Should Diversity be addressed within the narrative or should it be a non-issue?

[Netrigan]

I have to wonder.

If you were to go about your normal day, doing the things as you do - getting ready for work, hit the grocery store, maybe see a movie after dinner and so on - but every day, you have a random person come up to you and soliloquise about how they are gay. Would that serve any purpose for function to your day other than confirming that "Yes, gay people exist"?

Nobody is suggesting this.

People are suggesting that gay people be portrayed, occasionally, in precisely the same way straight people are already. Straight characters do not soliloquise about their sexuality, but relationships are very, very common in media (as are mentions of relationships).

Again, nobody has suggested some highly unnatural focus on the sexuality. Oddly, nobody finds it particularly unnatural or forced when a straight relationship pops up, as they do all the time, in every medium.

Indeed, no one in this thread has suggested such a ham handed approach, but I've seen people demand gay characters added, even hapazardly, as long as they are "represented" and I think that approach would do more harm than good. It seems I may have unintentionally implied I was referring to people in this thread. I was actually referring to the extreme side of this demand of diverse representation, not the more reasonable requests.

A Lot of the normal domestic representation, such as people holding hands, a peck on the lips as they walk out the door, flirting at a bar, or a picture on a nightstand are all things that could easily be integrated into development of a game with a little of forethought and minimal cost.

I feel rather than demanding an amorphous 'DIVERSITY' goal, just having background characters do these actions and let the game randomly assign character models to be male or female for those pairings would be well sufficient for any character that isn't the main focus of the story. It presents a realistic, honest image and is as important as background characters need to be.

Obviously characters that are the focus of the story should be handled more directly.

Snip for space.

I have a Mistakes Will Be Made attitude to all this.

You really can't expect someone to figure out how to perfectly nail diversity without a lot of trial and error. If you're a writer who believes there should be more gay characters in fiction, then you put them in there and try to make it work. People see your work, respond to, praise the bits worthy of praise, point to mistakes, suggest corrections, etc. You try again, hopefully doing a better job of it.

If you get noticed by your peers, maybe they decide to give a go, too. They bring a different sensibility to it. They get feedback after it's published.

Maybe a gay professional thinks, "no, no, no, that's not how it is at all" and they come in with their perspective. People in the audience get inspired by it, they come in and open up their brains. Everyone is learning and growing and getting better at portraying gay people in fiction. Some folks aren't confident about their ability to write gay characters, but are on board, so they make sure they put gay characters in the background of their work.

What you call Tokenism might be the thing which inspires someone to write. Maybe it's because they felt included for the first time in their life. Maybe they're just insulted by it and want to show how it really is.

This stuff just doesn't spring forth fully formed. It's a long arduous process involving tons of different people, often riffing on one another's work. Yes, I can point to works where a gay character is horribly shoehorned in and say "if you're a writer, you don't want to be doing that", but that doesn't mean that wasn't a valuable step in the learning curve. Hell, that might be a valuable lesson in What Not To Do... like the movie, Cruising.

That's a reasonable outlook. I personally would prefer for people to put forth a minimum of effort up front as I mention above and most of this issue would disappear for basic representation in media. It wouldn't resolve the lack of main character representation, but it would alleviate them not appearing at all.

That said, while it's reasonable and definitely how media advances, I do like to retain my right to cringe horrifically at bad representation, ha ha.

Also, as I'd mentioned prior, I don't like it when you have the "obligatory love interest" trope even when it's a heterosexual pairing, so I'm not going to like it when it's a gay couple shoehorned in either. But you are correct. That awful representation may motivate someone that actually has any idea what they're doing to step in and show people how it's done.

I think one of the problems (both writing and audience) is there's so much pressure on the early adopters. We're just starting to see transsexual characters popping up and because there's so few examples of trans characters, there's pressure for those characters to be all things to all people. It's not enough for the lawyer to be a transsexual, we need to show how being a transsexual affects their lives in numerous ways.

And next thing we know we're getting exposition dumps about transsexuals where exposition dumps just do not belong.

You can see gay characters starting to get over the hump of having to represent everyone. For a while every gay character felt like a statement. There was just no casual way to put a gay character into a story without having to address it. In the last ten years or so, things have really started to snowball, so Doctor Who can have a gay couple dancing in the background at a wedding and it's just there. Captain Jack can flirt with the boys and it's just Captain Jack being Captain Jack. The whole thing gets less and less awkward as we're exposed to the idea more and more.

Seeing how little emphasis is put on the soldiers in Call of Duty, I wouldn't recommend anyone making a big deal out of one of those guys being gay, because these guys don't really exist much beyond Holding A Gun; but what if Dom's lost love in Gears of War had been a man? To me, that seems like the kind of thing which should be happening just a bit more often than it does.

 

[Silvanus]

Indeed, no one in this thread has suggested such a ham handed approach, but I've seen people demand gay characters added, even hapazardly, as long as they are "represented" and I think that approach would do more harm than good. It seems I may have unintentionally implied I was referring to people in this thread. I was actually referring to the extreme side of this demand of diverse representation, not the more reasonable requests.

A Lot of the normal domestic representation, such as people holding hands, a peck on the lips as they walk out the door, flirting at a bar, or a picture on a nightstand are all things that could easily be integrated into development of a game with a little of forethought and minimal cost.

I feel rather than demanding an amorphous 'DIVERSITY' goal, just having background characters do these actions and let the game randomly assign character models to be male or female for those pairings would be well sufficient for any character that isn't the main focus of the story. It presents a realistic, honest image and is as important as background characters need to be.

Obviously characters that are the focus of the story should be handled more directly.

I can happily agree with that. In open-world RPGs, particularly, the approach you described above could work quite well.

 

[visiblenoise]

My thought is that I don't know many gay people, and are good friends with zero. So I'm not very interested in learning about the perspective of a gay person per se, and any sort of book, movie, game, etc. that singularly focuses on that will likely bore me. And given the low percentage of homosexuality, I'd guess that lots of people feel the same way as I do, resulting in a really small market for this kind of thing.