Lack of Gay Character Options in RPGs "A Shame," Says BioWare Producer

[Nieroshai]

While I myself welcome all types of storytelling and my own sexuality would make me a hypocrite if I objected to LGBT characters, this is my stance: if the population is 3+ percent gay/bisexual, isn't insisting that a majority of games accommodate LGBT characters officially pandering? Nearly all games that let you build your character seem to have the option to be whatever you damn well please, and all other games are typically about specific characters. Characters who have their own orientation, one which is usually 99.9% ambiguous. I'm sorry, I just don't see it. And I don't feel under-represented. And I don't feel the need to be represented when it means stomping on a written character.

 

[NeutralDrow]

Lack of gay characters sucks, but the lack of anyone actually being able to write relationships in games is the reason why we don't have them. Not discrimination.

And yet, people clearly still write relationships in games. Does that mean they're prejudiced against straight people?

The problem comes when you make the character's defining trait as gay. I find that the character is just there to make a social commentary and nothings else. I know that this has been mentioned before but look no further than Fallout New Vegas. Veronica was a lesbian and she only mentioned it once or twice and that was it. It wasn't her defining trait it was just a extra tidbit of information to make the character feel more real.

I thought of New Vegas, myself, but my mind turned to the player character instead, since you can play a gay character with either the Confirmed Bachelor or Cherchez Les Femmes perks.

As a gay man, i don't want to play as a gay character if he is poorly written and just there for the sake of it being there to appease the more vocal minority. If you're truly passionate about making a gay character and him having great development and growth and other things that a character needs to be compelling, not just a gender identity then you should write one and for no other reason one should be written.

To be honest, I conditionally disagree. Sure, it's bad when a gay character is written defined solely by their sexuality, and worse when their written "sexuality" is essentially comprised of harmful stereotypes, but if gay characters become more prevalent, and more subject to the terrible writing, horrid cliches and shoehorned-in romance of common love stories...good. That's the normal state of things, and homosexual relationships being perceived as "not normal" (read: "icky") is the center of the problem. Having only well-written gay characters sounds pretty utopian in the first place, and requiring well-written characters to change the status quo is a bit "perfect solution fallacy."

Really, if I'm reading this particular vocal minority right, I'm hoping they win. The positive part of the message seems to be "stop acting like it's hard, and just write them in already! They're normal people!"

hmmm... why is pandering considered negative amongst the gaming community?

Three reasons, I would guess:

1) Gaming is still widely seen as an immature medium, leading gamers to be hypersensitive about anything that could be used to reinforce that stereotype.

2) Gamers are quite often cynical, and that paranoia a lot of the time leads them to mentally replace "pandering" with "manipulating," and react badly.

2) Gamers don't like something pandering to anyone but themselves.

Take your pick.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

hmmm... why is pandering considered negative amongst the gaming community?

The word itself has a negative twist on it. To pander is to indulge or gratify something that shouldn't be indulged or gratified. Google: gratify or indulge (an immoral or distasteful desire, need, or habit or a person with such a desire, etc.). I guess the real question is why some things are called pandering and other things aren't, or if people are using the word as defined.

 

[UberPubert]

Gamer isn't really a broken term, it just needs to be more specific.

Does it? I already made note of the term "moviegoer", I'm not actually certain what people who read books are called...simply "readers" I suppose? These terms are used pretty generally and without qualifiers, so I consider myself to be both of these through regular consumption, though gaming is absolutely my main hobby.

If we are to use gamer as a specific term, what do we use to call people who treat it as a secondary or tertiary pastime? I've heard the term "casual" thrown around a bit but it's never really stuck, and when I hear numbers quoted on sales and average user playtime these casual gamers actually end up as the majority. Is using a separate qualifying term for the people who actually dominate the user base justified or even helpful when trying to discuss their habits? What about those who would claim your or I are casual by spending more time and money on games? Do we label them as hardcore gamers?

 

[PBMcNair]

I am opposed to them because they were just so damn poor and ham-fisted in DA2.

That's my problem too. It's like they looked at feedback from DA:O and said people were complaining about the lack and/or presence of homosexual characters, and decided that the best answer was to make everybody bisexual. It felt really lazy.

 

[UberPubert]

Well we have terms like "film buff" for people that preoccupy their time with movies and "scholar" for people that like to read more than the average person. I'm not sure what we could use for someone whose main hobby is playing video games, plus gamer just rolls of the tongue better than most other replacements.

Like I was trying to explain to ratty earlier, I don't really care for the term "gamer" or whatever replaces it, since whichever way it's sliced I don't believe the larger "people who play videogames" demographic can be reduced to an easily identifiable one. I wouldn't even call film buffs or scholars easy to define, since they're pretty widespread and have conflicting schools of thought all the time even between simple "entertaining vs. academic" criticism or preference towards their respective works.

On the other hand, "gorehounds" can accurately depict the kind of moviewatcher who might enjoy an Eli Roth flick, "repressed middle aged mom" describes someone who unironically enjoys Twilight and fifty shades of grey.

 

[Vault101]

And I'm not sure how Liara is a loophole since she's female and you can romance her as a female, despite her being an alien and all. You basically had only her and Ashley/Kaiden to choose from in the first game either way, romances didn't get really big until ME2 and 3.

the fact that they originally had gay options but removed them..WHILE allowing you to be with Liara as Femshep

its like them saying [i/]"we can let you be gay...without ACTUALLY admitting such a thing because oh gosh gayness is just too much for the good folk"[/i]

this ties into the the..."issues" I have with the Assari, yes you can explain away their existance with lore and all that and even just ot be cheeky hint at them not being what they seem (ala that bar scene in ME2...however that was only ever a hint and doesn't change anything) but lets be honest

[b/]they are bizexual space babes[/b]...yes they are well [i/]explained[/i] bisexcual space babes but its kind of like Power Girl giving a big speech about her boob window...c'mon man....you're not fooling anyone

so again, female women can be with them but its not "technically" a homosexual relationship...which is fine lore wise, I can accept that, what I can't accept is allowing us to do that while not allowing is us to have a human lesbian pairing...its bullshit

and if that weren't bad enough you can't even get with Ashley as Femshep in the end! your only real option is trainor...and as a "tacked-on" character she's actually not bad...but its too little too late as far as I'm concerned

 

[disgruntledgamer]

This again...... Do Bioware devs ever think about anything else but how to include this in their games? Like seriously, they're the only ones going ape**** on the subject.

 

[Ratty]

I know you're being sarcastic, but the gender binary is total bullshit in general. All of the "scientific evidence" for a strict gender binary is based on ignoring or claiming as flawed the thousands of people who don't fall neatly into the x and y chromosome divisions they teach in school. The thousands of men with breasts and women with facial hair, supposedly "male" and "female" secondary sexual characteristics. And that's not even getting into those who would normally be designated transgender persons.

You do realize that those few intersex people are exceptions to the rule not ones that disprove, right? They're outliers, they literally compose a fraction of a fraction of the world's population (this is thousands of people from a few billion after all). Being intersex is a mutation, an abnormality that doesn't even manifest all that uniformly. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it doesn't make it any less true. You can't same the same about sexuality because sexuality isn't always purely a genetic thing, a lot of it has to do with emotional preferences and a more romantic aspect.

The fact that intersex people exist, whether they be intersex as described above, transgender or both- no matter how relatively small their number- proves that the rigid divide of "male" and "female" is artificial to an extent. The fact that much if not most of what we associate with being "male" or "female" is based on culture rather than anatomy supports this conclusion. Of course no one would argue that the L, G and B are far more common, but that doesn't mean T deserves any less respect.

 

[Sanunes]

The problem comes when you make the character's defining trait as gay. I find that the character is just there to make a social commentary and nothings else. I know that this has been mentioned before but look no further than Fallout New Vegas. Veronica was a lesbian and she only mentioned it once or twice and that was it. It wasn't her defining trait it was just a extra tidbit of information to make the character feel more real.

Bioware has never made a character like that.

Steve Cortez was a character in Mass Effect 3 he talks once or twice about his husband that died and Samantha Traynor actually never mentions her sexuality once in the game, there is one point when she talks about EDI's "sexy voice", but no real definition of her preferences. Which felt the same to me as Veronica and I do look forward to seeing characters more like those that in future games.

As far as what was being said there, I never got the vibe that he meant "all games should include same sex content" the way I took it was "its just that its a shame that you don't see it more".

 

[ExDeath730]

if I recall in New Vegas you could be gay I think...or at least allud to it, no romancing though, I think that was actually an option once but they cut it

pretty sure in Skyrim you could be gay too? again probably not in the Bioware sense but its there

in retrospect the fact the first 2 Bioware games didn't allow you to be gay is actually pretty baffling..in a bad way

and no as far as I'm concerned Liara is a loophole with her own set of unfortunate implications

You could indeed be gay in FNV, but you only had the option to hit on certain individuals. There wasn't really any sort of romance option period, but it was nice that they had the perks. Their gay characters on the other hand were some of the most realistic and well written characters I've seen in a while, certainly better than anything Bioware has written at least.

In Skyrim all marriage options were available to both genders and all races, but the entirety of the marriage option feature seemed kind of tacked on. Then again, the Elder Scrolls has never been about romance so I could have gone without it entirely. At least Hearthstone improved it a tad.

Never played Baldur's Gate 1 or 2, but didn't they not have a lot of romance options in the first place? That may explain it.

And I'm not sure how Liara is a loophole since she's female and you can romance her as a female, despite her being an alien and all. You basically had only her and Ashley/Kaiden to choose from in the first game either way, romances didn't get really big until ME2 and 3.

Just one thing about Bioware games...The first BG had no Romance options the second one did...But let me tell you...Everyone got shafted there. The male romance options only included elves. No joke, only elves. The female? The most obnoxious/boring character in the game. The KOTOR games weren't any better, truly, in the first one you got Bastilla, an arrogant jedi that embodies the worst in the Order or some guy way too generic for me to even remember the name with severe trust issues that makes you want to jam a lightsaber in his mouth so he stops saying that he "can't trust you".

The Bioware game were the Romance options were actually interesting, the first one, was Mass Effect, and then, Dragon Age: Origins. After that it became some kind of company trademark, so that's why they're focussing on this.

 

[ShakerSilver]

It is a shame, yes.
It's also a shame that Bioware can't actually write good gay characters, or actually write a personal sexual personality for any character, and writes everyone as a bisexual that will fuck you if you just say a few nice things to them. They forgot that a characters sexuality is part of their personality. Being able to fuck everyone just cheapens any romance and the characters your romancing.

Maybe they'll get it right with that "fully gay" character in the new dragon age. I'm not holding my breath though.

 

[Something Amyss]

You're assuming I suggest we retire the term due to feelings getting hurt, which isn't my intention.

Ah. You misunderstand me. I didn't say anything about feelings being hurt. I just used a ready example of how disuse of a term won't change anything. Simply using "gamer" to describe as "movie buff" would have the same end result as it does now.

Hell, the idea that people hold a single idea of what a movie/film buff is is rather absurd in itself.

If you're going to say I misunderstand you, try not to do the same.

Why? Is it completely pointless to have a character who is black without it adding value to the story? Seriously replace "gay" with any other minority in the sentence you just said. As if it's pointless to have representation of non-straight white characters in a story without them justifying their existence in the plot somehow. How about having them in there because people other than straight whites exist. Or because only having straight whites is not only boring but also unlikely in sci-fi settings and unecessary in fantasy settings.

It probably is pointless, but no more pointless than having a majority group. But then, if it's so pointless, one is left to wonder why people fight it so thoroughly. I would think if it was pointless, an argument over it would be similarly pointless.

And to remedy any potential misunderstanding, I'm more or less on your side. I'm just sort of spinning off this concept.

 

[Callate]

My typical response (in short) is generally: sure, absolutely. Let's have gay and lesbian characters. But can we not have every romanceable character be bisexual just so we can recycle dialogue?

In a very real way, it would say at least as much towards thoughtful inclusiveness to have an attractive NPC who flatly says: "No, I'm not interested in [men/women], keep your distance, thanks," as the power fantasy that the hero[ine] can "have" anyone so long as they've gained enough relationship points and reached the "pre-climax sex scene" portion of the plotline.

 

[Therumancer]

SMH

Is it too much to ask that creators be able to tell the stories they way the want to without having to be all inclusive of every minority/orientation/political view, etc? I'm honestly getting tired of wondering which activist group gets to pounce on the next new game.

I had similar thoughts on reading this myself. But then again keep in mind that Bioware is the company that opened this whole can of worms by being one of the first major game companies to have homosexual romance options in their game. When their writers decided NOT to have them in "The Old Republic Online" there was outrage of epic proportions, which of course raised the whole issue of entitlement and creative freedom.

Bioware needs to walk a careful line here, and I think the point here is to try and pre-empt any kind of explosion by making it clear these options are in their most recent game. As far as actual resistance in the games industry in general goes, I don't really see that. Not having homosexual options in your games does not mean that your involved in any kind of "resistance" against the idea, no more than Bioware was acting in opposition to the idea when it decided in one of it's games not to include such elements when they had done it before.

To be honest if they greatly limit the character options in "Inquisition" again, I'd be deeply amused if we saw protests by people like Peter Dinklage over how not having dwarves or truly short characters is bigoted against the truly short amongst us.

Another funny one, would be if we saw a warpath against an RPG company for "fat shaming" when they do not let you have a truly obese character... I mean seriously, why can't my fighter be a truly epic lardo? Friar Tuck was fat and over ate and he was one of the most dangerous swordsmen in all the land... of course then again Old Republic Online would be safe here because it does allow some characters with truly epic girth.... nothing is more epic than seeing some 300lbs Jedi Counsler do a face-kick.

 

[NemotheElvenPanda]

You know, I don't get the hamfisted sexuality argument. I mean, I haven't seen that much of Dragon Age 2, but from what I've seen in it the characters don't go "Oh by the way did I mention that I'm gay? Because I'm gay," every three seconds. If a person's sexuality completely defined who they were, you literally should not be able to name anything else about them and they would bring it up every three seconds. And that would be an appallingly bad character. Again I haven't seen much, but I haven't seen anything like that from DA2, or really any Bioware games. Heck, Traynor in ME3 only off handily mentions that she's a lesbian if you go out of your way to woo her (And in the Citadel DLC). I just don't follow your argument.

Would be cool to see a non-romancible gay character though.

It's just incredibly jarring to see gay characters just saying they're openly gay as if there isn't some social stigma or anxiety about it. Even in areas were homosexuality is 100% accepted there's still heavy sense of caution and anxiety simply because it's not a common behavior and all the other social baggage that goes with it. This is why I consider Sky's relationship one of the best Bioware ever made because you really had to go out of your way as a male PC to get into a relationship with him. If you didn't do things right in dialogue by making him feel ok with the idea on being in love with another man, the romance would end. That's incredibly realistic for a lot of gay people.

 

[Remus]

Bioware makes its bread and butter off making many things optional, not just character relationships. It's what they do. But just because they leave the character open to be defined by the player to such a degree doesn't necessarily mean every company has to as well. Take The Witcher for example - the games are based off a series of books. Geralt is a killer of monsters and lover of women, lots of women. That's a part of his character and story development, clearly defined as intended by the creators. What would FF7 be if Cloud Strife was "random character 555" of random class, random stats, and random character development? Not as memorable for one because everyone's experiences would be different. The story peaks wouldn't be nearly as poignant, if say, Cloud had a budding relationship with Cid rather than Aeris at the time of her death.

MMOs, if we want to cover them under this same blanket statement, are a completely different bag entirely. While the players can play however they wish, with whomever they wish, it is largely up to developers as to the types of characters they want to populate their world with. MMOs have a lot more freedom in this regard than standard story-driven RPGs. For whatever faults ESO has had, one thing I can't fault it with is not representing the LGBT community with its NPCs. I've helped a guy plant flowers in remembrance of his partner, rescued the wife of a lady elven general, the list goes on. The same is true of Guild Wars 2. In their last living story, 2 members of your NPC party in the final battle were lesbian lovers who nearly died in the final fight. This is companies doing it right - representing a broad spectrum of characters without feeling forced or using stereotypical caricatures.

 

[Stevepinto3]

Christ, every time now an article mentions, "Hey, it would be cool if we had more games that featured characters besides the usual straight white dude" it's immediately met with "BUT MUH ARTISTIC INTEGRITY" or "STOP FORCING THIS ON DEVELOPERS"

Yeah, because that is exactly what's happening here, right guys? All these timeless stories like Watchdogs just could NEVER work if it wasn't a straight white dude. God, I mean look at what an amazing character Aiden Pearce was! He wore a hat, had a magic phone, wore a hat, something about generic revenge, and that hat! You could NEVER pull that off with a female or gay character.

Yes, thank god you defenders of the industry for making sure that Watchdog's story wasn't horribly corrupted by the forces of social justice warriors.

 

[JET1971]

"resistance to its inclusion within the game industry is puzzling to him"

Many people don't want to see that sh_t. Same goes for pedophilia, bestiality, mutilation and any number of other perversions. Poll the public if you have the courage. No lead in/steering, 1) Want to see more gay. 2) Want to see less gay.

That's entertainment as a business in a nutshell. Hate on Michael Bay all you want but the public clearly wants to see more. Of course, with the rampant politically correct thought police these days, you'll have to make it an anonymous poll. A fear to speak one's opinion truthfully; isn't an over abundance of tolerance grand?

Just ask California about Proposition 8. Even the most naive conservative would never have bet on such an outcome in California of all places.

Odd I didn't know RPG games were like movies made by Michael Bay. Odd I didn't know that a majority is affected by an option for including a minority. An option that is completely optional, as in you do not have to play a gay man romancing other men, or a lesbian romancing women. Options do not take something away or ruin the experience for anyone because until you choose that option it is not visible.

Also when is being LGBT the same as being a pedophile or into bestiality or mutilation? It isn't and it is also not a perversion.

OT, An RPG should have every possible option available to choose from. If it is a good RPG it will have options for your character that's not limited to species (if there's more than just human in the game and are not faction specific), race, gender, or sexual orientation. All options should be available during character creation. They can add slider to change the way the character looks they can also have choices for everything else.

 

[Vareoth]

Whilst writing quality is of course very important, I like the fact that they at least attempt to write gay characters in the first place. I'd rather have poorly written romance across the board than to not even have them try. Gaming doesn't have to as exclusive as some people obviously wish it was. A lack of options doesn't make anything better, especially not in a game based around choice.