Trans representation in gaming

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Yeah, it would be. Practice makes perfect, however. Trans representation in gaming is somewhat getting better? I don't know, there's a genderqueer runner ID in Android: Netrunner, another runner ID (and my personal favourite) who is the adopted daughter of a gay couple... and that scene isn't populated by the screams of people decrying 'SJW' like idiots. Android: Netrunner often boasts a diverse range of figures precisely because it's set in a living world of the not so distant future of multinational megacorporations, their subsidiaries, and runners from all over Earth, the Moon and Martian colonists.

The thing is, the people screaming about 'shoehorning characters' ... how? The whole point of media isto inform people about, at first hand, the nuances of being human. People exist, and we don't take that argument to the logical conclusion ofdemanding 1 in7 characters in any sci-fi game should be of Indian descent... otherwise you're just shoehorning and pandering to Caucasians in media and destroying the immersion.

The thing is, while people are particularly maligned by poor representation and are the target of ridiculous degrees of hostility from society at large solely for who they are, you have to question how exactly any positive representation, or good will, on that basis alone is somehow bad.

People should be challenged to write characters different from their experience or the zeitgeist normative gaze of what is within a completely arbitrary idea of tribal dimensions of a character's humanity. If the 'representation is bad' ... gee, I wonder why that is? Could it be that people aren't actually trying hard enough to understand their creation's dimensions? How do people do that again? Oh,that's right ... practice ...

See, the thing is people don't actually get better at representing the aspects of our collective humanity without actually trying. And the ultimate goal of exploring our humanity is about treating it as mundane. It shouldn't matter if a person is transor not regardlessof the narrative around it. It shouldn't hurt the story anymore than any other descriptor ... and it's almostas if no othercharacter is treated this wayin the usual analysis of them.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

For one, the vast majority of people are not transgender nor will even meet a Transgender person, and if they do they probably won't realize it.

Statistically, anybody who's met 200 people has met a transgender person. Hell, anybody who watches GDQ knows two of them.

It's not like with say black women who are easily about 13 percent of the population of America thus even if you aren't one (assuming you are American or been to America) you have probably interacted with one if not several and thus have at least general idea how one looks and acts. Then there's the fact that video games are still not something a majority of people across the planet are involved with either making or playing them, shrinking the potential audience, developers, and publishers further. In all likelihood there are very very few Transgender people making video games and not much more Transgender people or people who have met them playing video games either, thus the vast majority of these people have only know what little in pop culture shows them about the Transgendered.

Weird, with gaming being the escapist hobby as it is, with plentiful character customization, one would assume that trans people would be drawn to it like they're drawn to the furry community.

Let's be honest here, the people making these games are not putting these LGBT characters in because they are trying to draw in LGBT people, as I said they are far too small a demographic to be worth trying to entice especially at the risk of alienating the much larger demographics, and that goes double for any one of those groups in particular. They're putting these LGBT characters in to try and shut up the SJWs white knighting these groups to avoid controversy that would alienate the demographics that ARE big enough to be worth catering to. [/quote]1 in 25 people is a big enough demographic to be occasionally pandered to.

This is why anyone who isn't an insane bigot (i.e. most who complain about this stuff) have such a big problem with all this obvious shoehorning. It's not because they want to be catered to exclusively, it's because these LGBT characters are thrown in for the sheer sake of having them rather than because they benefit the video game in any way whatsoever and are often actively detrimental to it even if the LGBT characters beat the odds and are actually well written.

"they are often actively detrimental to it even if they're well written". Fucking what?

When a group's representation is way way WAY out of proportion with the amount of that group that could potentially be watching it can get pretty annoying to have to see it everywhere especially when the game is dragged down by these characters and thus would be better off if they weren't there. Then there's the fact that controversy happens often enough anyway even with all that even if they do them well written and accurately... it's no wonder there's barely anyone who cares to try.

You honestly believe that one in twenty videogame characters are LGBT and one in two hundred is trans?

 

[Satinavian]

Statistically, anybody who's met 200 people has met a transgender person. Hell, anybody who watches GDQ knows two of them.

And of how many people you met do you actually know gender and sex instead of just assuming from the looks ?

I never have met a transgender person in my whole life afaik. Which probably means i just didn't notice ever.

Weird, with gaming being the escapist hobby as it is, with plentiful character customization, one would assume that trans people would be drawn to it like they're drawn to the furry community.

If they are they don't tell anyone. Which is kind of really easy with gaming.

You honestly believe that one in twenty videogame characters are LGBT and one in two hundred is trans?

Probably true for gay, probably not true for trans.

When counting the gay ones you should not count all the people with unknown sexual preferrence as hetero. Many many games never discuss it. How many gays are in XCOM ? You would not know. But counting only explicitely hetero- and homosexual characters you do probably get somewhere near 5%.


But if i were to write a video game (i probably could if i wanted to have a really low salary), i would not know how to do a trans character. Honestly, i don't really understand gender anyway and so the last thing i would write is a character where gender is really important for his or her idendity.

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

Snip

Hey serious question. The average person will never meet a transgendered person? The average person will never meet a member of the Japanese mafia either, and yet Yakuza is a successful and well established series. The average person will never meet a samurai, and yet media staring them still go well. Shock of all shocks, that isn't being done to bring in the Yakuza gaming crowd, but because there's story potential there.

Can we please drop the narrative that in order to write characters or enjoy them, you need to have met IRL counterparts to them? Because it's kind of a load. If you write them and you don't know any IRL counterparts, you can do it, you just need to be willing to go out and do research.

Writing only what you know and never challenging yourself is a textbook definition of staying in your comfort zone anyway. It's what shit writers do.

 

[Satinavian]

Hey serious question. The average person will never meet a transgendered person? The average person will never meet a member of the Japanese mafia either, and yet Yakuza is a successful and well established series. The average person will never meet a samurai, and yet media staring them still go well. Shock of all shocks, that isn't being done to bring in the Yakuza gaming crowd, but because there's story potential there.

Those two are completely missing in 99.9% of all games (ok, maybe samurai get slightly more than 0.1%, but not Yakuzas. I have played far more games with transgender persons than with Yakuzas.) Also no one argues for their further inclusion.

Can we please drop the narrative that in order to write characters or enjoy them, you need to have met IRL counterparts to them? Because it's kind of a load. If you write them and you don't know any IRL counterparts, you can do it, you just need to be willing to go out and do research.

Yes, i could theoretically do research to include them. Or i could do research about stuff i find even remotely interesting or at least promising good story hooks and include that alongside the stuff i know.

 

[Erttheking]

Hey serious question. The average person will never meet a transgendered person? The average person will never meet a member of the Japanese mafia either, and yet Yakuza is a successful and well established series. The average person will never meet a samurai, and yet media staring them still go well. Shock of all shocks, that isn't being done to bring in the Yakuza gaming crowd, but because there's story potential there.

Those two are completely missing in 99.9% of all games (ok, maybe samurai get slightly more than 0.1%, but not Yakuzas. I have played far more games with transgender persons than with Yakuzas.) Also no one argues for their further inclusion.

Can we please drop the narrative that in order to write characters or enjoy them, you need to have met IRL counterparts to them? Because it's kind of a load. If you write them and you don't know any IRL counterparts, you can do it, you just need to be willing to go out and do research.

Yes, i could theoretically do research to include them. Or i could do research about stuff i find even remotely interesting or at least promising good story hooks and include that alongside the stuff i know.

Really? Because the Yakuza seems to be actually rather common in media, to the point where they crop up almost as the default bad guy in quite a few stories and heroes in others. Persona 5, had Yakuza, Saints Row 2, had Yakuza, GTA, had Yakuza, SMT, had Yakuza, Overwatch, had Yakuza, Payday 2, had Yakuza, fucking PAPER MARIO, had Yakuza.

That's the sad thing about gaming. It's more inclusive to a specific subset of organized crime than it is to transgendered people. You can play as members of the Yakuza. You can play as two former members of the Yakuza in Overwatch, one of the biggest games of the modern age. I can think of one game where the main character is transgender, and it's Saint's Row post 2 if you play as a woman. That's why no one argues for the Yakuza having more representation. It doesn't need it.

[EDIT: Fuck, there's an argument to be made that there's more games where you can play as God Almighty himself than trans people]

The fact that you think transgendered people don't have interesting story hooks speaks volumes. And not in a good way.

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

I remember when articles like this [https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/12/there-s-no-excuse-more-boring-white-male-game-heroes] were the sounding cry for "all dutiful white males" to shun any idea of diversity and become adherent defenders of the Melanin-ness in all matters!

"Look! They are talking about uneven representation [https://www.newsweek.com/2016/10/21/video-games-race-black-protagonists-509328.html] in games! That's more ground you'll lose if we don't rage together as one!!!"

Then the conversation turns to LGBT, and usually from the same people who 'heeded the call', we hear "What's the big deal about representation? Can't you just play a game and enjoy the story without having it to comfort your identity?"

... Maybe you all need a new foreman, but all I can see are cracks in the foundation here...

 

[immortalfrieza]

Snip

I think you either missed or ignored the actual point I was making, which is the issue of accuracy. It's not a problem that the vast majority of people are not and have never met either a Yakuza or a Samurai isn't a problem for their depictions as they are hardly ever intended to be accurate in the first place and often are just outright copying off of whatever previous wildly inaccurate depictions have pervaded pop culture the most. The Yakuza or a Samurai depictions isn't really any more real than the Yokiati, a sacred order of monks who pet kittens to build up the static charge to do electric martial arts attacks, a thing I just completely made up off the top of my head. It's like how barely any writers have been in the military and thus either skip depicting it in any real fashion or do a pretty terrible job of being accurate about how the military functions and have piss poor depictions of military tactics. People can't effectively write what they haven't experienced for themselves and even research is just secondhand knowledge filtered through one's own perceptions.

It's POSSIBLE to overcome this, but realistically an utter lack of personal experience with a given subject is a pretty massive handicap in the first place even for something everybody has seen and researched, not to mention with something which is a extremely rare way of life like Transgender. Most writers are either unable or aren't going to bother to try to depict Trans accurately for so many practical reasons. It's very unfair to expect them to too, it's like expecting a writer accurately depict what the color red or even what color is when they were born blind. If I am a writer it doesn't matter how competent and motivated I am, I can do all the research that exists about some obscure tribe somewhere in the middle of nowhere but whatever depiction of them I make still isn't going to be 1/10th as accurate as a member of that tribe would be able to do given the same resources as I would have. Then there's the fact that accuracy like all things depicting real life is often extremely boring so even if as I writer I did somehow manage it I'd likely have to skip over and fudge a good deal of that depiction to make it interesting, then there's that people tend to scream bloody murder if an accurate depiction doesn't follow pop culture as it usually doesn't because that's what they expect out of it...

In short, it's just not a realistic expectation for people to have for writers to be able to do Trans people accurately, everything is against them. Writing Transgendered people accurately for the vast majority of the human race is not simply "hard" as in writing something outside one's comfort zone to challenge oneself, it's trying to write something so alien to one's experience as to be one step short of impossible.

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

You make a fair point about Yakuza being depicted accurately, but I take issue with the idea that most writers can't handle writing trans people. As someone drawing up a concept for a trans person, it isn't hard. You have to go out there and do research, but we live in a day and age where that's easier than ever. Watch a few interviews, read some blogs, it's all out there. If a writer can't write a trans person, I have a hard time swallowing that they couldn't, I find the more likely explanation to be that they weren't willing to put the work in. People rarely want a 1 to 1 accurate depiction of IRL people, I mean look at Black Panther. It isn't a true to life depiction of an African culture, but there's enough attention to detail was put in that it was utterly adored. Honestly, put in enough effort to show that you did some research and avoid the pitfalls of things they would never actually do (such as deadnaming themselves within three minutes of meeting someone) and you'll be fine.

Can I share something with you? I wrote a character named Nora Hawkins once, a woman who didn't like women's clothing, not because of a dislike of femininity, but just because it made her personally feel uncomfortable and she just liked the way men's clothing felt. One of the reviews I am most fond of ever receiving was from a woman who said my depiction of that was spot on and it really resonated with her. The only research I did on that situation was talking to a few people online for perspective.

If a nobody like me can do it, I think professional writers can. I'm not half as talented as they are and even I managed to touch someone's heart by giving a damn. I think they're not giving themselves enough credit.

 

[CaitSeith]

I think forcing players to play as controversial or things they find undesirable is of limited benefit.

The GTA series says otherwise.

 

[Satinavian]

Really? Because the Yakuza seems to be actually rather common in media, to the point where they crop up almost as the default bad guy in quite a few stories and heroes in others. Persona 5, had Yakuza, Saints Row 2, had Yakuza, GTA, had Yakuza, SMT, had Yakuza, Overwatch, had Yakuza, Payday 2, had Yakuza, fucking PAPER MARIO, had Yakuza.

Didn't play any of those and wasn't aware they feature this syndicate.

Maybe i underestimated how common the Yakuza is but so far i have seen far more transgender people in games (including options to play one like in Battletech).

[EDIT: Fuck, there's an argument to be made that there's more games where you can play as God Almighty himself than trans people]

That however seems quite believable. God games are a popular genre.

The fact that you think transgendered people don't have interesting story hooks speaks volumes. And not in a good way.

It is not so much that i thing transgendered people don't have interesting story hooks - just that those hooks have nothing to do with being trans. Just like the hooks of everyone else have nothing to do with not being trans.

If a writer can't write a trans person, I have a hard time swallowing that they couldn't, I find the more likely explanation to be that they weren't willing to put the work in.

You are probably right.

But i don't think a writer should invest this work just for the sake of it. Just like he shouldn't invest the thousands of other things he doesn't know about just for the sake of it. Research needs a reason. Either because the writer is interested anyway or because it is the topic of his future work for other, unrelated reasons.

Can I share something with you? I wrote a character named Nora Hawkins once, a woman who didn't like women's clothing, not because of a dislike of femininity, but just because it made her personally feel uncomfortable and she just liked the way men's clothing felt.

I wouldn't even know what mens clothing is. While women's clothing still exists, everything else is nowadays unisex. And a significant portion of all women never use women's clothing. Doesn't make them transmen.

 

[CaitSeith]

Shouldn't we endeavor to develop empathy and through it the ability to identify with people from all groups?

To put that into practice, one needs enough good characters from all groups with whom empathize. Make the overwhelming majority about one or two groups, and you'll be saying that those two groups are the only ones who deserve empathy.

 

[Xprimentyl]

Would [proponents of trans characters in video games] consider Gwyndolin from Dark Souls a good example? Born as a male, but raised as a female. I may be wrong, but the game never overtly addresses the issue save for perhaps in an item description, and the fact will likely go unnoticed by less thorough players, but it adds so much to the overall lore and his motivations: Gwyndolin, the last of the gods in Anor Londo keeping up appearances with myriad illusions of a time and place that shamed him. I imagine that?s something trans people might deal with in real life, lack of acceptance, hiding truths, loneliness, etc. and it?s expertly incorporated into the game without ham-fistedly making it a focal point. Yes? No?

 

[Kerg3927]

Because, I want more trans characters in games...but they have to be real characters, not cardboard cutouts to satisfy a diversity checklist.

The diversity checklist is the main problem, IMO. Writing a good story and good characters is obviously difficult under the best conditions because it's rare. Add in the contraints of a diversity checklist, and it seems you often end up with an awkward mess.

Imagine if Mark Twain had set out to write Huck Finn, but was forced by his editor/publisher or by societal pressures to include a member of every race and sexual orientation and gender identity on his raft. The story he originally had in mind would have probably become convoluted. He probably wouldn't have had the insight to be able to write some of the characters well, and thus those would have ended up being stereotyped cardboard cutouts. And the book would have probably been a failure.

The same thing probably happens to a lot of good artistic ideas these days, and the end result is crappier art, including video games.

I think the best art is created when the artist has creative freedom and is unencumbered by rules. And right now there are just way too many fucking rules. I imagine for a lot of artists it is stifling.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I think forcing players to play as controversial or things they find undesirable is of limited benefit.

The GTA series says otherwise.

I'll add Shadow of the Colossus to the mixed-feelings-about-what-i'm-doing playlist.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

I think the best art is created when the artist has creative freedom and is unencumbered by rules. And right now there are just way too many fucking rules. I imagine for a lot of artists it is stifling.

What rules?

See, the thing is that the metaphysics of your argument don't make much sense on their own. You could flip it around with Star Trek. Star Trek could be argued as per 'filling out a diversity checklist' all while reinforcing a normative gaze despite a fictitious setting in a far future where humanity have achieved some egalitarian future of equal inheritance to resources and the stars themselves.

For instance, why exactly isn't the Federation more representative of the grand peoples of Earth? And this is a legitimate question that you can pose at so many far future settings.

My example of the cast of personalities in Android: Netrunner, whether Runner IDs, corporate executies, random people on card art .... there's actual paucity of the obligatorily understood White, eurocentric man.

And that helps reinforce in every card that the world these people exist within is global and interplanetary and in a far future technocratic setting that reinforces the idea of liquid culture and liquid national boundaries, in exchange for megacorporate global hyperconsumerism and the mass transit of billions of people all throughout the world and to space itself.

The thing is, the people making an argument of 'diversity checklist' solely because of a trans character, and then lumping that with a transcharacter can't simply be trans for the hell of it, is a self-defeating proposition of creating believable worlds themselves. Because I love ANR's world ... and these characters often only have paragraph long backstories that are presented with direct visualization and metanarratives through card art.

My favourite runner is still Chaos Theory...

Spoiler: A Wunderkind Shaper from New Angeles...

Spoiler: Who perhaps has more personal reasons for testing her computer science creations against megacorporations than simple curiosity...

Spoiler: And managed to survive the cycle trashes ... unlike most early runners... suck it, haters.

And so on ... and so on ...

Because it's not about a 'diversity checklist' ... in essence characters owe to themselves simply being as much as they owe to the nature of the world they inhabit. A trans character being trans and doing normal stuff regardless is equally a statement about their existence, and need not be defining. And honestly, that's what good representation is about. That's kind of the world that we want in the way that being trans is often all people need to single them out for abuse and hatreds.

And if writers are struggling with that, perhaps they need practice to get over it ... and less idiots screaming 'diversity checklist'. ANR has had expansion cycles set in India during the clone suffrage movement, and how runners and corporations are jockeying about with card art and card mechanics centred on that political contest and trying to capture that feel in the gameplay... Where corporations that are invested in destroying the cloning market competitors for their android creations are funding clone suffrage movements to help weaken their competitors and increase sales, and runners willing to capitalize on political assassination events that see some of their contacts 'trashed' in exchange for increased public attacks to help them damage megacorps....

And lo and behold many of the runners and executives, and subsidiary corporate IDs from that expansion cycle (the Mumbad Cycle) are Indian, or East Asian. To represent the socioeconomic, fictitious focus.

Spoiler: Also another favourite runner of mine comes from it...

It's less about the character themselves, and just how much of all nuances of the world that you wish to portray. And it's intellectually dishonest to pretend like a trans character on their own suddenly has to merit some amazing reason for being trans. Well, no ... they're trans, they exist.

See, the thing is ... I find it difficult to believe any future setting of a supposedly enlightened humanity and half the cast is white. It starts to break down, don't you think? When you actually stop and think about it ...? And the thing is roles get cast this way for a reason despite every reason why you should probably not do it.

It really doesn't set a very good visual narrative of an egalitarian future of a united humanity when every authority figure in the movie is cast as a white dude. You know .... sends kind of a bad undercurrent as in it gets you to start thinking there must have been one hell of an apocalyptic return of Caucasian colonization.

And the thing is Android: Netrunner is not magically worse for the 'diversity checklist' .... no, it actually sells the idea of its world actually being one set in a global focus. And it doesn't have much more than a metanarrative of blurbs and card art and some background filler about theme each cycle.

Spoiler: And hell, its representation and narratives of genderqueer people isn't perfect ... but you know, practice ...

 

[Erttheking]

I think forcing players to play as controversial or things they find undesirable is of limited benefit.

The GTA series says otherwise.

I'll add Shadow of the Colossus to the mixed-feelings-about-what-i'm-doing playlist.

Spec Ops the line would also like to join the party.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Shouldn't we endeavor to develop empathy and through it the ability to identify with people from all groups?

To put that into practice, one needs enough good characters from all groups with whom empathize. Make the overwhelming majority about one or two groups, and you'll be saying that those two groups are the only ones who deserve empathy.

If you can empathize with people, you can empathize with people, it doesn't matter what type of people they are. If you don't focus and pay attention at group representation percentages and just go in trying to just enjoy the game while being an empathetic person you will never have any issues as long as the game is actually a good game worth playing. Even if there's nobody of your group represented, ever. I know this for a fact cause growing up in Greece there were no games even in my own language, never mind ones with modern native Greek characters. Yet, I never had any issues identifying with all the foreign characters speaking in foreign tongues and so on.

 

[Erttheking]

Really? Because the Yakuza seems to be actually rather common in media, to the point where they crop up almost as the default bad guy in quite a few stories and heroes in others. Persona 5, had Yakuza, Saints Row 2, had Yakuza, GTA, had Yakuza, SMT, had Yakuza, Overwatch, had Yakuza, Payday 2, had Yakuza, fucking PAPER MARIO, had Yakuza.

Didn't play any of those and wasn't aware they feature this syndicate.

Maybe i underestimated how common the Yakuza is but so far i have seen far more transgender people in games (including options to play one like in Battletech).

[EDIT: Fuck, there's an argument to be made that there's more games where you can play as God Almighty himself than trans people]

That however seems quite believable. God games are a popular genre.

The fact that you think transgendered people don't have interesting story hooks speaks volumes. And not in a good way.

It is not so much that i thing transgendered people don't have interesting story hooks - just that those hooks have nothing to do with being trans. Just like the hooks of everyone else have nothing to do with not being trans.

If a writer can't write a trans person, I have a hard time swallowing that they couldn't, I find the more likely explanation to be that they weren't willing to put the work in.

You are probably right.

But i don't think a writer should invest this work just for the sake of it. Just like he shouldn't invest the thousands of other things he doesn't know about just for the sake of it. Research needs a reason. Either because the writer is interested anyway or because it is the topic of his future work for other, unrelated reasons.

Can I share something with you? I wrote a character named Nora Hawkins once, a woman who didn't like women's clothing, not because of a dislike of femininity, but just because it made her personally feel uncomfortable and she just liked the way men's clothing felt.

I wouldn't even know what mens clothing is. While women's clothing still exists, everything else is nowadays unisex. And a significant portion of all women never use women's clothing. Doesn't make them transmen.

Your lack of experience doesn?t change the facts. I can think of multiple playable characters that are canon Yakuza. Can you do that with trans people?

If you think there are no story hooks connected to a person?s trans status, again, that speaks volumes. And not in a good way

If you think the world of clothing is divided into women?s and unisex, you are misinformed. The world of professional workplaces begs to differ

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

I think forcing players to play as controversial or things they find undesirable is of limited benefit.

The GTA series says otherwise.

I'll add Shadow of the Colossus to the mixed-feelings-about-what-i'm-doing playlist.

Spec Ops the line would also like to join the party.

Can we talk? Yes, but No Russian [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXBDkevx5lM]? I understand, Call of Duty, I understand.