LGBTQ Characters in Videogames

I'll give Overwatch some props, you know you're doing something right if your character is so gay that their tie-in comic gets banned in Russia. Please, please, tell me that there's going to be Prohibition-era style shebeens where illegal gay Overwatch art is traded while sexy jazz plays.

But that got me thinking, where are all the queer videogame icons? You can probably name more queer film and TV characters than Avengers, and queer music icons tend to be just all round important music icons (think David Bowie and Freddie Mercury).

But the more I think about it, the more I struggle to name queer videogame characters. And I think that's because for all the gaming industry's progress, it's still struggling to find spaces to put queer bodies in. Which is strange because those are just regular places. Like offices or schools or parks, where regular people hang out, because it turns out the LGBTQ folk like to do pretty normal things when we get off the unicorns and finish drinking soy milk by the truck. Initially we were delegated to roles as villains, and queer coded characters were often antagonists. But it's gotten better, right?

In my research I've found couple queer characters and it actually surprised me how many there were, notably Max and Chloe from Life Is Strange, a game I've actually covered on the blog before. But then again, the queer identities of the characters in that game are overshadowed in my mind by the sheer piss taking that was the fucking bottle hunt mission. I got stuck there for like two hours searching for the last one. Demote whoever the level designer was, please.

But then the other memory of that game poked up, the one of actively being a queer person. I remember when the "kiss Chloe" prompt showed up and it blew the little socks right off my little feet and I was like, oh holy shitniblits, we're going 100% turbo boosted gay right here. I'm going to click that prompt so hard that the pressure will turn it into fuel to be used by future generations eons from now.

And that was a great experience.

The other one was, funny enough, romancing every member of my crew in Saints Row IV (except Keith Davis, the prude). I get that it was supposed to parody Mass Effect but the fact that I could just engage and acknowledge the sexuality of my version of The President was always just a really compelling feature. The superpowers that let me roam around the city while listening to In Flames more so, but the romance too. The issue is that in those kinds of "choose your own adventure" games, people might never even experience the queer side of the game. I know not everyone is a fan of having the sexuality of their character pre-destined but welcome to the world of every queer person being forced to play straight characters in videogames ever.

The other issue is that we often bury the lead with our queer characters. The original NieR for PS3 and Xbox 360 comes to mind, as Yoko Taro deliberately decided not to explicitly address the intersex and gay characters he wrote (although he did address more of it in the sequel, NieR Automata). JK Rowling recently caught fire because director David Yates decided not to explicitly address Dumbledore's sexuality in the upcoming Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them sequel. And don't give me that second movie of five load of wank, it's been seven books, nine movies, one stage play, seven mainline videogames as well as a quidditch spinoff game later. You're telling me that in all that not once in all that, not even a singular time, no one thought to bring up that Dumbledore is actually into the Dumbledick? You're better than that, Jo.

So we live in a world where representation could be used as justification for banning in foreign markets, China and Russia specifically, but on the other hand, queer media is so hard to come by and the enormous amount of good you do by being part of the history of representation in media can't be overstated. And in videogames specifically, we don't actually have a lot of queer experiences, at least, not a lot of mainstream ones. The political climate is so precarious that it's hard to know if it'll ever happen, but hopefully some devs step up to bat for the other team.

But here's to hoping for more Tracers, Gay Tonys, Ellie, Max-es, Kanji Tatsumis, and Poisons. Here's to hoping for more Dream Daddies and Strange Flesh-es. We can do better. So let's not bury the lead anymore. Let's not keep our characters closeted for the sake of subtlety.

And let's have more LGBTQ characters in games.