The History of Queerness in Videogames - Part 4 - The 2020s
Today we finish out the series by discussing the current decade and talking more about backlash. This week we have a Content Warning: specifically a lot of queerphobic wording and thought processes.
Today is the final part in my 4 part series about the history of queerness on videogames. This time we finish out by talking about queer games in the current decade and unfortunately have to talk about how they have been impacted by the people claiming "Woke-ness" and "DEI" every single time there is diversity. Also again, be aware that I talk about the thought process of the bigots a decent amount, I’ve balanced it with talking about the queerness of the games but just be aware, some of it is detailed. As a reminder, here are the 4 spheres I will be grouping these games into;
Ignorable, this means that the representation is either completely missable or takes initiative from the player to have the representation.
Shitty, this is portraying queer people in a bad light, being stereotypical with that bad light, or making an obviously queer character but having some explanation for why they aren't queer.
Antagonists/killable, this is when the queer people are either the main or side antagonist/bad guys in the story or they are able to be murdered by the player.
Actually good representation, this is when the queer representation is done in a positive way, when the queer folk are portrayed in a way that is accurate in its representative fashion.
Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
The 2020s
Obviously we are only about half way through this decade so this section will show an incomplete picture of the progression of queer representation for the decade, but I still felt it is important to discuss how this decade has represented us queer folk.
Let's start with an examination on what "Woke" is and then move into the games. "Woke" is a AAVE term which originally meant, basically, are you aware of the sociopolitical state of the country or in other words "are you awake?". That's probably a massive simplification, but that's the basic origin. It was then hijacked and completely and utterly bastardized by the folks who, in the prior decade had called every game SJW. But SJW never really caught on as well as "Woke" has. "Woke", in the context of videogames now, is the idea of diversity being a problem, to the point of it supposedly "not being historically accurate" or it being forced or simply existing at all. In part 3 we went over how the GamerGaters hated any representation and "Woke" gave them a word that was more simplistic and easier to say and was turning what used to be a positive into a negative. So, essentially, "Woke" is exactly what SJW was in the prior decade, a word used to represent diversity in representation that the users of the word aren't happy about, no matter the level of diversity, none is acceptable. But Cat, I can hear you say, what does DEI mean? Well that's simple, it means the EXACT same thing. That they are not happy with any diversity. The reason why they have two words is that they can apply to different instances, so you can use "Woke" to describe a game that includes queer folk but then use "DEI" to describe a black or queer developer you see who worked on the game. They have the same exact meaning, the difference is only how they are applied. Thanks for the question. Now that we know what those words represents, we can approach the current decade with more understanding.
The decade started with a game that has become so synonymous with "Woke-ness" that there is a subreddit called r/lastofus2 that isn't dedicated to discussing the game, but is dedicated to discussing "Woke-ness" in the industry as a whole and making fun of people for liking having diversity in their games. There's the occasional person who posts about liking the game, but they're like the occasional posters on r/trees asking about trees. The Last of Us Part 2 is a very gay game. You play Ellie, a very gay woman, who goes on a journey for revenge against Abby, the murderer of Joel, whom she murdered in her own act of revenge. The game gained immense praise in the industry but many in the gaming community despised it. Not because it was a bad game, not even because Joel died, although that was part of it. They hated it because Ellie was gay, Abby was buff and you had to play as her for the second half of the game, and there was a trans guy in it that was portrayed in a positive light/realistic way. They called it woke. It is, in a way, the pinnacle of what they view as woke. A game that has a story to tell that isn't all consumed with white men, despite them still being a part of it, and has both queer representation and racial diversity. Some of this hatred is an instance of people not liking how the story goes, as opposed to the story being bad. The story has a point, it's designed to show you how revenge isn't worth it, how the people you want to take revenge on are also people, and that revenge will take many things from you. I talked about this in my In Defense of Dragon Age: The Veilguard article but there is a fundamental problem in the gaming community right now because they don't like the direction the story goes as opposed to the story being bad or written poorly. They judge games based on what they wanted it to be as opposed to what it is. That said, there are occasionally reasonable applications of this thought process I'm criticizing, but in the instance I am talking about, it is not.
Now then, The Last of Us 2 has some of the best written queer relationships I've seen. Seeing the care given to writing the relationship between Ellie and Dina, seeing them grow over the course of their journey in Seattle. It's a lovely feeling, to see that even during such a dark story driven by revenge there's still some amount of brightness left between them. This then sinks into sadness when the ending hits and Ellie comes home to find Dina having moved out, a sadness that is driven by how well developed their relationship was, how you could feel love between them. The Last of Us Part 2 was a game that might have created a backlash unlike any other, but with it's incredibly well done and representative characters and story, it falls very squarely into the Actually Good Representation sphere.
So, now in part 4 I want to finally address why I have been bringing up the ability to kill so many of the queer people during this entire 4 part series. Could it be that I'm simply being too "sensitive"? Or that I'm simply overreacting and thinking the world wants to kill queer people but no one does? No, the Killable part of the Antagonist/Killable sphere exists because that's what these people have done in one of the most successful games from 2023, Baldur's Gate 3. I have seen many far right bigots say that "at least in Baldur's Gate 3 we could kill all the queer people." (I will not post screenshots of these conversations I have seen, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. If you're morbidly interested in seeing things like this in a more safe environment where people are making fun of the craziness, I highly recommend r/gamingcirclejerk, it's a better way of delving into this than what I've done for research for this series and another future one. Also yes I am a masochist, I look at this stuff way too much). Now, as I have said, that is simply a reality of the kind of games that give you so much of a playground, but that doesn't change that the reason many of them are okay with the "Woke-ness" in the game, is because they can commit hate motivated mass murder. I know this was not Larians' intention, and we as queer people shouldn't be immortal or something in games, we aren't kids, but the very fact that people actually do this, that they think in this way, is absolutely awful and has forced me to examine how queer people have been represented in games. It made me want to write this 4 part series and make plans for another series in a similar vein about politics in videogames. I've been toying around with the idea for this series since I originally started this blog about 6 months ago, but seeing bigots say they went around killing the queer people is what finally pushed me to get it all written down (and I ended up writing a third of a book in length and could easily fill a whole book with all that I didn't cover).
Despite that, Baldur's Gate 3 still has tremendous representation. It has queer characters, the ability to play as a trans person, queer relationships represented in NPCs and the world in a completely accepting way, and the ability to be in a giant lesbian poly-cule, if you so desire. The game is filled with queerness that you can only really miss if you put blinders on. It was a lovely experience going through the game, making decisions that decided the fate of many around me, some that drove people away from my party entirely, and to still be able to have a queer relationship. Karlach is, in many many ways, such a messy lesbian despite being pan. She's a person who has a messy past, a messy "ex" and is still kinda figuring stuff out, she's much like Jack from Mass Effect 2 in that way. Then, Astarion is just desperate to be as queer as possible hitting on almost everyone around him (he doesn't like duergars), he's the exact type of queer vampire you would expect in this kind of world. The queerness is there. It's everywhere, and while some of it is, arguably, ignorable, it mostly straddles the Antagonist/Killable sphere and the Actually Good Representation sphere.
There's also a great game that managed to survive through all the anti-woke harassment and also allowed you to play as a trans person in a world where transness was just an accepted part of the world. I'm talking about Cyberpunk 2077. I played a trans V, the main character, because I am trans, and it was amazing being able to experience the world as some semblance of myself. Feeling like a part of the world because noone cared about V being trans, all they cared about was how much Johnny is working to kill you and how much you want to fight the corpos. It's an amazing piece of queerness. There's also queer characters, both gay women and men, and also the trans woman Claire who runs races or at least is the race quest prompter for V.
While this transness is ignorable, I didn't even engage with the races cause I didn't enjoy the driving that much, but the other queerness still existed in the world and you couldn't ignore it if you did each main romantic interests sidequest. Unfortunately, there are mods to specifically remove this transness, to take away the trans flag on Claire's truck and remove conversations with her. It's a depressing reality that these idiots go out of their way to remove such a small acknowledgement of transness because, as I've discussed, they don't want ANY diverse representation. There are also ads objectifying trans women that exist on so many vending machines throughout Night City. We were accepted in society to the point of objectification, something cis folk have dealt with for all of modern day advertising.
Cyberpunk feels like the game that fits the easiest into the label of Queer game, at least when it comes to sci-fi type games. There's so much you're able to do as a queer person, playing through it is such a wonderful experience that made me love being able to be who I am, but in this hyper capitalist setting. I highly recommend playing the game because of how nice it is to be able to experience being queer in this type of game. Going through the stories of Judy and seeing her past and the struggles she goes through with the Death of her best friend, Evelyn, who she very obviously has a thing for. Seeing Kerry struggle with his unrequited love for Johnny and dealing with the trauma of him "dying" during his assault on Arasaka, these are both experiences that show depth not just to the characters, but to their queerness. Kerry is fundamentally dealing with his past love for Johnny, Judy is fundamentally dealing with her obvious love for Evelyn, these are experiences that are pure Cyberpunk 2077. They're messy, they're gay, and they're amazing. Add on that you can play as a trans person and you have a game that is so damn queer that I can't do it justice. Cyberpunk 2077 manages to straddle 3 spheres, the Ignorable sphere, the Antagonist/Killable sphere, and the Actually Good Representation sphere. It is a game with a massive playground so it's not surprising it does this, but the representation in this game is still top notch.
And of course, there is Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a game filled with representation and attacked incredibly often for being "Woke". Particularly when it comes to Taash. Going off of what I said above about Baldur's Gate 3, the common refrain I've seen about Veilguard is that it was bad not because of the representation, but because it wasn't well written. They say that they want to be able to be shitty to Taash but only deal with the ramifications of that shittiness later on. that that would be more "elegant" than simply being supportive of them from the get-go, like you are your other teammates. Or worse they think they should be able to be shitty to them and then lob gifts in their direction to fix Taash hating them. And then, even worse, I've seen people say that they hate the representation because they have to engage with it, because they can't just kill Taash so they don't have to deal with it. It sucks and all but the representation in Veilguard is still fantastic.
It has incredibly accurate writing when it comes to coming out and the experience of those you've known for a while adapting to your new self. The Bharv scene (where the character Isabella does pushups after accidentally misgendering Taash) continually gets called out by the bigots as unrealistic or cringey, but it is so damn representative of something us trans folk go through all the time. We've all had that moment of someone misgendering us early on and being awkward about it so they do something performative. Isabela is, herself, pretty queer, and she's showing in the scene that she knows she messed up and she's genuinely sorry. She's doing the characteristics Cis thing and that's okay. It's a good scene because it feels awkward, because it shows what it's like for us trans folk to go through something like that. Veilguard is filled with this kind of accurately representative queerness that you can't look away from. Its bones are queer and that's why there was such a large backlash too it. The game has such amazingly well done representation and it isn't accepting of bigotry in a world where many like to think anti-queer bigotry would be the default. It is a unique experience in a AAA game that I'm very glad exists. Dragon Age: The Veilguard falls very obviously into the Actually Good Representation sphere.
Horizon Forbidden West, the sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn which we talked about last week, came out in 2022 and it gained just as much "woke" accusations as the first one, although that one was called "SJW trash". This time the game continued to represent queer people in this world of the future with robot dinosaurs. But things changed when the DLC came out called Burning Shores. In it Aloy can finally romance a woman. This is a side thing in a DLC of a game that, while it had decent representation, was still broadly ignorable. Forbidden West is an amazing game, but the representation still falls into the both Ignorable and Actually Good Representation sphere. The second one is mainly just because the queer people that exist in the game are portrayed very well, we are shown as just normal folk. Like we are.
Starfield, the first new Bethesda RPG IP came out in 2023 to middling reviews but had pronouns in the character creator. This was looked at by the "anti-woke" chuds as simply unacceptable. So let's talk about pronouns. They are there as a way of simply having more identity for your character, most games in the modern industry that allow you to make your own character include them. Why is that a bad thing? It's a simple selection that barely comes up in most of those games, it shouldn't be something to freak out about. It's literally the most basic form of trans representation possible. So, again, why is it something to freak out over? Well, it's actually quite simple, my dear reader, and I've talked about it in part 3 when it came to GamerGate. They don't want depth and diversity in representation, they want ALL the representation. Having pronouns in a character creator reminds them trans people exist, a real shocker I know, and that is simply unacceptable. Starfield isn't even a good game, at least for me, but it spawned meme after meme about that now famous British YouTuber yelling "PrOnOuNs!!!". The representation falls into the Ignorable sphere, although I considered making a Hilariously Overreacted To sphere specifically for this one.
There has also been a tremendous amount of queer indie games in the first 5 years of the decade, many managing to all fall into the Actually Good Representation sphere. There was Ikenfell, which came out in 2020, with it's tremendous and accepted queerness that I have written about before. In that game the queerness of the characters is an accepted integral fact about them, even having someone who uses Ze/Zim pronouns. Ikenfell was a wonderful experience of queerness that left me tearing up with how much it meant to me. Obviously it lands in the Actually Good Representation sphere.
Last year in 2024 there was Dustborn, an Indie game that had queerness everywhere and was much more diverse race wise, I'll be reviewing it in a few weeks so Ill wait to go into any real detail, but just know that when you look up the game theme one of the videos calls the theme song the most racist song in gaming. It's not, it needed to go harder but it's not fucking racist. Dustborn falls into the Actually Good Representation sphere.
There was a sequel to Life is Strange last year called Life is Strange: Double Exposure where you, again, play as Max who is still just as queer as she was before. She is much more apparent with her queerness and you're able to play the 20 something lesbian in a really interesting environment that is very different from the original game even if it's not as good. Life is Strange: Double Exposure falls into the Actually Good Representation sphere.
In 2023 there was Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical, a game made by former Bioware devs, that I have written about before, that has fantastic representation and diversity. You're able to be queer during the campaign and you'll see plenty of representation that is just accepted, although it's one of the games that you kinda have to push for most of the representation. It's there, and some characters make it known, but in order to get to the good stuff you have to choose to be queer. Which isn't inherently a problem, but it does make the game straddle the line between the Ignorable and the Actually Good Representation spheres.
There was Tell Me Why in 2020, a fantastic game made by DontNod who made the original two Life is Strange Games that is about a pair of twins with powers and one of them is a trans guy with the story having to do with his transness and how their mother reacts to him being different. It's a really interesting representation that made me cry my eyes out and obviously falls into the Actually Good Representation sphere.
Hades, a Greek mythology based roguelike, came out in 2020 and was incredibly gay, as all Greek mythology was (something I'm very proud of since I am Greek). In it you play Zagreus, the son of Hades and a really gay/bi dude. You can romance Thanatos, the incarnation of death and the romance between them is very well done. That said, it can be ignored, so this one straddles the line between the Actually Good Representation and the Ignorable spheres.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 came out just a few weeks ago and people have already lobbed "Woke" at the game, despite the lead Dev being a fellow GamerGater. This has actually forced some of them to drop their mask a bit. See, the lead Dev believes his game isn't "woke" despite including a gay male romance and, gasp, a black immigrant, because he didn't force those things. They just are facts in the game that the devs wanted, not them pushing an "agenda". But that lead the exact same people who said they were fine with diversity as long as it was written well and not forced to finally say the truth that they don't want any diversity at all in their games. None. Zero. This is not addressing the fact that there is antisemitism in the game, it is not a "Woke" game, it just also happens to have a gay romance option and one single black person in it. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, besides having an awful naming convention, with its tiny, tiny amount of representation, still falls into the Ignorable sphere despite the massive uproar of the bigots saying the lead Dev betrayed them. Seeing the lead Dev have his face eaten by the very same leopards he once called friends would be hilarious if it wasn't so depressing.
Avowed came out this very week and as I've been playing it one thing I see everywhere is how gay it is if you look for it. For instance, the first companion you get is Kai, played by the actor who played Garrus from Mass Effect, and he's a gay dude. In the second hub world of the game you find out he had a friend who he cared for and said friend was in love with him and had recently died. But unfortunately that wasn't obvious to Kai and his friend never said anything about it so the love went unexplored. Kai was obviously also in love with his friend and just wishes they could have had something, if only he had been there when his friend needed him instead of running away. Its a lovely relationship experience that can easily remind you of what it's like to look back on people you cared for and reexamine what could have been. Avowed is made by Obsidian who has a history of having fantastic representation and this game is no different. While the representation is arguably ignorable so far, its still there if you just scratch past the skin. Avowed straddles the line between the Ignorable and Actually Good Representation spheres but it's still mainly just Actually Good Representation.
These are obviously not all of the games that have released in the last 5 years with queerness being either in the background or in the foreground of the game, many more have that I either haven't played, haven't heard of, or just didn't have the space to cover. All of these games had "Woke" thrown at them and that was something that you can't get away from with how influential those people have become. All of these games are filled with bigoted reviews on steam about them being propaganda. All of these are accused of being something that the all powerful left is forcing the bigots to see, not even to necessarily play, they don't like even SEEING the games existing.
These same people have been often calling for boycotts of games not because of terrible conditions of a studio, not because the studio has people working there that support literal Nazis, no they boycott them because there is diversity and queerness. This has been a constant thing in the gaming industry recently. People are respected for boycotting queer games, people are making fun of queer people for not appreciating that their existence is supposedly ruining games. And then, when queer people decide to boycott a game that benefits a person who is a literal Nazi (or at least a Nazi Sympathizer) we are viewed at large as children. These people will also take credit for games failing, saying that the devs "Went woke and went Broke" despite that the games that failed were often destined to failed because of their development or because of other completely separate issues with them. Concord is trotted out as a sign that diversity in games will lead to the largest failure in industry history, but they don't bring up that the game didn't really have a personality, was ripping off Overwatch, which hasn't been big in years, and took around $400 million to make. It didn't fail because it was woke, it failed because it wasn't interesting.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is at the opposite end of the spectrum here where the game "under-performed" (in that it didn't sell as much as EA wanted despite reaching over 1.5 million players and probably selling pretty close to that as well, a figure many games would fucking die for) largely because of the massive budget that was spent developing the game for 10 years and spending most of that time and budget scrapping multiple earlier versions of the game. The game didn't sell like trash like people have claimed, and the game does not deserve the hate it has garnered, as I have discussed before. The major social media platforms are being overrun by bots working for Nazis and actual Nazis which has lead to games being boycotted by them and then having under-performing sales, and the Nazis saying that they weren't the cause of the under-performing sales, it was just because the game was terrible. GamerGate has morphed large parts of the gaming community into a beast that will maul anything that has any amount of diversity, even if it also has white cishet males represented. The only games that manage to stay mostly unscathed are the ones where queerness is either able to be ignored or we are able to be killed. Thankfully there are still games that have us in the foreground, there are still developers who don't let the bigots intimidate them into not having representation, there are still queer folk in the industry who continue to produce diverse work. The industry is not defined by the backlash despite it being influential.
The Final Conclusion
The 2020s has turned out to have some of the most upfront queer representation in gaming yet and that's not because it was forced, but because the developers actually WANT that representation and because there is more diversity in the industry as a whole, plus all the indie devs being able to make their games without the influence of executives. Hopefully, with what's going on in the world of politics, the game industry doesn't start to crack down on visible queerness. Doesn't force it back to being ignorable. Hopefully the industry continues to flourish and the rest of the decade continues to represent us.
At the end of this 4 part series I think the most important thing I could say is that I hope I have shown you that queerness in videogames has always existed, it has never been forced, it has never been shoved down peoples throats. From Flea in Chrono Trigger to Volgin in MGS3 to Max in Life is Strange to Ellie in The Last of Us 2, what happened from the 1990s to the 2020s was that our existence was becoming no longer ignorable, and often no longer killable. The bigots that exist now didn't have a problem with the queerness in games back then because they didn't have to engage with our existence or because we were the antagonists. Now that they can't just ignore us existing, now that we have entire companion characters in high profile RPGs that have queer stories, they can't handle it. They think that things were better when we were ignorable or were the bad guys because they don't like having to have their ideas of what is normal challenged. They are also people who often didn't notice the queerness of many of the games I have talked about throughout this 4 part series, either because they were too young to notice, or because they were able to ignore it due to the design of the game/it was coded queerness.
These people are also upset that not every single game is made with only them in mind, that now there are games made with people in mind that used to be ignorable background people. It's a change to have us be there in the center, but it's also not like we weren't there to begin with. If you're queer and play games, remember that there's plenty of us out there who love gaming, that you're not alone, that you have representation far beyond what you might have ever thought. Remember that queer people have always existed in videogames and we have always existed in the world. Remember that even if we start to have more games that lose the tremendous amount of foreground queerness, our existence will always be there. We are everywhere, we always have been.
Meow,
Cat
The Main source for the final piece in this series is my own experiences exploring the gaming community online and playing the queer games I'm talking about.
Other sources:
Video of the Last of Us 2 Scene which the screenshot is from.
Reddit Thread for the Karlach screenshot.
Reddit Thread for the Claire’s truck screenshot.
Reddit Thread for the Pronouns guy screenshot because I didn’t want to watch the video for my own.