Question by cocksucking-accent:This! Not only are nonbinaries absolutely not represented when you pick a gender for your character, but many features are exaggerated. Some trans women don’t have wasp waists, and that’s okay and should be okay and their character should be able to look like that. Some trans dudes do have wasp waists and don’t mind said waists and having a male character with a teeny waist would help them normalize their body and feel more at ease with themselves. Gender isn’t just boobs v. not boobs!Also there is a problem very similar to an already known RPG story fault. Most RPGs are written for male characters, and use the same script when you play as a woman, which results in awkward and/or nonsensical situations.
This is why you can’t just flip a switch and keep everything else the same. Women characters are not male characters with tits. Trans characters are not cis characters with a superficially different backstory. We are different people who interact with the world differently and are treated by others differently. The same goes for race, which faces similar problems but I’ll leave to someone more qualified to comment on in detail.
These traits matter. We can’t design meaningful characters with a colorblind/genderblind/anythingblind mentality. Otherwise we’re just writing cis white men with a different character model.
Made rebloggable by request.
Question from thegentleprice:
I’ve been reading your blogs responding to Gaider this morning, and I’m curious to know which games feature glbt characters that you would recommend. I’d like to check them out! I’ve certainly been looking games featuring such characters, but aside from mainstream markets I’m not sure where to look. And as you know that market can be lacking. Googling hasn’t offered much help either.
Thanks for asking! This is definitely one of those instances where Google can be a bit lacking.
Here are three sites I can recommend right off the top of my head:
They each have several games that feature queer characters and/or queer themes.
Made rebloggable by request.
thegentleprice asked: I've been reading your blogs responding to Gaider this morning, and I'm curious to know which games feature glbt characters that you would recommend. I'd like to check them out! I've certainly been looking games featuring such characters, but aside from mainstream markets I'm not sure where to look. And as you know that market can be lacking. Googling hasn't offered much help either.
Thanks for asking! This is definitely one of those instances where Google can be a bit lacking.
Here are three sites I can recommend right off the top of my head:
They each have several games that feature queer characters and/or queer themes.
Re: On Transgender Characters
who gives a shit if the protag is cis, trans, male, female, white, x of color, gay, straight, bisexual, ect. i just want good games okay.People who are trans, female, people of color, gay, bisexual, ect. [sic] care. Because none of them are represented, none of them are told “you can be a hero, too.”
If you are used to the protagonists in every single game being designed for your group, then you have no idea what it’s like to be excluded from that. You literally have no idea. It is completely outside your realm of experience. The exclusion of others has no emotional impact on you, so of course you won’t see it as a big deal.
But the world is more than just you.
Are you implying all minorities are hive minded?
That’s racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, and anti-bisexual.
Oh my god. You use these words, but they do not mean what you think they mean.
The only reason I’m reblogging the rest of this verbatim is for the amusement of my readers:
Who are you to speak for them? Do you think that just because they’re tied to an identity that they all think alike?! NO! Everyone is a unique individual, they can be whoever they want to be. They don’t need some fictional story to tell them that they can be a hero. They can be whoever and whatever they like as long it doesn’t harm people! They can be a hero, they can be a successful being if they push hard, and be able work with others! It is the individuals right for themselves to chose their own destiny. They are more than an identity, they are the names they are chosen by themselves or their parental guardian. They are, individual beings that think 4 themselves.
“They don’t need some fictional story to tell them that they can be a hero.”
The media shapes people’s perception of self and of others.
By your own logic, we don’t need cis het white men in stories at all either. So why complain when people suggest a change in representation? Your argument defeats itself.
(Source: dgaider)
More Re: On Transgender Characters
If it were in your power, would you feature a trans* character as a lead, or do you think that that would be putting too much on the writing team’s shoulders? As someone who is highly involved in the game industry, do you think there would be a backlash from the industry or fans if a trans* character was a lead? Is video game culture ready for a trans* companion? — venak-hol
No, I don’t think video game culture is ready for transgender characters— not as major plot characters, and certainly not as a lead. It’s not ready for major characters that are gay, either. Heck, it’s barely ready for ones which are female.
Does that mean the industry should wait until it is? Probably not.
Yet I am also not the one whose money is being put on the line when it comes to making a major game. With hundreds of millions of dollars now sunk into your average video game title, it could perhaps be viewed as understandable why publishers would be risk-averse. The tried-and-true is safer. The audience they already have, and have had since gaming’s inception, is safer. Or is it?
Re: On Transgender Characters
If it were in your power, would you feature a trans* character as a lead, or do you think that that would be putting too much on the writing team’s shoulders? As someone who is highly involved in the game industry, do you think there would be a backlash from the industry or fans if a trans* character was a lead? Is video game culture ready for a trans* companion? — venak-hol
No, I don’t think video game culture is ready for transgender characters— not as major plot characters, and certainly not as a lead. It’s not ready for major characters that are gay, either. Heck, it’s barely ready for ones which are female.
Does that mean the industry should wait until it is? Probably not.
Yet I am also not the one whose money is being put on the line when it comes to making a major game. With hundreds of millions of dollars now sunk into your average video game title, it could perhaps be viewed as understandable why publishers would be risk-averse. The tried-and-true is safer. The audience they already have, and have had since gaming’s inception, is safer. Or is it? […]
This isn’t a question of what videogame culture is ready for. As an employee at a AAA games company, you are speaking about what the AAA industry is ready for, without even realizing it.
The mainstream industry’s inertia is caused by the people who pull the purse strings—the publishers and the shareholders and the CEOs. Most of whom are straight cisgender white men. They’re afraid of change for two reasons: 1) They’re worried it will hurt their profit margins, and 2) They themselves are afraid of things that don’t appeal to them personally.
Outside of the industry, meanwhile, in the land of videogame culture, people have already been producing games with transgender people, people of color, and women. While the AAA industry keeps churning out franchise sequels and New IP with the Same Old Gameplay.
One more thing: The “videogame culture” you are speaking of is specifically the one you, as a cis white male, are most familiar with: the cis white male gamer culture. I am most familiar with trans women gamer culture. We’re the ones who felt betrayed by the brothel scene in Dragon Age: Origins. We’re the ones who kept on playing DA (though fewer in number this time) despite that, only to get backstabbed again. We’re the ones who are quickly getting fed up with AAA games screwing us over for a cheap laugh or ignoring us altogether.
We certainly have our own specific interests, but, being women, we’re also a part of a larger gaming culture: women gamer culture. The ones who make YouTube videos about overusing the damsel in distress trope, and get rightfully angry about sexualizing female characters to ridiculous extremes.
We get horrible representation and women in refrigerators all the time, and despite that we trudge on. Why? Because we’re gamers.
And you know what? We are ready for transgender characters. We’re dying for them. We’re ready for women leads, whether they’re trans or cis. We are ready for this. You, the developers, publishers, and producers, are not.
You still define “gamer culture” as “the group of people that can’t handle trans people or women as main characters”. When trans people and women are a part of gamer culture.
So we will continue to produce the games we want, the games we need, according to our own means. And the AAA industry will continue to excuse itself from its own audience, and become irrelevant over time from its own inertia.
That irrelevance is already showing itself in the negative reactions to the next console generation, because the industry is failing not just women and minorities, it’s failing gamers as a whole right now. There’s a reason entire consoles are being Kickstarted into existence, and why developers are circumventing traditional publishers to get their games made and distributed. The publishing money wants to stay in the hands of cis white men, and the rest of us aren’t having it.
Enjoy your bubble.
transsexual (high intensity)
transsexual (moderate intensity)
transsexual (too intense for me rn)
transsexual (25 hp)
transsexual (moderate rainfall)
Ya no, I know this is very tongue in cheek, but I’m honestly having issues finding it hilarious knowing at least one doctor I have seen probably thought along these lines. Negates the hilarious absurdity of it, tbh.
hey I’m 1000000 percent with you there
more or less all my doctors before I was a legal adult (ie the doctors that cis people picked out for me) thought along these lines
I joke about this stuff because of how seriously and murderously it affected my life!
it left me barely alive!
[joke]
I totally understand if joking isn’t a coping mechanism that works for you! but it really really does for me. most of the time it is the only alternative to sobbing!
[another joke]
Studies show that 30 minutes of high intensity transsexual four times a week is really good for your health.
