look back and explore what they world may have been like had certain issues never existed, how they came to that point, why it diverged and how this might influence the future.

Also using Sims and SimCity as an example of how you wish the world was..not exactly a good comparison. Especially since you then proclaim that you dont have to critically think about it, you absolve the players of these games of having to think about issues. Why do you imply that they dont, or wouldnt? And how are those games any different from a game which alters history, either past, present or future to suit the theme it sets out to explore. You earlier used Spec Ops as an example of a subversion. How is that a Subversion? Its Full Metal Jacket in Game-form. Its Platoon. Its an anti-war game, it simply highlights just how terrible war is, how even a good man can make terrible choices and how all these choices eventually affect him psychologically. The only subversion here was that it decided to show what War would really be like, rather than the Hollywood-style that Call of Duty and consorts offer. If anyone ever thought war was glorious, they are stupid to begin with.

Nerdmode: The Buildings of Coruscant reach up to the Stratosphere, literally. The buildings are so tall that you cant even see the ground, its a city spanning the entire planet, layer upon layer. So yes you can fall several thousand feet down without hitting the ground. Take the largest building in the world, remember its height, now imagine how often you'd have to stack that building on top of itself to reach our planets Stratosphere. Now ask yourself if gravity was less the further away from the planet you got (it is, to a small degree). Anakin surviving the fall is essentially explained by him being a Jedi, its a cop-out sure, but its as much of a cop-out as explaining that the Wizard is throwing the fireballs. Also there is no law that states every universe, fantasy or otherwise has to adhere to our laws of physics. They can literally run on their own laws because thats part of that universe, its fiction. Its not real.

You are implying it has to follow our laws, our history. It doesnt. Go back far enough and change something in history. Now think how that change could affect the next hundred, or thousand years. What if the colonial powers never discovered America? What if they never took slaves? How would the world be different because of it? Its a small change, but everything changes from that point forward. I will admit its shoddily done if a game doesnt set up the explanation that X didnt happen somewhere in the plot, hence allowing this fictional world to be different, but the implication of it having happened is still there.

Again, you dont get to pick and choose what is true and what isnt. What is the "norm" is not something you get to decide based on flimsy evidence of, statistically speaking, very small sample sizes. If one woman was raped in your neighborhood, right now, does that mean your neighborhood has a rape-epidemic? Or was it one isolated case which should be dealt with? The further we broaden the scope of an issue, the less real it gets because it is literally driven ad absurdum. It becomes, as you point out, parody.

Also, i must have missed where Walking Dead was about racism, rather than surviving the zombie apocalypse. It is human nature to distrust people you dont know, precisely because you dont know them. We have evolved several instincts based around this..suspicion of anything foreign, an innate Xenophobia if you will. You cant teach that out of people, you simply cant. At least not quickly, it takes time, maybe thousands of years for us to literally evolve past those instincts. Making progress to help that along is fine, but the more you demand results now, as if you had a magic wand in your pocket that could fix everything is not the right way to go about it because all you do is piss people off by implying they are racist, or sexist, or whatever-ist on some fundamental level when they arent. If you called me a Sexist, or a Racist, i would punch you in the face, because i will not stand idle to being told who i am by someone who does not know me, who has never interacted with me.

Now not saying you did, but thats the general idea of it, if you keep telling men that they are sexist..you arent doing yourself any favours. Telling white people they are racist, again not helping. They might be racist or sexist, but if you implicate everyone to be because "culture" or "society", you assign blame and then shift it onto something we cant change overnight. So you are left with blaming men for being sexist (all of them), or white people for being racist (all of them), because society and culture are these faceless masses, its like blaming the monster under your bed for stealing the cookies that you ate. Sexism and Racism go every way, blacks can be just as racist as any white slave-owner from the 16th century. Women can be just as sexist towards men as some men can be sexist towards women.

The moment you start assigning blame unilaterally to everyone in some group, you simply alienate them. You know, xenophobia.

 

[rgrekejin]

No, not really, for the simple reason that in the vast majority of games, the sexuality of the protagonist is completely irrelevant. It literally never comes up.

I mean, really, the default assumption here seems to be that unless we're specifically told that a character is LGBT, they must not be. But why are you assuming that? It is, to use the popular term, heteronormative thinking.

It's not that almost all characters are straight, it's that we have literally no data on most game characters one way or the other, because their sexuality is completely unimportant. Maybe Chris Redfield is gay. Maybe some of the many iterations of Link have been transexual. Perhaps Ezio is bisexual (in fact, I'd be kind of shocked it he wasn't). We don't know one way or the other, and, as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So it's kind of misleading to point out how few LGBT characters there are in games when the simple fact is that characters in games with any sort of a defined sexuality at all are pretty rare to begin with.

EDIT: Just to be clear - I think the absence of sexuality from most games is a GOOD THING. In most games it wouldn't serve any purpose, and randomly injecting it in to games for its own sake is a non-sequitur at best.

 

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

I think that kind of press is your answer.

People arguing for inclusivity because "I feel weird playing some-one not of my own gender".

Now this is what I was arguing against in another thread. It's a bugbear of mine. Not a "legendary" one, but certainly getting up to "dire".

The argument against having homogenous protagonists has NOTHING to do with "representation" or who players can "empathise" with. As a guy, I've been able to empathise with plenty of fictional female characters. Not a problem.

My step-niece has enjoyed many games with male protagonists, including the last "Assassin's Creed" game. I don't think she'd be particularly happy at the suggestion that the new "Assassin's Creed" game isn't for her because it only features male protagonists. I haven't had a chance to ask her about it but I'm guessing she'd find the assumption that she *couldn't* enjoy a game because of the sex of its protagonist to be pretty damn condescending.

The lack of variety in game protagonists is not, in and of itself, a problem. It's a symptom of a problem. And that problem is a lack of variety in game DEVELOPERS. (Less of one, I have to say, than it used to be.) As long as games are made for a narrow group of people by people who are members of that group themselves, we won't see a proper expansion of the role of gaming in wider society. And we need that expansion.

More variety in devs = more variety in games = more variety in gamers. And since most devs start out as gamers, that means even more variety in devs as a result. That's what's needed if you really want to see gaming taken in new directions, or rather reaching its fullest potential. To a certain extent I think it's already happening. But I'd like to see even more evidence of it.

 

[marioandsonic]

Yeah, I suppose we do. Only 14 year old Call of Duty players would be the type to complain about it.

Seriously, who the fuck cares. Not the majority of gamers (excluding immature dudebros that probably only play WoW or CoD and little else, like the flipside SJW army that ignores the numerous indie games that feature well-written female or gay protagonists just because they aren't AAA games).

I just wanted to say that I don't know many "dudebros" that play World of Warcraft. They'd probably say that's too nerdy for them.

As far as the OP goes, I would say we don't NEED any, but having more would still be a good thing. Of course, I don't want to have it so every games has a gay character just for the sake of having one. I also think it's a bit counter-intuitive to try and force game creators to shoehorn them in.

 

[Supdupadog]

The lack of variety in game protagonists is not, in and of itself, a problem. It's a symptom of a problem. And that problem is a lack of variety in game DEVELOPERS. (Less of one, I have to say, than it used to be.) As long as games are made for a narrow group of people by people who are members of that group themselves, we won't see a proper expansion of the role of gaming in wider society. And we need that expansion.

I don't quite buy this line of thinking.

For one, it seems for many a game, the publisher was the one being very adamant on which kind of character needed to be in the game and front and center. Diversity in devs is nice, but it seems like we also very much need a diversity in publisher thinking or else every video game out of norm still has to fight tooth and nail to get things put in.

And publishers are very rarely creative types. They are money managers, and they are more interested in market trends.

And second, I don't like this idea that the only way for more diverse characters is to have diverse people behind them. Like the only way a female protagonist gets written is if a girl wrote her apparently. Or that the creative director has to be black to get a black protagonist.

I think we can ask more of the creative types. If they can create characters who are dragons, elves, aliens, anthropomorphic turtles, we can ask for female or even queer characters.

 

[Pink Gregory]

We need more characters, not a checklist.

No, not really, for the simple reason that in the vast majority of games, the sexuality of the protagonist is completely irrelevant. It literally never comes up.

EDIT: Just to be clear - I think the absence of sexuality from most games is a GOOD THING. In most games it wouldn't serve any purpose, and randomly injecting it in to games for it's own sake is a non-sequitur at best.

I'm surprised that this point isn't made more frequently in these discussions.

It serves a purpose if a substantial portion of the game is about getting to know people intimately for whatever reason; I don't think RPGs really do this well, but something a bit like yer Tex Murphys, yer detective adventure games, yer visual novels even.

Personally, when I'm presented with such a character, it's probably the last thing that I think about. Sexuality is the last thing I'm going to be concerned about when I've got things to be doing, unless the nature of their sexuality is of import to what I'm doing.

 

[Therumancer]

To get right down to it without getting into a whole spiel about it, there is a lack of protagonists in video games that fall outside of the heterosexual norm. Now I'm not talking about games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age where main characters can choose whether to be heterosexual or not. I'm talking about games where the protagonist has been written as being LGBTQ+. Off the top of my head I can only think of My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant and maybe Gone Home if we can stretch the definition of what constitutes a protagonist. Read Only Memories promises to be more LGBT friendly as a video game but it's not clear at whether or not the main character will be heterosexual.

This also isn't just a matter of inclusion. Yes I would like to see more protagonists that I can relate more closely to as a gay male but I that's not the only reason I would like more LGBT characters. There's just so many more varied stories you can tell if you don't just stick to the rigid formula that seems to be in place for video games.

I'm not saying I dislike games with heterosexual protagonists, I mean if I did what would I have to play. I also understand why there are not very many games with protagonists that are explicitly LGBTQ+, video games want to appeal to the core demographic of heterosexual 16-30 year old men and I get that. I just want a little more breaking of the mould.

Anyway, enough of me talking, I want to know the users' opinions on the matter.

Well, there are more than you think. The main character in "Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle Of The Flesh" is gay for example and indeed attending therapy about it where it comes up. When you start looking into games made in Japan you find tons of gay and lesbian characters, especially when you look under labels like "Yaoi" and "Yuri" and they don't always involve outright porn. That said when it DOES come to porn games you have the two part "Lightning Warrior Raidy" a sort of lite RPG/hentai game where the main character is about as lesbian as your going to get. "Loren Amazon Princess" is another game that features heavy lesbian elements, though it's not a sex game (unlike Lighting Warrior Raidy), Loren herself is pretty much a Lesbian amazon, your character who can be either male or female can be straight or gay in either direction with the various characters you run into (and that includes potentially romancing Loren).

To be honest, given that your dealing with such a small percentage of the population, and also a behavior (or state of being if you prefer) that is pretty much gross to the overwhelming number of norms, your dealing with pretty good representation in how often it does come up, and the simple fact that you can find entire series of games, albeit off the beaten path, that cater specifically to that. Not to mention that as much as you might not want to include them, games where you can choose gay romance options without the character being written in any particular way do count, especially when your dealing with something like "Mass Effect" with tons of dialogue and characterization behind the protagonist even if you get to name them. Indeed one of the big problems with "Mass Effect" has always been the lack of control and how things are so heavily written that what you select doesn't always wind up mattering as what you choose doesn't necessarily match what's going to come out of Shepard's mouth. Dragon Age "Origins" with it's silent lead is a case where you can make a better argument, but "Hawke" in Dragon Age II was again pretty heavily scripted and developed.


I don't think we need more, but time will tell if we see more. Honestly I think right now the whole gay rights movement has gotten offensive enough where it's begun discouraging people to want to work with it. The situation with Bioware for example hasn't gone unnoticed, where the writers decided to give gay options in a game, and then it became an entitlement where they were actually attacked for not having them in another project (The Old Republic Online) where it was touted as a major social issue. Ubisoft is getting similar treatment from liberals because they had a female protagonist in a game, and now it's seen as an entitlement that all of their games at least have the option for one. Basically nobody wants to work with these kinds of groups when they start making demands and telling you what you have to do with your games, or attacking you for exercising your own creative freedom.

My basic advice is to keep an eye out, and understand when dealing with a minority, you oftentimes have to look toward fringe sources. Your best bet as I pointed out, is to specifically do searches for "Yaoi" games or those with those elements, and you'll probably find a number of them from importers and the like. That said I imagine you'll see more representation as an option at least within the AAA market, assuming the gay rights movement can learn to zip it, and just go with the flow. By all means express appreciation for inclusion when it comes up, but when it goes so far as to attack someone for daring not to present gay alternatives to heterosexual romances (hey, maybe the writer just felt it didn't fit his characters, or not being gay just couldn't write it well) that's when you start to see problems.

 

[Silvanus]

Games would benefit from greater diversity, as other art forms have and continue to.

There are a great many people intentionally missing the point of the question (such as those talking about how we need well written characters, which should go without saying), or focusing on minutiae (like the use of the word "need").

 

[BarkBarker]

Apart from maybe a few nods and awareness jokes about stereotypes and the like, would you really get anything different out of it? The game is still marketed to straight men, so you'll likely get a lot of tits and ass somewhere anyway and it'll likely be an interesting lampshading, but not much else. If they were gay or trans or whatever, would it really matter? Do you want a game with multiple races to have some sort of input on racism and thus the same with gays and trans, or do just wanna see them in a position where that preference is so meaningless they coulda been hetero and nothing changed?

Basically my point is it can either mean a lot or it can mean nothing, there is no victory in these kind of situations unfortunately, however it could be an interesting experience to live the life of a man who cannot marry whom they love....wait thats already been done in multiple different forms, er maybe it'll be fun to experience feeling like one gender trapped inside another....I guess??

 

[Darkmantle]

More specifically, I'd like to see more characters that are 'out and proud.' Mainly because it seems to me that there's this logic that the quality of a queer character can be directly tied to how 'out' they are.

Practically abstinent gay man who is so out of touch with his sexual identity it's hilarious? Great character!

Effeminate gay man who's a total queen and loves having sex with other men? Bad character!

You know that the instant a developer puts your "out and proud" ideal character into a game, they would get a huge wave of controversy for "stereotyping" gay people. It's lose-lose really. What are devs to do?

 

[Stavros Dimou]

Most games doesn't apply a sexual identity to a character anyway.
Some do for story purposes,so at that point it comes down to if there is a need for more stories written with such protagonists.
Here is what's truth however: Usually,at least most story writers,make the protagonist of their stories somewhat like them. Actually a very big percentage of stories if not the majority of them,are written in first person,meaning the writer forgets he is writing about another character,and writes as if the character himself is writing the story.
Having that in mind,we realize that in order for there to be more games with stories that have homosexuals as protagonists, there should be more homosexual people becoming involved with video game making.
Thus its up to them to change how things are. Usually strangers don't do favors to random persons,so it is kind of hard to just see an increase of stories with homosexual protagonists without a rise on homosexual video game makers.
So here is my personal advice: If you want something to be done,do it yourself!
This can be a great encouragement to drive you to change the way things are.