The History of Queerness in Videogames - Part 3 - The 2010s

This week we discuss the 2010s, and have to address the elephant in the room, GamerGate.

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;

1. Ignorable, this means that the representation is either completely missable or takes initiative from the player to have the representation.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

This week, in part 3 of 4, I'm going to go over the 2010s and look into the games that moved queerness more to the foreground, following the groundwork laid by the 2000s, and also moved the industry closer to the backlash that was inevitable, the movement called GamerGate.

Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2:

The History of Queerness in Videogames - Part 1 - The 90s

The History of Queerness in Videogames - Part 2 - The 2000s

The 2010s

The 2010s were the decade that introduced the term SJW (Social Justice Warrior), a term that has the exact same meaning as “Woke” to the people that used it.

The decade started with some surprising representation with GTA 4: The Ballad of Gay Tony. A game, or DLC, centered around helping Tony, a gay nightclub owner, pay back some debts and keep him from being killed by his debtors. Tony isn't the normal overly flamboyant gay character you would expect from prior GTA games, in fact he was, amazingly, rather normal. Not to say he wasn't as fucked up as others in the GTA universe, he was just as fucked up. Just to say that he wasn't a stereotype, he was a guy who had issues, but also a guy who had friends, and a guy that the main character for the DLC, Luis Fernando Lopez, just wanted to help. Tony was someone you could feel for despite them doing some shitty things, which was a consistent theme with both the GTA 4 DLC campaigns and the base game. It was representation that was nice to see, despite Tony still being kinda a piece of shit. This, in many ways, falls into the Actually Decent Representation sphere in that it showed a character who was just as human as the others in the GTA universe.

“Ahhhh I’m a girl who challenges the idea that women can’t be masculine looking but trans women are shitty ahhhhh!”

At the other end of the spectrum and in the same year, there was some highly debated (in the small community of the game) representation. In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, the character Chihiro is, at first, seemingly a tech genius teen girl who is locked up in the Hope Peak Academy with everyone else. I will be using she/her pronouns for her because, I believe, she is a trans woman who the writers ripped the heart out of. See, in the game, she is "revealed" to be a teen boy who simply appears in feminine dress and adhering to feminine tropes because it's easier for her. The writers try to say that she identifies with being a man, she's just not super masculine but wants to try to be. This is revealed after her death and there's constant moments of characters doing the "she is a he???" shtick. But, I believe, she is probably a trans woman. This is controversial in the community, as I stated above. Many don't like when people make this assertion. Yet, with the way she acts, she is incredibly trans. Adhering to feminine tropes because it's easier? That sounds trans. It seems more likely she's simply a trans woman trying to gain some interest in her masculine side. At the very least, Chihiro is a femboy and that is definitely gay. This is still portrayed awfully and, while I love the game and series, it's infuriating how much the character feels hollow when the writers "reveal" she's a boy. Chihiro is still queer representation, it's just done in an amazingly bad way (and is reminiscent of Persona 4). Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, unfortunately, falls into the Shitty sphere.

The decade kept introducing more and more queer characters and stories and with the introduction of more indie games, the decade had far more queer representation than ever before. Especially in the foreground instead of the ignorable background. For instance, Mass Effect 2 introduced Jack, a bi character who, because of the influences of executives, wasn't allowed to have a relationship with femshep. Jack was a fantastic character who was very much a messy gay. She had such depth to her character. Such rage. Her story of being kept in a facility as a kid and forced to view the rest of the world through a one-way mirror, making her feel incredibly different and alone, and whenever she would engage with the others in the facility she was treated differently, looked at with fear and disgust is a very gay story. Many queer folk had the feeling of looking at the cishet world through a one way mirror, feeling like we want to engage with it, but that it will never fit us. That even when we try to engage, the world seems designed to work against us. Jack was amazing representation, another Bioware game with representation that's more than skin deep. Mass Effect 2, obviously, falls into the Actually Good Representation sphere.

And there was Fallout: New Vegas, a game filled with queer representation and a game that is very trans coded. Personally, I was not a fan but that's because I am not a fan of Westerns and New Vegas is a Western in every way. The game is amazing, it has so much representation that is normal and just there. It's both in the foreground and in the background. It's coded and its direct. The transness of the game is not something I can do justice to, but it also had people who were able to ignore the queerness, and were able to kill the queer folk, it also allowed you to kill everyone. Which is just the reality of a lot of those type of games, you can kill anyone for any reason, even bigoted ones. This doesn't change that it was a good piece of representation, I'd argue it's one of the games that has the best representation in the entire decade. Fallout New Vegas straddles the line between the Antagonist/Killable sphere, and the Actually Good Representation sphere. Largely this is dependent on the player and how much of a terrible person they are.

All four of these games came out in 2010, so what about games that came out after? Well we had Dragon Age 2 in 2011 that had a bunch of gayness in it that was pretty hard to avoid if you did any of the companion stories (just like the future Dragon Age sequel Veilguard). We had The Last of Us in 2013 with Ellie and Bill, characters that were very gay but it was ignorable by the player (The Last of Us would start to be called SJW because of Ellie having a whole gay DLC in Left Behind). We had Dragon Age Inquisition (so many Bioware games) in 2014 where there was the amazing Dorian gayness story and Krem, a trans man, existed and was attached to a main companions story but was still avoidable and able to be shitty to. This would be called out by the GamerGate movement that started the same year. All of these games straddled the line between the Actually Good Representation sphere and the Ignorable sphere. However, going forward games would have more obvious queerness and more and more bigots would be more and more vocal. Yet, despite queerness simply being more upfront and less ignorable, despite us just not being so common as antagonists, it made people think that queerness either never existed before in games, or that it was just better when queer people were ignorable.

Found in Sam’s locker at home in Gone Home. She is soooo gay.

In 2013, Gone Home, the first game from the indie studio Fullbright, former devs from Irrational Games, was immensely well received and well crafted. You play as Katie who comes home from a year abroad to find your parents house empty. You then have to go through a bunch of puzzles and a lot of walking to discover that your sister, Sam, came out as gay and it drove a wedge into the family while you were away. Eventually after piecing all of it together you discover that Sam actually ran away to be with her girlfriend because of how awful her parents were being to her. The game is an incredibly queer game and an incredibly well done game. While it is mostly a walking simulator, the story it tells over the couple hours of gameplay is touching and wonderful and the queerness is fundamental to the story and is not ignorable. It also faced accusations that the developers focused on telling a queer story TOO much at the expense of the story. As if that makes sense where the story is fundamentally queer. Gone Home falls very safely into the Actual Good Representation sphere.

GamerGate Tangent

As I have said, GamerGate changed a lot in the industry and the gaming community as a whole. Suddenly, the bigotry and toxicity was much more prominent. If you are unaware of what GamerGate was, I envy you. It was a mix of misogyny, queerphobia, misinformation, mass harassment campaigns, and manipulation. It started with a false accusation of an indie dev, Zoë Quinn, sleeping with a game reviewer in order to get a better review and was pushed by said Dev's abusive ex boyfriend. Said ex actually wrote a manifesto to fuck over Zoë with the aim to destroy her career. She then dealt with a massive amount of death threats and the attacks started to snowball to other non-cishet white male devs and game reviewers until it was an entire movement that began to change the industry. It then expanded further to include any prominent women in the industry, whether a dev or a journalist. It was awful.

It was then manipulated and harnessed to put Trump into the White House 2 years later by two people, Milo Yiannapoulos and Steve Bannon. They worked together to radicalize a lot of disaffected straight white males who felt left behind by society and gaming because they started to feel like not everything was for them now. Which was true in that queerness and race were becoming more prominent pieces of discussion in the industry and the games that were being made (and the world). This doesn't mean that straight white males didn't still have representation in the gaming industry, statistically they were and still are the majority of the people working in the industry. We also still have plenty of white men in games who are important characters. For instance, in Star Wars: Outlaws, a game derided as “Woke” because the main character is a normal looking woman, the character that is hiring people for the heist that drives the game forward is white. He is a complex character who has good and bad parts, but he isn't evil and is still representation in the same ways as Volgin was queer representation in MGS 3. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a game starring a white main character, but he does punch Nazis and Fascists so I guess it's still “Woke” despite still having representation for straight white men. Thank Goodness You're Here is a game centered in a Fictional British town filled with white people, is that not representation? Now, is every single game stoic, generic, or unemotional white guys like back in the day with Marcus Fenix, Nathan Hale, Desmond Miles, Alan Wake (not as generic), Booker Dewitt, Sam Fisher, Gordon Freeman, Nathan Drake (not as generic but still a white dude), and Snake (more generic than people are willing to admit)? No, but almost all of those games were criticized by the industry for having generic white guy main characters. They weren't interesting, they were boring, they were stagnant. Now we have variety. Why is that a bad thing?

So many. But I guess these weren’t enough.

Simple, because they want more depth with straight, white guy characters. Not depth with having different representation AND depth with the straight white guy characters. See, even with games that have depth with their straight white guy characters, like The Last of Us, they are called "SJW" or "Woke" because it's not just Joel, it also had Ellie. They are not satisfied with still having representation but less, they want ALL the representation. They'll say they are fine with representation, it just has to be written well. That it has to be written in a way that matches the idea of the language in their head, like the accusation that Dragon Age: The Veilguard simply uses too much modern language and is supposed to be a middle ages game despite the fact that all games are written with modern language, because if they weren't we could barely understand them with all the uses of thou and thee and thy which simply don't really exist in games because why would it? We aren't writing games in the middle ages, we are writing games now. Of course we use modern language. Then, even when it is written well and in a way that accurately portrays the queer, or particularly, trans experience like in Veilguard, they throw the accusation of bad writing because they desire to hide their bigotry under the guise of just caring about well written stories.

All of this really gained traction with GamerGate. I believe that without GamerGate, Trump wouldn't have won 2016. That, without GamerGate, the gaming community would be much much less toxic. That, without GamerGate, Nazis wouldn't be making a comeback. GamerGate didn't just change the industry, didn't just change the gaming community, it changed the entire western world.

Note: if you're interested in learning more about GamerGate, I recommend the book Crash Override by Zoë Quinn, here’s a link to her site for the book, the woman who the whole movement was initially focused on. While I felt like the book didn't focus enough on the GamerGate movement, it's still a great book and I highly recommend it.

End Tangent

Meanwhile, after the massive awfulness that GamerGate provided, Life is Strange in 2015 would be called SJW because of the gayness (which would go on to spawn multiple sequels/spin offs including one last year that had “Woke” thrown at it even from people who, supposedly, enjoyed the first one. Because they're tourists). It had a story that revolved around the gayness of both your main character and the main supporting character. The game was inherently queer and you could not see past it. It is in the Actually Good Representation Sphere.

Undertale came out in 2015 as well which has multiple queer characters but remarkably wasn't much represented as a SJW despite being queer, it is possible I missed the accusations of it being a SJW but with how successful Undertale was you would have expected a game like this to have accusations against it. This is likely because, as with other games, the queerness was broadly ignorable. If you were queer you saw it, if not, you could disregard it rather easily. It is in the Ignorable Sphere.

Firewatch came out in 2016 and it's main character, Dave, was gay but again there weren't many accusations of SJW against it, probably because it wasn't incredibly successful, was an indie game and also because you only discover his gayness through notes instead of it being directly integral to the plot. It is in the Ignorable Sphere.

Overwatch came out in 2016 and had multiple queer characters and did face many accusations of being SJW but since the queerness was mainly told in comic books instead of the main game it was easy for people to ignore it. Overwatch is both in the Ignorable Sphere and the Actually Good Representation sphere if you actually know the characters.

Life is Strange: Before the Storm came out the same year and wasn't super successful so didn't have a whole lot of SJW accusations. They still existed, just not as many. Again, it was in the Actually Good Representation sphere (Something Life is Strange is very good at).

Apex Legends came out in 2019 which also had queer characters but their queerness was easy to ignore so didn't get many SJW accusations thrown at it, it was in the Ignorable sphere.

And then The Outer Worlds then came out in 2019 which was an Obsidian RPG with queer characters and relationships like Fallout New Vegas, but without the coded trans stuff. Obviously it was in the Actually Good Representation sphere while also being in the Antagonist/Killable sphere because you can kill anyone again. These were obviously not all of the queer games that came out in the post-GamerGate part of the 2010s but they were some of the more prominent ones.

There was also Persona 5 which came out in 2017 in the west and it had some of the most mixed, but still bad, representation in the series. While there's definitely some queer coded stuff,( Ryuji gives off major repressed Bi-ness) there was also direct representation. Let's first discuss THAT scene in the game that is awful. Ryuji and the main character, who I will be referring to as Joker, are in the red light district and ,as you are leaving, two gay men come up to you and start hitting on Ryuji. They talk about giving him a makeover and such. To which Joker and Morgana, the cat, ditch Ryuji and let him have to deal with the awful characters himself. It's very badly written and was made only mildly better in the re-release, Royal. The characters are portrayed as rapey assholes fitting into a very bigoted stereotype.

The scene in question, link in the sources at the bottom. It’s awful.

Fortunately there is also a different character, one who is definitely queer but still kinda a stereotype. Lala Escargot is the proprietor of a red light bar that Joker goes to to meet a journalist contact he has and also to, eventually, work for. It is never revealed if Lala is a gay man who crossdresses, a trans woman, or a drag queen. But she is still very queer. And she's nice, while we don't know exactly what kind of queer she is, she's very queer and Joker just kinda accepts it, he doesn't make fun of her, or anything, just respects her existence. I know Lala isn't amazing representation, but having her exist in the game at all is rather nice. Especially with the opposite end of the spectrum also existing in the game. That said, you don't actually have to interact with Lala at all, you can just wander by her and ignore her every time you are there to see the journalist. While you do need to work for her in order to complete one of the Requests for Mementos, she is still rather easily ignored. Persona 5 is another game that straddles the line between the Ignorable sphere and the Shitty Sphere

Next, is a game that garnered massive hate from the GamerGate crowd and is still referenced today by them as a "Woke" game despite them not having used that word when it came out (they called it SJW trash). Horizon Zero Dawn came out in 2017 and faced massive accusations of being an SJW fest because of two reasons. First, there were queer people in this world that takes place thousands of years after the end of our world and, according to these crazies, queer people only exist in our world, they are purely a modern day thing as opposed to us having always existed throughout human history. Second, and this was the biggest one that you can still see memes about online, Aloy, the main character, has peach fuzz on her face. See, Aloy is a woman who has existed in a world without modern days view on how women should look, so she doesn't shave her face of the peach fuzz that almost all women have. The reason this pissed people off is quite simple, they don't know what a real woman looks like. They usually use some other BS videogame character who never has peach fuzz or you can't see it, or they use porn/movies as an example as well. Sometimes they will claim they know plenty of women and none of them have peach fuzz as well but chances are they've never been close enough to a woman to notice the fuzz.

This is Petra Forgewoman, who always has a weakness for restless girls.

This game had such massive hate thrown against it that I was incredibly surprised considering how damn good the game was. There were queer NPCs, like Brageld who is a side quest character and very explicity gay. Or there is Janeva, another side quest character, who is likely a trans man since he has a name that ends in a vowel which is a distinct Carja woman thing but says he is “...not one of [Aloy’s] sisters,” during a conversation. Janeva is an interesting character but isn't exactly the best representation because the game never actually takes a stand to say what kind of person Janeva is. In some ways, it's nice to see that there is a trans character, in some other ways it's frustrating that Janeva isn't given more of an identity. There’s also Petra Forgewoman, a very obvious lesbian who hits on Aloy during a sidequest. All three of these characters I've brought up are largely ignorable and there are other NPCs who are queer but ignorable as well, or at least are easy to disregard as they are only there for a single moment in time instead of being a consistent voice in the story. Aloy, however, has very queer moments depending on how you play her. Like in most RPGs you can make her more queer, particularly in how she doesn't seem interested in most men. This is another instance of the player being able to decide how she acts towards people. Add on to that that the only queer relationship Aloy can get into is in the Sequel's DLC and, while she is still queer and always has been queer, it's still difficult to actually use her as representation. This isn't to say she isn't representation, just that she's inconsistent representation. The game mainly shows it's queer characters as side people, people who are talked to maybe a couple times in the massive open world and then forgotten. This isn't uncommon in these types of games but it is frustrating still. Especially with how much hate was thrown at the game, you'd have hoped it would have more queerness in it to justify the vitriol. But nope, the game's main reason for driving the hatred will always be fucking peach fuzz. Horizon: Zero Dawn falls into the Ignorable sphere.

Part 3 - Conclusion

The 2010s introduced many, many more direct queer games and even more games with queerness in the foreground. We had so many more games with Actually Good Representation that, if you were young queer folk, it felt good to see yourself reflected in the industry you enjoyed. Mass Effect 2 had the amazing queer experience of Jack and despite the femshep relationship being cut by stupid executives it still had a game that helped cishets understand what the queer experience is like, even if they didn't realize it. Life is Strange helped me, a trans girl who wasn't out yet figure herself out. It was a game that showed that teenage messy gay that a lot of people had gone through or were going through. It's still one of the few games that I wish I could go back and play it for the first time again. Fallout New Vegas introduced a lot of positive representations of queer folk despite giving you the ability to go on a genocidal rampage, and it helped a lot of trans folk come out. I know trans people who view it as THE game that helped them realize who they were. The Last of Us had positive representation despite it being ignorable in the main game, the Dragon Age games had plenty of Actually Good Representation despite also being ignorable. Gone Home was the indie game that really solidified that queer focused narratives could be meaningful and not done in a shitty way. There were far more games that had Actually Good Representation than I have gotten to, many that also don't straddle the Ignorable and Actually Good Representation spheres.

Then there were the negatives in the decade. The 2010s had less shitty representation than prior decades, but some of that representation was really bad. Particularly, the absolutely awful scene in Persona 5 and the absolutely awful portrayal of Chihiro in Danganronpa. The industry might have been growing, but that didn't mean it would stop having shitty portrayals. There are plenty more games that have shitty representation in this decade but I genuinely think that the games with Actually Good Representation either, outnumber them, or are louder than them. In that, I believe that the progress in representation in the industry was drowning out the shitty voices and games in comparison. The industry was becoming, and in many places already was, a better place for queer folk to play, and to work.

The 2010s was genuinely the decade that ended up morphing the industry into the kind of much more queer accepting place that it is in the 2020s. At least somewhat. Yet, the decade also gave us GamerGate, a movement that destroyed the careers and lives of many in the industry. That lead to people leaving it because of the death threats, that saw amazingly well done games to be labeled "SJW" and eventually "DEI" and "Woke" because of disaffected white cishet men. GamerGate changed so much and forced people to start to deal with the bigotry of men in the capital G Gamer community. Overall, it was a mixed decade.

Next Time On...

Next week, we finish out the series by discussing our current decade, the 2020s. We go over how influential the GamerGate folks have been in the industry, how depressing it is that they have any influence at all, and how queerness in games continues to flourish despite all that influence and harassment. In the mean time, have a good week and I'll see you next Friday,

Meow,

Cat

The Main Sources for part 3 are both my memory:

LGBTQ Videogame Archive for the 2010s

Chihiro “Reveal” scene

Gone Home scene with the obviousness of the gayness of Sam

Petra and Aloy obviously having chemistry and her hitting on Aloy

Reddit link for the Generic white guy picture

Whole Polygon Article about the Persona 5 scene, and how it wasn’t fixed in Royal

Said Persona 5 Scene, yes it’s a whole walkthrough, but it’s an exact link to the scene

Here’s a link to the final part in the series!