The History of Queerness in Videogames - Part 2 - The 2000s
The 2000s were a surprising decade of increased foreground queer representation.
Last week we covered the ‘90s, a decade where most of the queerness in games was coded. As games began to form more of an identity and move into the 3rd Dimension, queerness increased and came along for the ride. This week we are covering the 2000s, a decade which stopped being so queer coded and started being more openly queer. It also still fell into pits of representation being attached to enemies or being easily ignorable and laid the ground work for the future movement that changed the industry, GamerGate. 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 is a link to Part 1:
The 2000s
The 2000's was a time of more and more acceptance of queerness in the media sphere and videogames were no different.
The RPG genre was THE genre that allowed for an expansion of queerness into the industry. In 2000, starting the decade, Baldur's Gate 2 came out and allowed for two gay romances. The game was a CRPG that allowed for a lot of freedom in both how you approached encounters and how you approached relationships with your companions. Bioware would lead the industry in some level of queer relationship in almost every game they made going forward. Which, in the 2000s, were Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age: Origins (Neverwinter Nights didn’t have any from what I can tell but I could be wrong). All of them were RPGs and all of them allowed gay relationships. Many other RPGs of the decade had either people you could romance/seduce or just characters in the world/lore that were queer. A short list of these include: Fable (people you could romance), Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (although the people you could seduce weren't your companions and male gayness wasn't adequately represented), The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (which had queer gods and people you could romance), multiple Fire Emblems (both queer NPCs and PCs), Fallout 3 (which had both queer NPC couples and people you could romance), and Borderlands (Mad Moxxi is super bi and Tanis is gay). Put simply, there are so many RPGs in the 2000s that had queer characters but all of them straddled the line between the Actually Good Representation sphere and Ignorable sphere. While representation was increasing, our queerness was still firmly in the background. It allowed bigots to not even notice the obvious queerness either because the queerness took initiative from the player or it simply wasn't touched on much in the story. Yet, it was everywhere. Of course, RPGs weren't the only games that had queer representation, plenty of other genres exhibited queerness.
For instance, Indigo Prophecy in ‘05, a mystery game where the neighbor of detective Carla (one of the main characters), Tommy, is revealed to be gay in a conversation he has with her that is meant to reveal some clues. The player is given the option of asking Tommy if he is with anyone and he will then say
Well actually I did meet someone two weeks ago. He’s very real and very nice. And he works in a bank too. I think this time it could turn into something serious.
The player also has the option of saying "I'm happy to see you got your smile back" to which Tommy says
We all have our ups and downs, right? I always thought people in New York didn’t give a damn about gayness. They were so enlightened. How wrong I was. They still look at us as being different from so-called normal folks.
Tommy in this scene is there to give the player a nudge in the right direction for the mystery and these options are completely optional. So in this case, it's game that straddles the line between the Ignorable and Actually Good Representation spheres depending on your dialogue choices.
Now, obviously queerness in games where it's not optional/ignorable is in fact better representation. See, when you play any of the games in the ‘00s that I've listed so far you have to "make" it gay. Are the characters you can have gay relationships with still gay even if you don't have gay relationships with them? Yes absolutely. But it being optional engagement allows for those who are bigoted towards queer folk to not even see those parts of the games. It allows them to think that the games they loved growing up had zero queer representation instead of them just being able to avoid it entirely.
And then in some of the games you're even able to kill the people who you can have gay relationships with. Like in ‘03 with KotOR, a game I've already brought up, where the character Juhani is a dark side Padawan who killed her Master and you, as a new Padawan, are given the mission to go clear the dark side out of a local set of ruins on the Jedi training planet of Dantooine. While there you discover that Juhani is the person in the ruins who emits dark side energy stuff and you are given the option to either kill her, or save her. If you kill her, she dies and that decision does not change anything going forward. If you save her, she realizes she done fucked up by killing her Master and asks for forgiveness from the local council and then is given the mission to accompany you on your mission across the galaxy, but some people would just kill her and never know she's gay. Even worse, this actually allows those who hate queer people to get out their fantasy of killing queer folk. While it was not meant to be like that, it's definitely something the bigots think about. KotOR falls into the Antagonist and Ignorable sphere because you are both able to kill Juhani, and able to ignore her queerness if you don’t. It is another game that straddles two spheres, often landing in one or the other just depending on the player themselves
Next, let's look at Metal Gear Solid 3 from ‘04 for a moment to see another example of how queerness can be represented in a very negative way. Specifically, there are two queer characters in the game, Volgin and Raikov who are both enemies. Volgin is described as bi using the phrase "man of broad tastes". Now, if that wasn't obvious enough, when Snake disguises himself as Raikov, the other queer character, Volgin grabs his crotch after meeting him and that is how he realizes that Snake is not Raikov. Because Volgin and Raikov were sleeping together. MGS 3 has these moments of "I'm not sure if I would prefer to have no representation or this representation". And it still falls into a game where the queer folk are the villains. Raikov is also depicted as enjoying wearing thongs as a way of showing his queerness which is a very shitty stereotype that is often completely inaccurate and actually feeds into queer people growing a level of internalized homophobia because they didn't like doing that or thinking that if you do like that then you are only gay not trans (which can be true but can still lead to internalized transphobia). But hey, what do you expect from a game made by someone who would go on to make a character who breathes through her skin so just HAS to only wear a bikini. Obviously, MGS 3, an incredibly well regarded game, falls into the Shitty sphere of representation.
Or there's Persona 3 in ‘06 where you have a random girl student who regularly talks about Mitsuru, the woman who is integral to the plot and a fellow student, in a way that is often viewed as queer. However, that's just ignorable and maybe debatable. So instead let's focus on the trans woman who is portrayed in an incredibly negative light. 3 of the guys are on a beach and are wandering around talking to girls. They come across a woman named only as "Beautiful Lady" who, when it is revealed she is trans, the guys freak out and insult her. This was a terrible representation of trans folk, portraying us, again, as someone who pulls the wool over the eyes of others and that once we reveal that we are trans we become completely different people (mildly evocative of Faris in Final Fantasy V where she was revealed to have a feminine body and other party members instantly fell in love with her). Like the Movie trope of the glasses making a woman ugly and once she takes them off she is pretty, except in reverse. It's a trope that is everywhere and an incredibly bad bit of representation, and yet it is still representation, queerness still existed even if it's not in the best light. And hey, shes still named as "Beautiful Lady" and you can't ignore or kill her. Persona as a whole is a series that has a troubled history of queer representation that is really fucked. Although, interestingly, in Persona 3 Portable, a re-release that came out in 2010 in North America, you are able to play as a Female Main Character, the first for the series. She's able to have gay relationships with fellow S.E.E.S. teammates Aigis and Mitsuru, something that is incredibly nice to see in a Persona game but also falls into the "gayness is acceptable for women and not men" trope, male gaze and all that. So while it's nice to have actual queerness in a Persona game, I do wish the male main character was allowed to have gay relationship. This is something I hope Persona 6 allows to happen. Sadly, Persona 3 falls into the Shitty sphere.
Going off of that, let's talk about Persona 4. Persona 4 came out in ‘08 and is centered around a small rural Japanese town called Iniba. You play as a group of teens trying to solve a murder mystery of people being thrown into a world into the TV and then dying in there and appearing back in the real world in dramatic death poses and locations. There is a character known as Naoto Shirogane and he is a teen detective known as the Detective Prince. Throughout most of the game he is referred to with He/Him pronouns as he presents in a masculine fashion including seemingly binding his chest. When he is thrown into the TV the team has to go and save him by going through his dungeon where you eventually "discover" that he is "actually a woman". People have the characteristic "he is actually a she???" thing and they immediately switch pronouns. Though Naoto does not change how he presents both to the group and the world at large. I am referring to him as a guy because he experiences characteristic signs of dysphoria. He is uncomfortable with the feminine parts of his body, he tries to hide his chest and curves, he wears masculine clothes because he's more comfortable with them, he talks about how he wishes he had been born a boy. He is trans. But the writers try to get out of this by saying that he actually just did all of these things because it's easier to be accepted in his profession, teen detective, as a boy. It's a way of bending over backwards to undermine his transness. And even post him being "revealed" as a woman he does not change his dress, eventually at the end he does in a final picture but until then he still dresses masc. Even when he presents in a fashion show as feminine he is shown as incredibly uncomfortable being forced to wear a dress. He is trans. To present him otherwise is to tear the heart out of his character.
However, it gets worse. See, over the course of your confidant progressing, you have to tell him he is a woman and that you like him being a woman. You cannot do otherwise despite him being very trans and consistently discussing how much he dislikes his feminine body. This is a really shitty type of representation, the type that isn't controversial because it exists, it is controversial in the community because they like to insist he is a woman despite his so obvious transness. It's viewed as disrespectful to say he is trans, they consistently use the writers BS writing as an excuse to not acknowledge the very obvious dysphoria. It sucks and it is still representation. Anyone who is trans and plays this game can tell that. The queerness in Persona 4 also extends past Naoto. Originally the devs wanted you to be able to have a gay relationship with the best friend character Yosuke Hanamura. Yosuke is incredibly homophobic but that is obviously him repressing his own gayness. Often the ones who protest the most are the gayest. When he faces the shadow duplicate of the other teammate Kanji Tatsumi, he shits on Kanjis obvious frustration with his attraction to men (and continues to do so for the rest of the game). Kanji is portrayed in the game as dealing with his queer side, which is rather flamboyant. Kanji is probably bi because part of the core story of the group characters is that the shadows they encounter in the TV world are in fact part of them. Kanji's gay side is a part of him, he is fundamentally bi and queer. In many ways, Persona 4 is both the Persona game with the most coded queerness, and the most homophobic representation in the entire series. It falls squarely into the Shitty sphere of queer representation.
There was also a completely different genre and game that was liberating for a lot of queer adults and kids out there that had representation that the player got to experience for both gay men and lesbians. The Sims 1, 2, and 3 all came out in the '00s. These games were crazy for me as a kid, I could actually see positive gayness in both the world, and in relationships, gayness that was just accepted and normal. I wasn't able to figure out, at the time, that my enjoying having gay sims was a queer thing, I just enjoyed it. The Sims broke ground with the playground the players could create. Yet, it was still one of the games where you could ignore the queerness potential. This fell into both the Ignorable sphere and the Actually Good Representation sphere. It is another game that straddles that line that can fall into either sphere depending on the player.
Groundwork Tangent
There were a lot of moral panics in the 00s that had tangential relationships to queerness in games, gay marriage was a huge issue and helped tip the ‘04 election in George Bush's favor, the Satanic panic was, surprisingly, still going on although very diminished. Jack Thompson still roamed the news stations sphere and Fox News had the famous segment on a sex scene in Mass Effect where they got Geoff Keighly to defend it. The most popular panic in the reactionary Videogame sphere back then wasn't about queerness in games or sex in games (although that was still big because of GTA 3 and the famous Hot Coffee mod and the already stated Mass Effect sex scene), it was about violence in games. Even I wasn't allowed to play first person shooters because of my mom believing in this moral panic (I did anyway), it was everywhere and basically laid the groundwork for the bigots response for the following decades queer games.
The media was constantly talking about how videogames would make people violent, particularly because so many mass shooters also happened to play videogames. They were looking at games as this thing that would make you into a violent person, that would increase your anger and make you want to hurt people. They were saying that it was desensitizing, that seeing virtual creatures and people getting killed made you not care about real people (ignoring the immense violence in American culture and movies). It didn't matter that they didn't have any actual evidence for this beyond anecdotal stories. They just hated videogames.
This laid the groundwork for GamerGate in that it pulled the contentious nature of videogame content into the mainstream far more than ever before. Largely pushed by conservative media, like Fox News, kids grew up in an environment where it was natural to challenge and shit on the content of games due to a moral panic, particularly when pushed by conservative media. Where the parents would freak out over the realism of the violence. It laid the ground for both parental freak outs over queerness in games, and prepared the same people that grew up under this idea of violence in games to begin to look at games in a negative way. At this point most people were defending games and arguing that violence in videogames didn't matter. That there was no evidence to support what these assholes were saying. It would be turned on it's head in the 2010s with GamerGate, taking the energy of the kids defending the violence and putting it to use attacking the very games they used to defend.
End Tangent
When Bioshock came out in ‘07 it rocked the industry because of the narrative it produced. This was the game people looked at when they thought of games being art. Queer people were there too, in just as terrible a fashion as every other person in Rapture (that's what happens when you follow Ayn Randian ideology). The character Sander Cohen was an artist, composer, sculptor, and playwright that made art that was in support of Andrew Ryan's ideological ideal for the city of Rapture. He's also often called a sellout because of that, an unimportant aspect of his character that doesn’t pertain to his queerness. Sanders is 100% gay but it is hidden gayness, unfortunately. Essentially, it's implied that he had relationships with his male protégés, an incredibly shitty thing to do if also unsurprising since everyone in Rapture is terrible. One of his protégés refers to him as an "old fruit" which is shitty slang for queer in mostly shitty circles, although some people in the community are okay using that word about themselves, much like Queer which I have been using a fuck ton of times in this series. Another protégé says about Sander "the things that man had me do...". Cohen is also a complicated character as he, near the end, actually regretted his decision to move to rapture and maybe even wanted to kill Ryan saying in an audio diary:
I could have been the toast of Broadway, the talk of Hollywood. But, instead, I followed you to this soggy bucket. When you needed my star light, I illuminated you. But now I rot, waiting for an audience that doesn't… ever… come… I'm writing something for you, Andrew Ryan… it's a requiem.
Cohen is a complex character, akin to all characters in Bioshock. However it is still possible for thickheaded people to miss his queerness, so in that case Bioshock falls into the Ignorable sphere, with the asterisk that he is good representation in the way that he is just as fucked up as all those in Rapture.
There's also GTA 4 which has loads of queer representation from Brucie Kibbutz showing he's attracted to men and then going "just joking hahaha...." (unless?), to the bi/lesbian coded Elizabeta Torres who has very gay behavior towards women despite having been married to three men, queer people were everywhere in the game. There was Bernie Crane, an Eastern European immigrant who finally was able to be gay when he immigrated to Liberty City, and he also happens to be the closeted boyfriend of the Deputy Mary of Liberty City! Said Deputy Mayor, Bryce Dawkins who is never directly seen in game, is a far right politician who constantly promotes anti-gay legislation and is being blackmailed for his relationship with Crane (believe it or not, this is happening all over world, a far-right politician who is queer, but deep in the closet, has a gay relationship with someone and is blackmailed). There's even a shitty anti-gay man who walks around Middle Park to harass and attack gay men in the game, called The Hater, that you go on a mission to kill because he was attacking Bernie Crane. GTA 4 has significant queerness and I honestly think that despite some of it being not the best, overall the game falls into the Actually Good Representation sphere, while having dipping it’s toe a bit into the Shitty sphere.
Of course there was Bayonetta which came out in ‘09 and despite the character not being outright queer in the first game, she is 100% Queer. There's official concept art of Bayonetta and her best friend (rival in the first game) Jeanne being a couple and the one of the creators of the game, Hideki Kamiya has acknowledged them being a couple in a twitter (gross) poll where he asked who was the best couple. While that might not seem as official as it being in the story, it is also incredibly obvious in the story. In the sequel, Bayonetta literally chases Jeanne to Hell to save her because she loves her. Bayonetta is the kind of over the top character who in many ways is similar to Lady Gaga. And in keeping with that similarity, the queer community adores her. While you can definitely miss the queerness of Bayonetta, she is still incredibly queer. This straddles the line between the Ignorable sphere and the Actually Good Representation sphere.
Part 2 - Conclusion
Games with queerness in the 2000s existed, they were everywhere, and they were immensely successful. I mean, some of the most successful games of the decade had queer representation, like GTA 4. There was the incredibly successful Sims series. There was a gay character in Bioshock, a game that changed how some people viewed videogames. KotOR and Mass Effect were rather successful and had queer rep that wasn't inherently bad, even if it was ignorable. But there were also games with shitty representation and, in many ways, absolutely terrible representation. Persona 4 particularly was so incredibly homophobic and transphobic that I will always remember it for being that. The 2000s had queerness, the 2000s had moral panics about violence in videogames, the 2000s had Fox News segments on how there was a sex scene in an M rated game. The 2000s was a decade filled with progress and one that was balanced with shittiness, and we were still there.
Next there was more foreground queerness to come. We were going to have even better representation in the 2010s, but it was also going to be a decade where the people who had issues with queerness in videogames really managed to coalesce around a movement. It's when GamerGate became a thing and when bigots began to have more of a voice online through social media manipulation. Compared to the 2010s, the 2000s were almost the peak of queerness in videogames without the calling out of queerness being so mainstream. GamerGate changed everything.
Next Time on...
Next week we are gonna cover the 2010s, a decade where queerness moved to the foreground far more than ever before, and the decade where things started to change in the industry both with more representation and the backlash to said representation. That will lead us to covering a truly terrible movement that we still feel the ramifications of, GamerGate. In the mean time, enjoy the rest of your week and I'll see you next Wednesday.
Meow,
Cat
The Sources for this series are my memory and:
LGBTQ Videogame Archive for the 2000s
Full Indigo Prophecy Tommy Scene (it includes the whole chapter)
Example scene of killing Juhani
MGS 3 Volgin grabbing snakes crotch scene
Persona 4 Naoto Social Link scene with obvious transness
Fox News Mass Effect Geoff Keighly Segment in entirety
Bioshock wiki for the Cohen info
Bioshock Wiki for the Audio Diary Transcript
Sander Cohen Audio Diary Video
GTA Video of The Hater mission
Link to Part 3:
The History of Queerness in Videogames - Part 3 - The 2010s
Last week we covered the 00s. We went over how there was a bunch of queer games in that decade and how the industry was beginning its movement towards taking queerness from the background to the foreground. As a reminder, here are the 4 spheres I will be grouping these games into;