Jimquisition: Tomopology Life

[Abnaxis]

My point isn't that the gay option is more shallow, but that the shallowness is exacerbated by the fact that it was tacked on with a minimum amount of token effort, by people who don't have any artistic desire to add a homosexual option but included it because the corporate guys don't want a PR headache.

How can you tell that's the intent? Bioware's shallow normally, and they've had gay characters in their games since before this became an internet kerfuffle.

I mean, if they wanted a PR headache, wouldn't Bioware have taken relationships out of the games after Mass Effect at the very least? That was a huge shitstorm. Why add a gay option when the path of least resistance would be removing relationships, not adding gays.

So tell me, how do you know so certainly that these are just to check a box?

First, it would most definitely be more of a shitstorm if they had removed relationships from Mass Effect altogether. The only shitstorm that resulted originally came from conservative pundits who aren't even end-users. I wouldn't be surprised if the "controversy" actually increased sales. Dropping romance, OTOH, would have pissed off a large sector of fans, decreasing sales. Gamers expect 'ships in their space-opera RPGS...

On to the more important point, here's the thing: what I'm talking about is a gut reaction, based on intuition and first impressions. I'll do my best to pin down why "eye-roll" is my first instinct, but I'm not 100% certain.

Given the nature of this feeling, I don't know how to describe it without a specific example, so I'm going to talk about Dragon Age: Origins. I have a lot more hours with DA:O than the sequels, and I'd like to avoid the nonsense of "but it's in the fuuuuutuuure so sexual orientation totally doesn't matter" (and it is nonsense) that you get when talking about Mass Effect.

So in DA:O, you have four romance options: Alistair, the sensitive, playful, eager-for-commitment white knight looking for a soulmate to grow old with. Morrigan, the bullshit fanservice romance that makes no sense with her character but you can't make a character with such copious side-boob and not let the player hit that. Leliana, the exotic french choir girl, with all the savage church-repressed sexuality you would expect from something like this. Finally, there's Zevran, the damaged bad boy with a cavalier attitude, whom you can fix if only you can pierce through his fear of commitment.

Alistair and Morrigan are straight-only. For Alistair, it's because his entire character hinges on being traditional, and even the cynical writer has limits. Morrigan, because if she went both ways then homosexual women would have more options than homosexual men, and That Wouldn't Be Fair. Besides, we all know players want Morrigan for the Side Boob, because she has the personality of a reddit troll [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comicsandcosplay/comics/stolen-pixels/6864-Stolen-Pixels-149-Approval-Ratings].

That leaves Leliana and Zevran. Great! Switch some pronouns around and we're good to go! I'm sure there are a ton of gay men who fantasize about (Justified) Sexy Nun [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DracoInLeatherPants]!

It's like the homosexual options are a bad console port--the developer went through a minimum amount of effort, to take a thing designed for one environment, and shoehorn it into another. They put in a token effort, so they can expand their audience while incurring a minimum amount of cost, with little to no actual regard to what it adds to the experience or how to make it more appropriate for the target platform. And like most token inclusions, it masquerades as "inclusiveness" when it's only checking the box on the PR checklist.

 

[Abnaxis]

But that is a problem of inherently bad writing, or writing that, though not necessarily "bad", is at the very least done haphazardly. Bioware do have some extremely inorganic notions of romance, but to be fair, they're boring regardless of gender, for the most part.

Inclusiveness is a step in the right direction with regards to correcting this, though. Look at other media, like television, for example: afroamericans were incredibly token in the 80's and 90s (Fresh Prince, Cosby show et al), as well as gays and gay culture ( Will & Grace). It took a bit of a leap going from these shows to shows like say The Wire or Six Feet Under, where such topics and people are treated with a degree of depth. It's work in progress, so to speak.

Yeah, I'm not saying developers shouldn't try to be inclusive. I'm just pointing out that my first gut reaction when I see the homosexual options is usually to roll my eyes, for the token-ness. I'm sure I'm not alone in this feeling, and I think it's a large driver in the conflict.

I think people see calls for more inclusiveness, interpret as "token homosexuals are good, please give us more half-assed efforts at political correctness!" and jump into the fray. Then ugly names like "bigot" start getting bandied about, and we all roast in flames.

 

[Lilani]

While I whole heartedly cheer for gay people, my logic being the more they want men the more women are left for me, I must admit that I do not enjoy watching two men kiss and hearing another man say "my husband" makes my skin crawl. This isn't something I choose consciously , it's an reaction I have no control of, I was born this way....much like gay people were born gay.

And if I do have to watch two men kiss in my games it WILL affect my enjoyment of the game. So do not be so quick to say it doesn't affect others.

And how do you think gay people feel, living in a world where 90% of the population and nearly 100% of the media they're exposed to is straight people kissing and feeling each other up, and men talking about "my wife" and women talking about "my husband?"

Nobody is entitled to a world where they never have to witness anything they might find "objectionable" or "icky." If you are a well-adjusted human being and accept this, then no, you haven't lost anything. But if for some reason you do feel entitled to a world where everything you come in contact with must fit with your world view, and anything that doesn't is a personal and deliberate slight against you, then I suppose you can be lead to believe you've lost something in the existence of another option you don't have to partake in.

 

[Thanatos2k]

The reason we like people sticking to their guns is because it's standing up for what you believe in. When you claim to have changed your mind it's often not very believable. Politicians especially. People hate hypocrites worse than someone who just holds a view you disagree with.

We hate FAKE apologies. Apologies done not because you *actually* changed your mind, but only because it placates people.

Make no mistake - Nintendo is only apologizing because they feel they have to. They will make sure "future" Tomodachi Life games will be inclusive - and so it's very clear they are simply not going to make any more.

 

[Alloflifedecays]

The problem is that there are people for whom equality and social justice are a zero sum game, and for whom every victory women, LGBT folk and POC gain is a loss.

They're called really mediocre people, people who inhabit socially favoured demographics but who are actually quite shit on an individual basis. They typically have an overly high opinion of themselves which, in some dark corner of their mind, they know is overinflated, and that scares them. They base their identities on their exceptionalism, even though they are only exceptional in a rigged game; their egos are built upon a status that can only be artificially maintained. They manage to be above average in a system that regards women, LGBT folk and racial minorities as automatically dismissable, but the more that gets eroded, the more people get drawn into consideration and ultimately declared less shit than them. They slip further and further onto the bottom of the heap once the default position stops working out for them as much.

They get angry at "social justice warriors" for letting more and more people through the gate - people they know will overtake them. They take a sense of exclusionary value from their maleness, their straightness, their whiteness, because they honestly have very little else of societal value. They also get very, very angry when other people try to level the playing field, lest the fact that they are shit be exposed.

They like that Nintendo included them but not gay people in Tomodachi Life, because the sign that only they are worth accommodating and that gay people are still dismissable validates their sense of worth in their straightness, and they got mad about Nintendo not "sticking to their guns" because they mistakenly assumed that Nintendo cared as much about actively excluding gay people as they do.

Fortunately, these people are, as was mentioned before, shit, and the non-shit people we gain with greater inclusivity are worth the loss.

 

[Schadrach]

Well at least it wasn't a shitfest like the one in the last thread where the now banned user insisted on claiming that homosexuality was a mental illness.

It wasn't all that long ago that homosexuality actually was considered a mental illness, and the reasons it isn't now are mostly a shift in cultural views on homosexuality (that is to say it didn't lose its status as a mental illness because of a change in the scientific understanding of homosexuality but rather the social understanding of homosexuality). The reason that pedophilia and zoophilia (for example) are mental illnesses and homosexuality isn't is mostly cultural (in that we classify being distressed by certain sexual proclivities and having other sexual proclivities at all as mental illness precisely because they are at odds with what the culture at large considers acceptable), in other words.

 

[MB202]

I apologize a lot, to the point where I sometimes worry it's lost it's meaning. I only apologize a lot because I really am worried if I've offended or upset people with what I say and do (unless they're deliberately messing with me, in which case, whatever). Really, I try to do my best to not be pig-headed and hopefully not incite Jimquisition-level rage with what I say. Thankfully, that's never happened (except possibly when I was arguing about the George Zimmerman case, which I felt very passionately about), but I'm always on my toes... mostly because I really do feel bad when I've made others feel bad.