Trans representation in gaming
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Something that you can hardly blame on the feminists or the GLBTQ community. That some people can't handle not being exclusively catered to anymore is not the problem of the people being included, nor should they be blamed for it.Commanderfantasy said:
For perspective: Would you blame black people for the outrage white people in the US felt when segregation was formally outlawed?
The problem I have with this argument is that you're assuming the LGBTQ market is somehow a mutually exclusive audience. Just because a video game has a trans character in it doesn't mean cis people are suddenly prohibited from buying it. Sure you might lose some people who let their views influence them but is that a larger or smaller audience than you might get from not alienating the LGBTQ crowd? Because I think it might be smallerCommanderfantasy said:
At the end of the day it's just too of a hot topic to cover in games these days.
Some people will be put off by it and on the other side people will be screaming misrepresentation.
Trans characters are not something you can creatively have fun with but something you have to pussy foot around or fear a back lash.
I'd like to see more trans in video games but when you have doctors being fired in real life for saying "gender is decided at birth" because you know, chromosomes. people ain't going touch that subject with a barge pole.
Some people will be put off by it and on the other side people will be screaming misrepresentation.
Trans characters are not something you can creatively have fun with but something you have to pussy foot around or fear a back lash.
I'd like to see more trans in video games but when you have doctors being fired in real life for saying "gender is decided at birth" because you know, chromosomes. people ain't going touch that subject with a barge pole.
Uh, the problem with this line of thinking is that it's assuming that only that community wants this. Plenty of people either want this, or wouldn't be bothered by it. I'm in that category of people, hell I'm all for it with open arms and baked goods at the ready. You don't need to be gay or trans to enjoy playing as a character who is in a video game. Sure, maybe people can't personally relate to a character because they're not the same gender, or have a different skin color, or have different ideals, or have different struggles...but does that matter? Someone doesn't have to look like you, talk like you, or be like you, for you to come to understand them and enjoy the character. For example I couldn't even remotely relate to the characters in Life is Strange. The difference between myself and the main characters was polarizing, but I still enjoyed it and they really grew on me. I'm glad I played it. People can grow to like and understand characters who are nothing like them, and personally those are characters that I tend to enjoy the most.Commanderfantasy said:
And I understand that focus testing done by the publishers has told them otherwise for decades, but people are starting to openly say otherwise and there has been a reaction to it. Hell we're seeing more female protagonists lately and it doesn't seem to be hurting sales at all despite all the people whining about it. Because it turns out that most people don't give a damn who or what they play as. As long as the game is good or the characters are compelling or well written, people will enjoy it. Due to the subject matter, will there be bumps along the road? Sure, there already have been. But I think developers should keep trying, and not just give in due to fear.
I mean, do you think doctors should be ignorant or in denial regarding basic medical information?Wakey87 said:
I don't think doctors should be allowed to tell patients that vaccines cause autism either, or that you can gets HIV from sitting on the toilet.
The idea that chromosomes decide gender is even more absurd than the above. Chromosomes don't even reliably decide sex (at least, not the metric of sex we actually use). There's very little evidence that gender even exists at birth. At best, it is a cognitive response to hormonal factors which are decided before birth, but even this is not particularly well evidenced.
There is no medical "debate" on the existence of trans people. There has not been for many decades now. The only people who still want one are those who want medical science to vindicate their own prejudices in contradiction to the available evidence.
The idea that "having fun" with trans inclusion means revisiting a long-dead debate over whether trans people exist is so out of touch with reality that I've already dignified it too much by even mentioning it. Having gender be mutable and fluid, perhaps even more mutable and fluid than in our real world, is almost automatically more fun than adhering rigidly to weird fantasies about gender being determined by chromosomes.
If sex is the biological thing and gender just some social construct, i fail to see how medical professionals qualify for gender questions at all.evilthecat said:
Of course medical science is pretty useless to answer social questions.
So, there's a third layer between the biological and the social, isn't there, and it has its own discipline.Satinavian said:
Biology looks at the physical structure and operation of living organisms.
Sociology looks at the way in which individuals interact together as a society.
But between the two, there is a science which examines the workings of the human mind. It's called psychology, and it's quite important in medicine because we understand that health issues are sometimes due to the way the mind works, rather than just problems with the body. It's from psychology that we get the separate concepts of gender identity, sexual orientation and, ultimately, gender expression.
We don't currently know what prompts a person to develop gender identity. It may be partly to do with sex hormones, or it may just be a very complex cognitive process which takes place at a very early age. What we do know is that it isn't a neurosis or delusion, it doesn't work like one. It is a seemingly natural variation on the way in which all human beings come to develop identity which, in a society with very rigid gender rules, has unfortunate and tragic implications for the individual whose gender identity does not conform (this is the part sociologists are interested in, but their interest is more theoretical and less clinical).
We are born physically with particular sets of organs, but we are not born with an identity. As we develop from screaming babies into human beings with complex thoughts and language, at some point we develop this thing called identity, a sense of who we are, which is very important to us. Most people come to identify strongly with the sex they were assigned at birth, but some people do not. The very existence of those people already demonstrates that gender (gender identity in this case) is not determined by "chromosomes".
Heck, "chromosomes" on their own don't actually do anything. The importance of the Y chromosome is that it normally contains the gene that triggers testis development in humans, and because it's much easier to see chromosomes than individual genes we use the appearance of the Y chromosome as a kind of rough way to estimate the presence of this gene. However, it's not a very good test. At one point, it was common to karyotype test athletes, but we stopped doing that because it's not accurate enough at determining a person's sex when compared to actual medical examination.
Or hell, the recent find of an XY women who's given natural birth multiple times to people who, themselves, can have kids.evilthecat said:
Turns out, humans are gloriously messy, and simplified high school biology is, well, simplified.
Drawing within the lines rarely breeds creativity. Creativity is boldness. If people make sincere attempts, they will probably be fine. If they end up offending people, maybe they deserve to be punished instead of putting on a fa?ade of decency?Wakey87 said:
I'll pick this up, since it hearkens back to the point I was looking to make in my OP and subsequent few posts. I say this as someone who supports more and better LGBTQ+ characters in games. I want to get my operating definition of "pandering" out of the way. To me, the word in this context means the insertion of LGBTQ+ characters whose only traits relate to their gender or sexuality, and/or who don't have definable character arcs in the game, for no discernible reason other than to appeal to a certain demographic.evilthecat said:
The best way to really explain what I'm getting at, here, is applying a variant of the "Plinkett test". If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's from the RedLetterMedia "Mr. Plinkett" review of The Phantom Menace (link below).
https://youtu.be/FxKtZmQgxrI?t=6m42s
In this case, it's "describe (video game character) WITHOUT saying what they look like, what costume they wore, what their profession or role was, or their gender/sexuality. The more descriptive you can get, the better the character". Run through a list of trans characters in your head, and see if you can find which ones pass the Plinkett test.
I did this, and I even deliberately searched for trans characters I might have missed or forgotten about. And of those from games I've played, the only character I identified to actually pass the Plinkett test is Poison. Fucking Poison.
Yes, I'm aware most major characters in video games, and pretty much all minor characters, fail the Plinkett test. If there aren't any major trans characters, how can we expect them to pass the Plinkett test?
So, I have a number of problems..Eacaraxe said:
Firstly, as you kind of point out yourself many, many characters in video games are, by this definition, pandering. Heck, I agree, they are pandering. How many female characters can you think of who aren't defined by their sexed attributes and appearance? Heck, most of the early examples of LGBT characters in gaming were hyper-sexualized bisexual women who were stuck in games very blatantly because straight men got turned on by the idea of women fucking.
Games have a much more simple and immediate approach to gratification than most other media, and often, the story (if there is one) is just a way to reward you for gameplay. This means that characters are often a reward for gameplay, rather than being an end in themselves. It's pandering, it's all pandering, so why does pandering suddenly become a problem when anyone other than heterosexual cis men want to be pandered to?
Secondly, the Plinkett test is an interesting idea, but like a lot of RLM's ideas about film it's pretty reductive if taken seriously. Darth Maul is a character who is defined by his appearance and narrative role, for example. He speaks one line, he has no arc, he doesn't grow or change, yet he's one of the best things about the prequel trilogy. If Lucas had added a side plot about Darth Maul being trained by Sideous, it wouldn't have improved his character because it's unecessary. A character's appearance can tell a story, a character's role can tell a story and yes, a character's gender or sexuality can tell a story.
In my opinion, the biggest flaw of the way video games write LGBT characters is not that everything about them is related to their gender and sexuality, but that almost nothing is. In real life, queer people are often incredibly defined by the fact that they are queer, to the point that it touches on every part of their lives. You don't add sexuality or gender to a human being and stir, these things make us who we are. Video games are often so determined to show that queer characters are "just like you and me" that they often seem afraid to make a character's queerness actually matter.
Sure, there's a lot of pandering in games in general. Not only do I not deny it, I made the point myself by pointing out most video game characters in general wouldn't pass the Plinkett test. So is that acceptable for trans characters, simply because pandering exists elsewhere? If one supports races to the bottom and is overall satisfied with the level of representation across the spectrum, I guess?evilthecat said:
But that's where we start getting into really sticky territory. Like I said, I did the Plinkett test myself, I really tried, and the one example I could find of a trans character who unarguably passed it, was a hyper-sexualized, fan service-y trans woman character. What kind of statement even is that? seriously, I'm trying to figure it out myself. That's part of for what I started this thread.
One of the benefits of the Plinkett test specific to women characters, is it allows for cutting a lot of the shit when it comes to "sexualization", and deep diving on characters frequently cited when discussing sexualization in games. Bayonetta, for example, is a frequently-cited character, but on the other hand her characterization is so strong there's really no room for discussion on if she'd pass the Plinkett test.
Likewise, it makes for a really fucking phenomenal tool for bringing up diversity of characterization in women characters, apart from discussion of physicality which dominates the discussion to the exclusion of all else. Funny enough, writing this post I did the Plinkett test on Bayonetta, and my answer was virtually identical to Poison! Did it on Lara Croft, or at least her pre-reboot version...funny enough, same answer.
Male gaze and jiggle physics my ass, let's start a discussion on that shit.
Funny thing about Maul. On the forums here (think it was the Clone Wars season 7 thread) I made a point about how Maul is so much of a non-character, one could cut him completely out of the film without changing the movie's plot (same thing with Qui-Gon, too). You miss a couple fight scenes, but that's it. His only role is to wave a lightsaber around and kill another completely superfluous non-character.
The fact he's one of the "coolest" things about the prequel trilogy isn't a validation of the character, it's a wholesale indictment of how truly bloated, disorganized, and superficial the prequel trilogy was. It took the CG series to do anything with him of note.
Well, there is one possibility I don't think you've considered, which is that the Plinkett test, or at least the way you're using it, is not actually a very good way of judging writing.Eacaraxe said:
See, the way this excercise was brought up in the Plinkett review of the Star Wars prequels was to highlight a specific weakness in the writing, namely the lack of strong characterisation. But even here, I'm going to argue that it doesn't really work. See, Han Solo isn't memorable because he's just such a brilliant, well-written character. He's memorable because he's an extremely archetypal character. Star Wars relies heavily on metatextual information to tell its story, it relies on you making comparisons to other genres and characters, Westerns, war films, martial arts films, samurai films and so forth. Literature and film are full of Han Solos, and that's why his characterisation is so memorable, because we've seen it dozens of times. Now, I'm not saying this is bad. Most films use metatextual information in this way to some degree because it's efficient, but it doesn't allow us to break new ground, it doesn't allow us to tell stories or use characters which aren't already archetypes.
But what you're doing is actually going a step beyond even this and deciding that gender and sexuality cannot be part of characterisation at all, which is completely arbitrary. These things can be hugely, hugely important to characterisation and provide huge amounts of implicit information about who a character is. I'm not sure why you would be surprised that, when you are forced to ignore very important pieces of characterisation, it is hard to describe characters. It's like saying that robocop is badly written if you describe the character while deliberately ignoring the fact that he is a cyborg.
That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm pointing out the only trait proscribed to these characters is gender/sexuality, and that is problematic. If you cannot describe the character -- at all -- without discussing gender or sexual orientation, that is the only trait they have. You're putting words in my mouth, and I'd like to think to this point I've been quite clear about my points.evilthecat said:
Robocop is a dutiful and humble, but confident, man with a strong sense of justice and empathy, who had a loving family. Due to the machinations of the mega-corporation which owns Detroit, he had his former life, family, and even his memories stripped away. However, his sense of duty and justice remained despite the corporation's best efforts to subvert him to their will, and when he began to regain his memories, he realized the full depth of the betrayal and undertook a mission to bring the conspiracy of criminals and corporate executives responsible to justice. The character, through undergoing a chain of events that involve suffering, sacrifice, and salvation, is a Christ allegory, albeit re-imagined for a dystopian science-fiction film that heavily satirizes post-industrial American consumer, corporate, and media culture.
One paragraph. Not only did I describe the character thereby satisfying the Plinkett test, I described the plot of the whole movie relative to that character's arc and even managed to devote a sentence to the film's themes and social commentary. Didn't even have to go near Robocop being a cyborg. For all it actually mattered to the film, OCP could have healed Murphy and infested him with a memory-erasing alien parasite; it would have had to be called WormCop or something, but that's neither here nor there.
You were saying?
Okay, sure, but...Eacaraxe said:
Why is this especially bad for trans characters, and a reason to not have they at all when, as you point out, it holds the same for a vast, overwhelming majority of videogame characters in general?
That and Harrison Ford absolutely nailed his performance, which turned Han Solo from an obnoxious hothead who gets everyone into trouble into a lovable rogue. On the opposite end, Anakin gets a ton of character development in the prequels, but Christiansen's performance turns all that writing into a flat character that sulks constantly about how unfair everything is.evilthecat said:
And this is the problem of talking about characters in any media where actors of some kind portrays them (as opposed to purely written characters): A good actor can take poor writing and salvage it into something acceptable, a poor actor can take Nobel prize winning characterization and turn it to shit.
Which is another reason that the Plinkett test often misses the mark, because it is too simple to account for all the things that influence characterization and dumbs it down to a writing issue. Getting good characters is about more than just writing a good script, it also requires a director who understands the script and knows how to translate it to moving pictures, it requires an editor who understands the importance of specific character building scenes and it requires actors who can deliver an adequate performance.
Okay, so this gives me a better idea of what you mean by the Plinkett Test (which isn't really the same thing they were doing in the Star Wars review). The problem is, you can do what you just did with almost any character.Eacaraxe said:
Jar Jar Binks is a bumbling, foolish alien with a strong desire to be helpful, which is thwarted by his clumsiness, cowardice and lack of common sense. When his planet is invaded, he is rescued from being killed and his sense of honour compels him to help his rescuers, initially by leading them to his underwater city from which he was previously exiled for crashing a submarine, and then by accompanying them on their perilous journey. His misguided attempt to shoplift on Tatooine leads to a chance meeting with a young Anakin Skywalker, leading to the later being trained as a Jedi. On Corruscant, Jar Jar reveals that his people have a Grand Army, and takes his companions to find them. For his role in cementing an alliance, Jar Jar is promoted to high military rank and accompanies the Grand Army into battle against the invaders. Through dumb luck, he inflicts many casualties on the enemy but is ultimately cornered. Jar Jar surrenders, only to find that the war has already been won by his allies. The character, through the juxtaposition of his foolish, cowardly behaviour and incredible good fortune, serves the role of a Falstaffian fool and comic relief, acting as both a contrast and foil to the hypercompetence and stoic demeanour of the other characters.
Actually the only people who want this are the LBGTQ community. Because if you are indifferent as to whether these characters are there or not, means you don't WANT it. You simply don't care. That's not the same as wanting it, and chances are that even if you don't care one way or another, a game where your protagonist is trans or openly gay will do one of two things:Nedoras said:
1. The character is so flagrant that it ruins the game for you regardless of other mechanics and you stop playing the game because the content just doesn't appeal to you. It's easy to say being indifferent, but if the content is targeted towards an LBGTQ audience, you just aren't going to stick with it if you aren't interested or a part of that target audience. It's like if you don't like RTS games, you might try a new RTS, but if RTS isn't your thing you probably wont be playing the game very long.
2. The other possibility is the character is LBGTQ, but the game barely makes any acknowledgement of that fact and the character might as well be Nathan Drake because their gender or sexuality doesn't mean anything in the game's context. Look at Poison from Street Fighter in this case. A trans character with the fact that they are trans having absolutely NOTHING to do with anything in the game. Therefore it's just a character you can pick and doesn't do anything to change the gameplay experience.
Now I will agree if characters are well written, then naturally we will see more diversity in characters that appear in games as a whole. A good example IMO is the gay hunter in Witcher 3, when Geralt offers to help him with his "monsterism" the hunter casual reveals his backstory of loving a noble's son and thus revealing that he is a gay man and there is nothing for Geralt to cure. Geralt's view and the player's view of that character doesn't change and the mission to track some soldier's continues. It's a good piece of writing that we need more of in games.
People have never given a shit about female main characters. There has never in the history of gaming been a game that sold poorly because of a female main character. In fact most female led games tend to sell BETTER than male driven ones. The reason that came up was because some publisher or developer executive at a press conference said some stupid shit.
If you compare Tomb Raider to Call of Duty, then yes the number wont compare. But when you compare something like Quantum Break versus Horizon Zero Dawn. Aloy fucking killed it in numbers. But notice something here when you look at these games. Both are brand new IP's, but one of them is incredible and the other is dog shit. Quality equals sales numbers PERIOD, not the gender of the protagonist. Ellie is apparently a lesbian in The Last of US 2, and I bet that game will sell fuck loads. Because it'll be a good game, with good writing, which is worth way more than anything else.
It is also important to note that Ellie's sexuality will (most likely) be a very minor point in the game, because sexuality and even gender is often the LEAST important thing about a good character.