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[AlleeCat]

So a recent episode of Game Theory had me thinking about LGBT representation in video games, and I think I've come up with something. MatPat brought up Phantasmagoria 2, and he mentions how the main character, Curtis Craig, is bisexual, but is also into S&M, cheats on his girlfriend, and is a transdimensional space alien. That's not exactly good representation. But, he also failed to mention Curtis's best friend, Trevor Barnes. Trevor is a perfectly well adjusted gay man, and although he is a bit of a stereotype, not everything about him boils down to his homosexuality.

In place of the Mako Mori or Bechdel tests, I've come up with a test for LGBT representation that keeps in mind some of the issues that MatPat brought up in this latest episode. I can only think of one or two American made video games that pass this test, and one was made almost 20 years ago.

Spoiler: The Test (click to show/hide)

Using Trevor Barnes from Phantasmagoria 2 as an example:
Is your character a protagonist? (Yes, Trevor helps Curtis throughout the game and is shown to genuinely care about him.)
Is your character treated with respect and dignity by at least one other, non-LGBT character? (Yes, Trevor is seen having friendly conversation with a (presumably straight) female coworker.)
Does your character ever have a conversation that does not relate to their LGBT status? (Yes, "The Potato Story" is a notable example.)
(Optional) Is your character of sound mind? (Yes, there is no evidence of Trevor having a particularly adverse mental condition.)

Using this test, we can determine that Trevor Barnes is:
1: Not universally vilified for being gay.
2: Not a villain or antagonist
3: Not reduced to having 'gay' be his only personality trait
4: Not insane/bipolar/schizophrenic
Sure, he isn't the main character, but he's well represented. His homosexuality is just a part of his personality. It doesn't define him or make him a villain.

I'd like to see this test put up against other LGBT characters. Just how many games are there that have decent representation of gay, bi, and/or trans characters?

[mainiac]

I think respect and dignity are hard to pin down and kinda not that useful.  If something is egregious you don't need a formal rule to talk about it.  I like the Bechdel test because it's pointing something out that you might not notice.

I think people miss the point of the Bechdel test when they point out perfectly good movies that fail it.  The point isn't that by failing the Bechdel test a movie is automatically sexist or poor quality.  The point is that when many movies fail it systematically it points out a larger problem.  The test isn't good for individual movies so much as the whole industry.

That being said I think that the whole token phenomena is stupid and makes for tired stories.  When a character is the only black or woman character, it turns them into "the woman" or "the black guy".

[Glowcat]

I feel the issues with LGBT representation in video games or other media aren't going to be boiled down to one rule, especially due to the variance within the group. For example, there's an issue with femme gay men being vilified, represented as mentally ill, or otherwise demeaned as other whereas gay men whose gender expression doesn't wander outside of binary stereotypes are held up as a sort of model citizen (when the film isn't outright homophobic) AGAINST that depiction. Furthermore, the femme gay person is targeted for reasons that concern his gender expression and speaks to an issue that is unique to trans feminine people (that of transmisogyny) rather than issues with sexual orientation. When investigating problematic aspects of media there needs to be greater focus on the distinctions in gender/orientation-variance because a "LGBT friendly" film can itself be ragingly bigoted against certain aspects of that grouping. Hell, even within the community itself we see masculine gay people pushing femme/androgynous gay men and transgender people (including transmen or non-binary) off the public stage and becoming hostile to those who don't accept the limitations on where they're allowed to go in gay-society.

[Muz]

A lot of characters in games are caricatures. The issue I have with LGBT in games is that it's there to have some kind of token gay/bi character, who is gay because someone has to be gay to be politically correct. Sexual orientation should be in the background. Like you can have a gay character who's "just not into girls", but not one who runs around dating guys, unless that's a (sub)plot of the story.

It annoys me that sexual orientation has to be brought up to show that those people are gay. A lot of action films don't have any romantic encounters, and even less games need them. And yet when the LGBT character is there, the sexual orientation is brought up and exaggerated. Just treat the characters as humans, whatever the orientation.

My point is that there should be another question in there, something along the lines of "Is the LGBT character the only one whose sexuality is brought up, aside from the protagonist and the protagonist's romantic interest?"

Though you could have flamboyant drag queen style characters who blast their sexuality at people.

I liked the Alien approach to character design - just write the script with everyone sexless, then randomize the genders.

[Flying Dice]

I liked the Alien approach to character design - just write the script with everyone sexless, then randomize the genders.

Agreed on this point. Tokenism can at points end up being worse than the problem it's trying to alleviate.


In my ideal world we could all write and enjoy reading/watching characters whose defining identities are that they are people, with all other characteristics being noteworthy only insofar as they affect the plot and character development. I understand the motivation behind wanting to diversify the characters of fictional works--goodness knows it gets boring when the archetypes also fit the same gender/sex/race/nationality paradigms in every single fucking work--but that's ultimately not a good way to permanently address the issue, not least because it inevitably results in tokenism rather than characters who are themselves first and [group] only incidentally.

[Vector]

Problem is that we have a certain group defined as default.

[i2amroy]

I think, like with many other video-game aimed "sexuality acceptance tests", you are going to run into way, way more games that fail due to lack of including any form of sexuality at all than actually have enough sexuality to make the test worthwhile. IMO really what we need is a test that first describes a set of criteria that need to be met (sexuality is actually known for some characters, number of known sexuality characters exceeds X, similar etc.) and then goes on to describe the things that it tests rather than just implying by virtue of lack of criteria that it can be applied to any video game.

Edit: Checking online about the biggest percentage of a large random population I can see that identifies as LGBT is around 18%, about 1 in 5.5 people. On a game average that means that when you look at an individual game you'd need to have at least 6 characters of known sexuality without a LGBT before the game violated that percentage on it's own. And that's worldwide, in the U.S. itself about the highest percentage you find is ~5%, not counting D.C. as it's a huge jump over the over states. That means for every LGBT person you find in a game you could identify ~19 other known straight characters without breaking representation of real life.

[Gatleos]

I think that it's very easy to accidentally make a LGBT character too "obvious" or stereotypical. A character's sexuality is one of their traits, and the way you reveal traits to the audience is through character development. The audience is going to assume every character is straight by default, so you have to "prove" otherwise. Then you end up pointing out this character's sexuality while the rest have the luxury of theirs being implicit.

On the other hand, if you try to avoid this by making the character's sexuality important to the plot in some way, it can come off as trying way too hard to let the audience know that this character is TOTALLY GAY YOU GUYS.

It's easy to say that the solution (a character's sexuality should simply fill in an aspect of their character rather than define them) is obvious, but the right intentions can easily backfire.

[Flying Dice]

That runs in to the issue of the perception of normalcy, though, which is related to what I was getting at. If the sexuality of the characters in a story (or even a simple majority of them) never becomes relevant, is it fair to accuse the story of being unrepresentative/biased/whatever? The underlying assumption there is that all characters default to heterosexual unless defined otherwise, which is more user error than anything else. That's why I was saying that we need to reach a point where these sorts of things are irrelevant to the story unless they have a direct bearing on the plot, otherwise you're going to stall out on people making assumptions based on their/societal norms and then drawing conclusions about the medium based on their own prejudices combined with "equality" by the insertion of stereotypes of varying awkwardness.

This is particularly troublesome in gaming, because a very large proportion of games have no reason to ever bring up the sexual orientation of the characters--does this then mean that if I write a novel in which no character is ever described with gendered pronouns or hints at their sex it must be a sexist work because all the characters are men?

Problem is that we have a certain group defined as default.

Which is half of the point? I thought it was pretty clear. Re: Diversity: None < By Checklist < Unconscious.

Diversity which is reached by people at some point in the creative process thinking or suggesting, "Hey, we need to have a [group] too, to make sure they're represented," is better than blind adherence to norms, but it is in no way an acceptable endpoint, for much the same reason that a civil rights movement shouldn't end with everyone satisfied with the outcome once people start thinking things like, "Gee, I guess [group] should have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else."

Just because the state of something is better than it was in the past doesn't mean there aren't problems or room for improvement.

[Vector]

Bleh, I'm tired .-.

[Ogdibus]

Just because the test doesn't apply to some games, doesn't mean that it doesn't apply to any.  There are still quite a few games that depict characters with sexuality.  It should go without saying that the proportion of those that pass is the desired statistic.

I really can't think of a game that passes, but I also haven't played many games that the test can be applied to for a very long time.  This is mostly because I don't expect to like or relate to the characters, though.

[i2amroy]

Just because the test doesn't apply to some games, doesn't mean that it doesn't apply to any.  There are still quite a few games that depict characters with sexuality.  It should go without saying that the proportion of those that pass is the desired statistic.

Which is exactly why the test should specify the criteria for determining which games it applies to. That would stop both people who try to apply the tests to games it isn't valid for to make a point, and the people who try to use the fact that it doesn't apply to a significant portion of games to ignore its application to another subset.

[Ogdibus]

While it's preferable to have that information, it isn't difficult to figure it out.  If you can't be bothered to do that, it's pretty likely that: you don't have any intention of doing any testing, or you don't have the experience to do testing of this kind.  It's probably a good idea to list the criteria that you used, though.  That will help with comparing your results with those of others.

[i2amroy]

Point. I guess I'm just so used to people pulling out tests like this on examples that they obviously don't apply to that it would be nice to have explicitly defined things so that they can't.

[LordSlowpoke]

* LordSlowpoke writes PTW on thread using 3 1/3 meter pole