Interactive Representation
I like video games. I hate a lot about the industry, the culture, and I definitely hate a lot about individual games, some more than others, but on the whole, I really like video games. It’s clear, though, that the games industry has a lot of problems with women and minorities. I also can’t exactly ignore their role in my life as one of the ways I explored gender and sexuality.
I had the first hints of gender-based doubt in my mind when I was in high school. During my sophomore year, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t male, but the really hard part came next. Because, well, if I wasn’t a dude… what was I?
My first answer to this question was that I was agender, or totally removed from the gender spectrum. And while this works for some people, it became clear to me that I was mostly using it as a guard, to stop myself from thinking about it further. By distancing myself from the notion of gender, I was stopping myself from thinking about the question further. (And that is just my experience with the identification, not an overall statement about the label.) But throughout all of this gender confusion, even before I knew I was a woman, one thing was pretty consistent.
I would always play women in video games.
I’m not saying that any guy who always plays women in video games is a trans woman automatically- far from it. But for me, I feel like the purpose is different- it was an exploration of gender in a medium that was sanctioned by the game. After all, the developers put the options there, so I wasn’t doing anything that could be considered wrong. A lot of games such as Pokemon allow you to choose whether you’re a boy or a girl when you start the game. Obviously, this is a little simplistic. Games with more in-depth character customization, such as Saint’s Row 3 or a bunch of modern RPGs like Fallout or Skyrim, allow players like me to customize much more than just gender, but video games have strict laws that can’t be broken. Without modding or altering the code, you only have the tools that the game provides you to create a character. Still, without fail, in each of these games, I would play a female character even before I had any inkling that I myself was a girl.
But at some point, the limitations of these games began to show. A lot of their female characters are either weirdly sexualized or locked out of certain options because of their gender. Additionally, so many games provide little to no support for any genders beyond male or female. So at some point, this was going to become… outdated.
That’s around the time I moved to tabletop, which is a much more open-ended form of storytelling and character creation.
The point is, interactive mediums such as video games, particularly those with character creation engines, are able to immerse their players into the role of a character much more deeply than non-interactive mediums such as movies or TV shows. That means that video games can provide insights into experiences beyond the player’s own, and even help the player to realize things about themselves. Furthermore, now that video game development is accessible to more people, creators are able to tell stories that personally impact them. But we have yet to see this level of immersion come in from many triple-A video game companies, where often the games are designed by focus group and marketability. Here, in the world of profit over art, we see harmful stereotypes about the LGBT+ community, people of color, disabled people, and so on and so forth. Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate has one of its more unhinged male villains display an obsessive attraction to Jacob, one of the two main characters. Even games that attempt to market themselves as progressive miss the mark- Cyberpunk 2077 has run afoul even before coming out, with an in-universe advertisement depicting a trans woman and the slogan ‘mix it up.’ However, the winds of change are, as always, blowing fiercely. A later entry in the Assassin’s Creed series, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, allowed players of either the male or female protagonist to romance any character with any romance option, with little or no change in dialogue. And the Cyberpunk devs apologized for how the in-game ad could have been taken, explaining that it was meant as a commentary on the commodification of trans aesthetics by major corporations. And, yeah, the irony of them being a company doing this to market their game isn’t lost on me.
Video games have a huge potential to be an exploratory space for the questioning, a gender sandbox to pile up experiences in and wipe them all out if you feel they don’t work for you. The games are just, unfortunately, not using their potential. The overfocus on profit and marketability leads developers to play it safe and put their players onto railroaded paths, all for the sake of sales and cash. And vigilance is needed- anyone involved in activism can tell you that it’s painfully easy for work to go to waste if you get complacent. The backslide is real. However, I believe that video games can be fantastically helpful- and we have the power to help them realize that potential.