As a gamer and, at the very least, a fan of feminism I found this to be quite an interesting ordeal. It seems that Electronic Arts is hosting a panel for GLAAD. Here is a link to the event on the GLAAD site.
As someone who has gamed for nearly all my life in both casual, hardcore, and even some competitive play, homophobia has always been something I have taken issue with. Various homosexual derogatory names roll off the tongues of so many so easily while gaming and it is ultimately the reason why I mute and never speak to others while playing. This concerns me greatly, as I am being pushed away from gaming by my dedication to the dignity of others.
Yet, despite the efforts of the various companies to prevent homophobia via user-agreements and terms of service, it continues to be rampant. This panel will hopefully shed some light on improvements in dealing with homophobia in these electronic communities.
However, the issue is not only the player's own personal expressions of homophobia, but how homosexuals have been presented in video games too. While at present the issue is primarily homophobia amongst the gaming communities and its players, I do hope at least some amount of conversing is done about how homosexuals are portrayed in games by the gaming companies.
This event is big news in the gaming industry for one reason: Electronic Arts (EA). This company is big, really BIG! They are hosting. While that alone may not seem like a major step, it is certainly a great gesture from one of the biggest video game companies.
Kotaku.com (a video game blog) let GLAAD post an editorial . I found the numbers on here shocking, as I cannot believe there is not more outrage.
What is really great is that this is only the beginning of a much larger GLAAD project investigating the issue of homophobia in gaming.
Ultimately, I am eager to see what comes out of this panel. I think this is a big break in fighting homophobia in gaming. I dream of a day where I can unmute my in-game voice chat.
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I'm glad this event is happening. Heterosexism and sexism in WoW is completely rampant. I used to leave all the chat channels to avoid having to read something completely hateful nearly every few seconds until I finally decided to stop playing altogether.
Hooray!!! :) I love gaming too so this makes me really excited. I am truly aware that whenever a gay person is represented in a video game it is always the borderline-offensive, stereotypical, super-super-flamboyant, brainless character that everyone thinks is ridiculous. And if the character can be played in the game, it will usually never get picked by the player. I remember there was a very feminine male character on a battle game my boyfriend and I used to play all the time and the way he was portrayed was absolutely ridiculous. I can't wait for the day gay people can be represented as simply PEOPLE and do not have to be defined by their sexuality alone.
Thanks for the link to this Vater.
I'm a gamer too, and I agree that this is a really serious issue in the game-playing community. When you enter a multi-player on line game, you enter a community that is similar to the internet chat world, but even more straight- and male-centered. We've had a lot of good discussion on Feministing about the hostility and violence towards gays and women in the blog-sphere, but not as much discussion about other places on the internet.
Kudos to EA for hosting, and for GLAAD to taking the issue of gaming seriously. Except what is up with GLAAD using the term "gaymer" UGH!
Vater talks about not using real-time chat during gaming to avoid the hostile environment. I never use chat, but for a different reason. I don't want to be outed as a "girl".
In a world where you can play characters of any gender, most of the female characters are played by men (and how they are played is a whole thesis and story unto itself). So I can avoid being either hit on or bullied (or sometimes both at the same time) by just letting everyone assume I'm one of the guys. You would not believe the misogyny present in "casual gaming". But once I turn on my mike, all my anonymity goes away.
I think it's best summed up in a NSFW comic
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
I completely agree with your perspective about being outed as the girl in the game. I play most of my games on Steam (especially partial to Team Fortress 2). There are fairly good number of women who play that game, at least from what I've noticed. However, the harassment begins and I just pick up and leave. Fighting or arguing with anyone in that state of mind is just futile.
Glad you liked the post. Thank you for your comment!
I want to go to this panel, but alas I found out about it too late and already had plans.
As embarrassing as it is to admit, I am a huge gamer. I have a Wii, PS3, and every console that has been available since the Atari. For real. I collect them. I love video games. However, above all the other systems, I love my Xbox 360 the most, and I love playing on Live. I love to play Halo and UT3, but it is impossible to engage in un-muted gameplay that is not rampant with anti-gay slurs. If someone calls me a "faggot," I usually retort with something but they end up finding out that I am female, making it that much worse. Something needs to be done about the culture in gaming that is totally unwelcoming to women as well as the entire LGBT community.
Oh, I might add that my favorite response to the various homophobic and/or racist comments that get hurled is, "Oh look, talking farm animals."
EA rarely deserves props for anything, but good on them for this.
Re: gay characters in games... I've been a pretty hardcore gamer my whole life, and while I admit the quantity of games I've played has dipped dramatically in the last few years, I honestly can't recall if I've ever seen a gay character. Now, keep in mind, I'm not counting the ultra-stereotypes, because they're simply flamboyant or whatever; they may be designed for people to look at and think "omg gaaaaay", but I've never seen anything that states, yes, this character is a homosexual (think Vega from Street Fighter).
The closest I can think of is Mass Effect and the potential lesbian relationship. But that's with an alien from an all-female race, which lets Bioware explore the surface of homosexuality while giving them a storytelling out against the anti-gay crusaders. You can decide your human female character is a lesbian, but as the main character there's little storytelling done about your creation. That's about it.
What have I missed? Or are there really not any openly gay characters anywhere, whether they're treated as stereotypes or not?
Yes, EA is not a great company, they just make a lot of games. At one point they were almost running a programmer sweat shop (programmers working 14 hour days with no pay). But to host something like this is a real step for them.
I am also glad to see that there are a variety of other representatives from other prevalent companies (Microsoft) coming to participate.
I will be sure to keep an eye out for any further coverage from this weekend and post it.
I'm just trying to think of American-made games with gay characters...I guess I play too many J-RPGs to know a good list. Since most of what I played started in an East Asian country, I can't say what this panel will do for queer characters in those games.
The American market seemed pretty good for me, but my 360 has only been recently aquired. For the most part I've played games where you design your own character, and there are other characters in the game you can have a relationship with. I did notice a lack of male/male relationships though female/female was acceptable. Mass Effect and Fallout 3 specifically.
I do believe in Fallout 3 (and one of the Neverwinter Night games) you could have a homosexual relation with a prostitute (both male and female).
Actually Fallout 3 did have a lesbian couple of Ghouls, I believe. They ran the bed and breakfast in Underworld. They were presented as really nice folks who were welcoming.
Fallout 3 had one prostitute I ever saw (and, sadly, I visited every area on the map). You could hire her as a female, but regardless, you go to the bedroom, sleep for the night, and then she leaves without so much as a fade out to suggest anything actually occurred.
You're right about NWN, although it's kind of "meh" that the non-PC involved was a prostitute. It's like, of course they'll do it, they're getting paid. But the writing involved in the interaction was pretty good.
(Man, I sound like all I do is play video games to pick up virtual hookers.)
Thanks for the reminder about the ghouls. I remember how baffling it was to see they were willing to show a happy lesbian couple but they had zero concept of how to piece together anything resembling a functional romantic story arc.
Fallout 3 didn't even have relationships. I mean, it theoretically did, but the writing was so poor and the game's desire to avoid any sort of actual romantic or sexual situations so blatant that it had the titillation effect of Sesame Street.
Really, I'm not sure any significant ground towards relatively narrow goals like reducing homophobia among the gamer population will be made until American video game designers stop getting tripped up by our society's issues with sex and reality. For the community to treat something as normal, that which the community is based around has to treat it as normal first.
The really sad thing is that games were more open-minded about all this back in the day. Fallout 1 and 2 had sex all over the place, shotgun weddings, etc. The Baldur's Gate games had relationships that took a long time to build. Granted, that was when no one expected digital boobies, since the tech wasn't there, and anyone going that route now has more potential problems- the expectation of realistic-looking scenes on one side and overwrought Puritanical nonsense on the other.
But geez, it's been over ten years since those games came out. Games come in from overseas with a much more open view towards sex- well beyond Mass Effect's half-second of butt- and our society hasn't collapsed from the popularity of those. You'd think some developer here would have realized that by now.
Yes, Fallout 1 & 2 were highly sexualized games. I believe in 2 you could be hired as a "fluffer."
Baldur's Gate had some of the most developed relationships I have ever seen. Been awhile since I've played those.
On the Ghouls in Fallout 3...yeah, that could be seen either way. I thought it as a Mother/Daughter relationship, myself, based on the characterizations, but I could see couple.
I guess it's as Spiffy says. The problem is more with the lack of gay characters and options than with the current presentation. The gaming community could get better if they had to work alongside and have interactions with well-represented gays. Heck, it'd be cool if they made you play as a gay character. As a woman, I get frustrated that I'm constantly forced into playing a male character, let alone one that is attracted to female characters that have...less than desirable characteristics (like I said, J-RPGs, so we're talking "utter devotion" and "sweet" crap like that. I want a badass girl!). Playing a gay male isn't my fantasy either, but it'd be something different.
There's very, very few characters I've come across in the games I've played that were gay, acknowledged in the narrative as gay, and didn't have it played off as one enormous joke the whole story. Really, the first ones that come to mind are the acupuncturist in Shadow Hearts and the dress-making brothers in Shadow Hearts II. The former uses his job as an excuse to feel up the handsome male lead (which horrifies and disgusts him, as shown by his in-game "Sanity Meter" dropping to zero) while the latter only accept payment in the form of trading cards featuring over-muscled men. Yeah, not too many flattering portrayals there.
Well, now that I'm thinking of it, there was main character Emil from Tales of Symphonia 2 who the game all but flat-out says is in love with older, wiser Richter. There's actually a scene in the game where he's reflecting on the fact that one of the other party members was forced to kill the woman he loved with his own hands, and goes on to wonder what he would do if he had to fight Richter. He then spends the rest of the scene frantically (and poorly) rationalizing himself out of the implicit admission that he's in love with Richter.
... Of course, he ends up with the female lead Marta in the end anyway, but I'll take that as meaning we actually have a non-stereotypical bisexual video game hero and call it a victory.
I spent a while thinking about this. All I managed to come up with are Abu'l Nuquod from Assassin's Creed (a gay man), and Makoto from Enchanted Arms (a trans woman). Yeah, not many.
Personally, I don't think Makoto is portrayed as a trans woman; he's portrayed as a very gay, flamboyant transvestite/cross dresser.
Japan does tend to conflate the two...
The reason I thought he was a trans woman is that he identifies himself as a woman, but it's hard to say.
If he is, he's a grossly offensive caricature of trans women.
After thinking on it, it seems more to me like whoever was writing the character mixed together a bunch of stereotypes about drag queens, trans women, and flamboyant gay men. Makoto was described as a "woman in a man's body," which is what made me think the game intended trans woman (I'm aware that not all trans people think this is an accurate description, but it is a pretty common one). I liked some of the direction they took Makoto near the end of the game but hoo boy, did they throw in offensive stereotypes to muck it up.
Most of the hard-core otaku gamers I know play import games from Japan (I've been playing imports since the Sega CD system) and the disparity in sexual images between U.S. titles and imports is bizarre.
While it may be reflective of who they are/were marketing to (here in the U.S. gaming, like comic books has traditionally been seen as a "kids" market whereas in Japan there have always been adult markets) Japanese games have always had better and more open romantic expressions. In particular the RPG format games from Japan that feature a "love story" almost always are aimed toward an adult audience and allow the player to guide based on their own aesthetic and interests.
In U.S. markets it seems like not only to they make virtually all games "straight dude" oriented, but they inject the notion of romance into games targeted toward a much younger market.
I think it's partially a byproduct of how overblown each game is in development and the expectations placed on that game to outsell every other game out there. Instead of making fifteen games directed at a bunch of different markets and players they make one or two games with every damn idea dumped in to it, then they trim out anything that might have made one niche happy with the gaming experience but could bother another based on the broadest market possible.
It's the "summer blockbuster" principle. The so-called free-market which should encourage a diverse range of products has been corrupted by the gaming reporting industry which, in all fairness, can only report on a few games and so the designers focus on the broad net approach.
In Japan the gaming community is much more important to getting the good word out about the games that are great, so the media influence isn't an absolute primary influence. Gamers, like manga readers, find an author or a team they like and they follow that groups efforts. Whereas here the fanship is much more passive and will wait for Adam Sessler or Olivia Munn to tell us what game to buy.
Any real hardcore gamers or people who really want to get in to gaming with as little expense as possible: Go find a used Sega Dreamcast (mine was $30) and get a stack of blank CD-Rs! Sega ran Windows CE and a pre 2000 model will read burns with no problem, and there are many forums out there with self-booting versions of import games from the Japanese market, many of them based on manga featuring queer and trans characters.
This is impressive for EA. I've heard many a not good thing about them over the years. So I guess this is a good step forward. I wonder how much this will really accomplish, though. Other than possibly encouraging game developers to portray gay characters as people instead of just jokes (funny enough most of the joke gay characters are in games developed in Japan... off the top of my head I can't remember any totally out there gay characters in American developed games), I don't think there is much anyone can do about the online gaming community. I have never liked playing games online basically because the people online tend to be bigoted and don't give a damn what you think, even when you try to voice your opinion. And if you're a girl, you're automatically shot down because you're just being "sensitive" and everyone KNOWS they weren't being sexist/are not sexist. Which is why I was a huge fan of Guild Wars. People could go ahead and keep their WoW, but Guild Wards gives you the option to play just by yourself with NPC heroes to help you out.Thank you Guild Wars for protecting me from people online. :P
So, raising awareness for this is awesome, I'm not saying it's not. But I don't know if raising awareness will solve all the issues here. Unless banning all the people on the internet/xbox live/playstation network is a viable option, or at least anyone who throws out a bigoted term which will be just about everyone. I dunno. I'm glad to see this problem is getting some publicity in the gaming community, though. I hope I'm wrong and thinks can really get worked out. :)
I would like to see giant posters of Gordon Freeman and The Master Chief making out.
That would be pure win.
I think this is a good step in the right direction and there are certainly some changes that can be made with the content of games, but it's not going to do much good in the areas where homophobia is worst. Online gaming is like the perfect storm of homophobia and sexism. You've got boys/young men who are at the age where the really feel the need to pound their chests and "out man" eachother. Then you put them in an anonymous setting taking part in a competitive, 'masculine' activity against other young men. Really, I don't think it has much to do with the gaming and more to do with the culture of masculinity. Until homophobic slurs stop being used as a way to knock other men's masculinity in our culture, don't expect it to stop in gaming. Same with demeaning/objectifying women to prove manliness. It's the same shit we see every day in the real world just amplified by the anonymous nature of the internet.
Hmmm...there's plenty of the "stereotypical gay" characters in a lot of RPG-type games, which by their nature are negative portrayals, but I've encountered a LOT of gay innuendo in videogames as well.
It's funny that Kingdom Hearts was brought up for its parodical gay characters (I can't deny that these are stupid, if perhaps benign), and yet the obvious romantic connection between the characters of Roxas and Axel (both male) in the same game was not mentioned.
The Metal Gear Solid game series, for instance, has had multiple instances of innuendo between its male characters (good and bad) and at least two villains (I know, I know) who were blatantly, unapologetically bisexual. Also, MGS1, MGS2 and MGS3 (even MGS4, if you're willing to ignore some really stupid elements) had some of the most amazingly strong and not-necessarily-sexualized female characters I've seen yet.
In Fable, you could marry (yes!) other male characters. It was amusing, because about half the male NPCs would be receptive to your advances (you had to cultivate relationships; it took time) and the other half would just respond, "Well...a lot would have to change, before I'd change -my- mind." Heh.
Oh, and Samurai Warriors with its (historically based!!) love triangle between Nobunaga, Mitsuhide and Ranmaru Mori, all of them male. Seriously wonderful to watch, and it was very obvious what was happening between the three.
As for MMO games with chat functions, well...I take off my headset, queue up a Village People tune on some external music player, and just blast the homophobic players with nonstop "YMCA." Online gaming can be a cesspool though, really.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/homophobic-law-passed-lithuania-20090617
You can be gay in Fable. I'm suprised no body has mentioned such a high-profile game
It was mentioned two posts above yours:
"In Fable, you could marry..."
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Jade Empire. Both genders had a gay option (which was the default option for the other gender. Or one of them, since male players had two potential female love interests.)
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 features a character who is arguable gay (Kanji Tatsumi) and one who has an androgynous appearance (Naoto Shirogane). It is also an excellent JRPG. You can get a feel for the game by watching the Endurance Run at Giantbomb.com here.
Also, would the peson who posted this to the blog do a follow up if and when the transcript or video recording of this event hits the web? It would be greatly appreciated.