Gayming among the gamers

 

 

 

Dion Lesage has a lovely and tender moment with his boyfriend Terence at a military camp during one of the cutscenes of Final Fantasy XVI, which made my silly gay heart pound in exhilaration after years of absolutely nothing of the sort being openly portrayed in one of the favorite series of all time. Since the beginning, Final Fantasy has always felt deeply heterosexual and conservative in its romantic scenarios, something very visible to me after recently replaying Final Fantasy VIII. Rinoa and Squall barely seem to have any chemistry at all going on between them, but the narrative really wants to convince us otherwise by making Rinoa seemly obsessed with Squall from their first meeting, creating tension due to her equally high regards for Squall’s rival, Seifer. The story around her suggests that she is in love with Seifer at first, but develop feelings for Squall later on, so she has to make a choice; because the story can’t be an “enemies to lovers” story between Squall and Seifer in a polyamorous relationship with Rinoa. Squall is this very quiet young man, clearly dealing with much internal turmoil and who speaks much more in inner dialogue than with the characters around him, while Rinoa, in contrast, in this very energetic, positive character always there to up-lift Squall and try to encourage him to open up about what he’s feeling. “Squall? You have to voice your feelings or else I won’t understand.”, says Rinoa. This concept, if well-developed, could be interesting, but FF8 feels less interested in having a well-developed romance between Squall and Rinoa, instead it just seems desperate to have them romance no matter what. Going a few years ahead, Final Fantasy X had a romance story between Yuna and Tidus much better written. Everything about them take baby steps to go forward, from their first meeting at Besaid until the beautiful scene at Macalania Woods and towards the very end of Yuna’s pilgrimage. Tidus and Squall have a similar plot device about their characters: trauma and loss; but each one of them respond very different about their past experiences. Tidus is silly, talkative and pro-actively supportive while Squall is quiet, focused and mostly self-absorbed. Although Yuna is essentially a complete stranger to Tidus and he’s lost into this new world, he still grows interested in being a helpful companion to Yuna in her journey to save Spira. His attitude is inspiring (…to a player who goes through this whole journey without an eager, mean-spirited excitement to reduce any JRPG character to a one-dimensional joke). Squall, however, shows very little interest in Rinoa and her goals for about ¾ of the game, effectively ignoring when she’s in danger during the Sorceress’ coronation and only changing after Rinoa enters a coma much later in the story. The change in Squall’s attitude then happens so abruptly, it’s difficult to follow-up or to empathize. At one point, it felt like the writers didn’t know how to flesh-out his character and his relationship with Rinoa but also couldn’t just make both of them just friends at this point, so just forced this romantic scenario between them instead of lowering the stakes a little. It doesn’t feel authentic. Just words in a script desperate for the curtains to close down.

 

Going back to Dion and Terence: their backgrounds are very little explored in the game’s narrative and cutscenes. We see they are in a relationship, but not how this came to be. Something new to a series very familiar to fans on creating romantic storylines, but fine. Final Fantasy 8 and Final Fantasy 16 have different writers and Dion is not a primary main character like Clive; nor do we really see the in-between of how Wakka and Lulu came together between FF10 and FF10-2 either, for example. What really marked me during the afore mentioned cutscene between Dion and Terence is this fear I sensed on the camera during their kiss. It’s a short smooch, but the camera runs far away at the moment, feeling scared of showing anything that could cause any potential backlash outside of the fiction. Dion doesn’t have the presence in the story I wish it had and the story is terrified of showing much about his relationship. 

 

Assuming fear as one of the motives behind the scarcity of Dion and Terence lovable moments, maybe it paid off. Final Fantasy XVI doesn’t seem to be present in a recent Steam of games featuring so-called “woke” content. A list which includes the strange game Palworld, detected as “woke”, while the game in which the three main characters are confronted with an opposite version of all of their beliefs is, apparently, “not-woke”.

 

Words and acronyms, thrown around so fervently in online spaces, enter our vocabulary without much thought. Woke, DEI, Gamergate, ESG; all now part of our language when discussing media such as video games. Terms normalized. “Forced diversity” becomes any and all attempts of including something outside the Default fed into the gaming sphere since the beginning. This current “Gamergate 2” is the result of the unresolved first Gamergate, which took place most strongly between 2011 and 2015, which itself is the result of decades of electronic gaming coming from and thinking about one singular reality. The vitriol against any marginalized group is a backlash against the diversification of gaming worlds, a rash attempt to rationalize the base-assumptions constructed and well-fed in the first few decades of gaming marketing strategies and the narratives inside those games. It was also a shift in language and media analysis of video games. We went from angry reviews and games-as-mechanics-only to critical analysis of characters and narratives. We went from James Rolfe’s “Alright, let’s dig into a big pile of bat shit!” as he starts his commentary on of a handful of Batman games to Anita Sarkessian’s “This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters, but remember that it’s both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media, while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.” as she starts her Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games series. Both iconic, but only one had to quickly disable comments in her videos, received an unimaginable number of threats for their work and has triple the number of dislikes to likes on her videos.

 

 

“Willst thou get the girl? Or play like one?” says one of the commercials for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time from 1998. “There is a beautiful naked woman on this page.” reads the text in one of Sega Saturn’s advertisements, in which a woman is only covered by a few screenshots of games. In commercials and ads such as these, women are portrayed as victims or sex-objects, never as players themselves. This has been the norm for a long time in the gaming industry. For a quite recent example: an advertisement for the PS Vita says “Touch both sides for added enjoyment.” The background image is of a woman with breasts on both sides of her body.

 

As marketing strategies, the Sega Saturn and PS Vita examples are bluntly sexist, but the Zelda commercial feels like the most alienating one. Players are invited to be Zelda’s savior, not Zelda herself. The message here is: if you play like a girl, you’re not a good player. You can’t be part of the group. Women have been constantly ostracized from the action-adventure genre as players, being regarded instead as a “niche audience”, for which very specific games were being made. Moony, of the YouTube channel Moon Channel made a good video about the topic of “gaming for girls”, with well-researched historical context to the concept. Games for Girls work much in the same way as the toys’ industry tendency to market tabletop games for boys and washing machines toys for girls. If Games for Girls is how the industry decided to separate man and woman in the gaming space, The Gay Button is how the same industry separates straight and LGBTQ+ players, a topic also discussed in a YouTube video by Verily Ritchie and Ada Černoša, creators of one of my favorite channels on the platform. If The Legend of Zelda was a boy’s club while Barbie video games were the place girls could rejoice in the gaming experience, straight and queer players could enjoy the same games, with the gay content hidden from the main experience. The illusion here is that games like Life is Strange is inclusive towards queer players, even though the queer content can be easily avoided. A short journey through the history of queer romance in gaming could take us back to the 2000s, with Bioware’s RPG series Mass Effect and Dragon Age being the most popular examples of that era where a player’s avatar can pursuit gay romance, to the mid-2010s and choice-driven games like Life is Strange where protagonist Max can end up in a romance with Chloe; then finally to narrative-driven game scenarios where players can’t opt-out of gay content, including the afore mentioned Final Fantasy XVI and The Last of US Part 2. Here, players can’t choose the sexuality of the characters on the screen. Dion is gay and Ellie is a lesbian regardless of player’s decision. Trying to go back even further in time in search of gay existence inside gaming narratives or advertisements feels like a useless endeavor. If women were portrayed as eye-candy objects in 80s and 90s video game ads, LGBTQ, black and disabled players were excluded altogether. That was a time when interacting with a gay character would result in a game over screen. In a capitalist society, where civilians are recognized by their ability to consume, for the first three decades of video games’ existence, from the arcades to the early days of 3D graphics in home-consoles, all advertisements completely excluded a huge portion of our society. “By gamers. For gamers”, says the motto of game company Interplay, in which one of its promotional materials has a photo where all of its developers are sitting in chairs next to a pool, all named and with their developed games listed next to it; in the background, several women in bikinis have their backs turned from the camera, all nameless.

 

This historical background can partially explain the staggering reaction to diverse characters in video game stories. RPGs have over the years been the place where diversity is explored with more depth. Barret from Final Fantasy 7 was probably the first black character I encountered in a videogame who wasn't defined by stereotypes or existed because the game's "realistic" setting needed them to feel believable. Barret had goals, a family and an intricate part in the game's narrative. Role-playing as a genre is an interesting one, as ultimately, every game is about role-playing. Uncharted doesn't have the well-defined characteristics of what we call RPGs, such as character leveling, attributes, party management and some deeper level of strategic approach, but everyone who plays the games are essentially role-playing Nathan. No other art form can quite reach the level of immersion a videogame environment can create. It has been said that, whenever someone is playing a Mario level and loses, there has still to be found a vocal reaction that says "Mario lost!" rather than - "I lost!". Mario is not an out-of-reach character existing in the confines of a movie screen or in the words of a novel, Mario is the player, flesh and blood.

 

Women, and all groups previously excluded from gaming as either players or creators still defiled expectations and became players regardless, role-playing characters opposite to themselves. I'm a gay man who have role-played the heterosexual lifestyle of Nathan Drake and did extremely awkward sex mini-games with Kratos in the God of War series. I rolled my eyes several times seeing the terribly bad development of Squall and Rinoa's relationship and none of these experiences have "dewokefied" me. I went through the entire Uncharted games with ever-growing feelings towards Nathan Drake, regardless of the narrative telling me how straight he was.

 

Class, gender, sexually, religion, culture, bodies... all are at play. Dishonored 2 allows players to choose Corvo or Emily. You can play one and then the other. The chains of reality have no place in fiction, less-so in games. Controller in hand, a man can become a skilled woman sword fighter, experience gender ambiguity, lead the revolution, explore a new continent or tend to a farm. These genius virtual spaces are limitless.

 

So no, a character from the recent Dragon Age: The Veilguard saying "I'm non-binary" in a setting where gender and terminology could've been more refined won't make you "woke". It can be new, awkward or even poor-writing, but there's no conspiracy behind these scripts.

 

Relax and press X. You willst play the girl, and that's great.