Gay Representation in ChoiceScript games?

Game Development Writing and Content
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Well, of the three WIPs I’m mainly thinking of, I really don’t want to talk about one of them, but I’ll go over the others:

The first had four ROs of each gender, of whom, the player is instantly introduced to two (who were both straight), before eventually meeting the bisexual RO. The sole gay RO was in a far more minor role, and while I understand he’ll have a more major part to play later on, it was still a pretty obvious imbalance. (It was pretty much the same for the female ROs.) Fortunately, in this case, the author did change it so that all ROs would be bisexual.

The second (I admit that I only played this once, a while ago, so my memory could be hazy) had three male ROs. The straight guy was a very major character, appearing even before the MC, and being heavily involved in the plot. The gay guy appeared very late-on, and could easily die without the MC’s intervention (and without the MC even necessarily knowing about him), and would gender-flip for a female MC (so whether he was really gay is a moot point).

I should note that in neither case was the gay RO inferior as a character, but it was still a pretty clear imbalance.

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Well they certainly are gay I would argue, just not always a guy…however it’s…“intersting” that the specific gay ROs are the only one gender swapping (at least if it’s about the game I think it is, and I’m actually pretty sure by the starting in the pov of one of the ROs thing). Also I think the bi guy at least is more difficult to actually romance for a male MC? Not sure about that point, as romancing him anyway is somewhat counter-intuitive no matter the gender, but anyway even when his bisexuality gets mentioned, we see him more often with female lovers as far as I remember… so yeah gay romance is especially difficult for male MCs in this game (the female bisexual RO is much easier to romance in contrast…) I can see why that feels like getting the short end of the stick, especially as cases like that are rather common. In such cases I would argue that everybody is bi/gay might be a fairer approach to things.

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I have a pretty clear idea as to which the first WIP you’re discussing is, but could any of you tell me what the second one is as I don’t seem to recall it.

Well I can definitely dislike it when I feel characters are written and inserted to be gay first, ahem Mass Effect Andromeda, looking at you here, again. And their whole existence seems to revolve around being gay. Now being gay can, due to the way society is currently structured play a greater role than it should, in people’s lives including my own. I’m a gay rights activist so I am known for being gay and that being the only reason some people even know of me in real-life. Had I been straight I would have hardly needed to devote time and energy to being a “straight activist” because straight people aren’t being put in concentration camps in dodgy Russian “republics”, nor stoned to death in Africa, nor being more subtly discriminated against and still occasionally physically harassed and assaulted because of their sexuality over here.
Okay, pfew rant over.

Anyway, gay or straight or bi or pan or even player-sexual I like characters with interesting personalities and yes I do tend to be attracted to the snarky, sarcastic and cute types.
Though, yes, if the gay characters are so minor that it is “blink and you’ll miss them” whereas the straight ro’s are heavily involved and plot-critical (team mates) then it’s a fair bet I’m going to feel underrepresented and left out.

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One thing I just want to bring up is the tendency of some writers/publishers to make their gay or lesbian characters all sort of similar…it’s bad representation, but it’s also tough luck for people who aren’t fond of the options given.

One publisher in particular, I’ve learned to play their games as a male character because they typically have one gay RO (smaller casts), and that always happens to be the one and only character I find particularly interesting, personality-wise.

Then I realised that’s because those characters all have about three major similarities that are all traits I like. And I’m sure they don’t even realise that they’re doing it. -_-

So it’s something worth thinking about, perhaps, for people who will at some point have multiple games…make a list of any minority characters you have (particularly minorities that are not one’s own), and make sure you’re not noticing any strange trends throughout your works.

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I would like to talk about a trope, if you don’t mind that I change the topic a little bit.

How do you feel about coming out stories?
I mean it’s kind of an obvious one to use once in a while when you are trying to portray gay characters, especially if the character is young.
However I’ve heard from some people that we don’t need these kind of stories anymore, but I think that kind of thinking can be a little dangerous. A lot of this people have already come out years ago and probably lost touch with the expirience of coming out and how importatn is for young people.

I think it’s an interesting trope maybe more for fiction in general than CoG games, but I still would like to know what everyone else thinks.

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I don’t like them, mostly because I don’t find them realistic. They all treat coming out like this one big thing you do and then you are out and no it rarely works like that.

Every time you enter a new social circle, or a meet new persons you have to make a new decision about if you want to come out to this person/group. Is it safe? is it worth it? Do you want to risk pick a fight.

And that is not even to mention those of us who crosses more than one box and thus have to come out multiple times to the same group.

Also those stories glorifies getting out of the closet, which neglect to mention that the closet is a life savoir for some people.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I don’t mind if a young or questioning character has a minor plot point where they come out, but not if it is all of that characters character development or if it is treated like a big twist.

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I think it’s still good to see, would be good perhaps with more variation than the most common version(s) which I think is “teenager comes out as gay, is happily accepted/thrown out by family”. Older people? Different circumstances? Coming out as different things? It’s hard to say that everyone’s experience has been covered.

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This is probably a running theme with any issue discussed in this thread, but I think it depends on how it’s handled.

I think a good depiction of a journey of a person figuring out that they aren’t cis or het is always useful. I know that there are issues to be had with her overall portrayal, but I liked the way her relationship with her eventual girlfriend developed, and the way there wasn’t ever a sit down with the group to discuss her sexuality, they just found out as they found out and it wasn’t a big deal. It was a smooth, natural way of doing it and I think it was a pretty accurate depiction of the experience of a lot of people.

Conversely, if the character starts the story knowing their identity full well, I’m not really interested in a struggle to tell their friends or family. I’m okay with a character having issues with a single family member–another show that’s definitely flawed, but I think of Santana Lopez’s issues with her grandmother’s homophobia on Glee. It’s a good, realistic scene that shows some of the difficulties that can come with coming out without greatly damaging the character’s life–which isn’t really a depiction I’m interested in seeing at all. (Not to downplay the emotional trauma of being rejected by a loved one that way.)

And I’d definitely like to second everything that @DreamingGames says above–especially about glorifying coming out of the closet. A lot of friends I have that aren’t cishet got a lot of pressure to come out from friends who are cishet, because they thought it would be fine only because they and a couple other friends are accepting, regardless of the overall situation.

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When it comes to the defined-orientation issues, I’d say it looks like you’ve all covered most of what I’d want to say :stuck_out_tongue:
To put it into a general principle, ROs with defined orientations (which can include bi/pansexuality) can totally be great for representation, and even ideal with large enough casts. The problems arise when it ends up used as a way to give gay players a poorer experience, and there are several different places where this discrepancy can come in (quantity, quality, variety, likability, importance, etc.)

So with that, it doesn’t really sound to me like you’ll have any problems here, @ashestoashes018

(Actually, I feel a little awkward about this topic with regards to my own WiP inasmuch as the most important gay-only male romance will be introduced later on than the straight-only guy, but the former is also quite a bit more important to the plot, so I think this balances…)[quote=“MockTurtle, post:246, topic:20429”]
How do you feel about coming out stories?
[/quote]

The thing is, this can be such a broad term… it can encompass such a wide variety of stories that there’s room to do it in entirely different ways… like how you can’t treat all “first contact with aliens” stories as the same thing, either. Some approaches will incline to cliché, or the problematic things that fellow posters mention here. But it can still be a rather personal story of someone developing self-understanding, and of someone’s relationships with the important people around them. It can even specifically engage with some of these issues… which is likely to happen if it’s infused with knowledge and experience (whether one’s own or from consulting with people who have had the experience)… like, if the story shows how you can have to come out multiple times, or the pressures that can be involved, or how it works differently for different people, or how it can be a process, or how some people will be aware of their identity earlier on and some go through a longer period of denial or unsureness, or how some people will make a whole event of it, and other people will just casually mention whom they’re dating… there’s a lot to work with, and a lot to explore.

From an interactive fiction standpoint, there might not be as much to work with here. I suppose someone could write a game specifically about a certain LGBTQ experience, in which you’d have a protagonist being more set to a specific group. This would be a bit different from typical ChoiceScript style, but I think it would be a more valuable type of locking than the typical unquestioning version where someone writes hetero-male-only without much consideration. Being interactive could even allow it to explore more of how experiences might differ.
(Or, well, an interactive fiction could just provide some opportunities to come out to various characters in the context of the story… being able to turn someone down with “sorry, gay,” or to flirt with someone with “hey, gay ;)” could sometimes be appropriate…)

I’d also say that any “coming out story” needs to be more than just a coming out story, to show that it’s not really the end-all-be-all defining moment of an LGBTQ person’s experience.

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The easiest way to get over with the challenge is to have only one romance. I guess it streamlines the plot a lot… but sometimes there can be only one true love.

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But what if the player hates that character? :confused:

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Well, I can tell you how it worked in the Path of Light, although it is a story I wrote before I even knew about Hosted Games. The MC is gender locked as male and the love interest is gender locked as female… which sucks according to the standards, I know.

She is a devil who has a problem with her self-control. You can unleash her bloodlust to get out of dangerous battles, but if you overdo it and your love is not strong enough… she just kills you.

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Depends on what you consider “the challenge” to be, I guess… as far as I’m concerned, having lots of romanceable characters with a great deal of variety, for everybody, solves the challenge… but for those who don’t like writing romances, or prefer smaller casts, the solution would look different… perhaps a couple bi characters, or just not writing romance at all.

Write what you want, but a hetero-locked game is the solution to a different problem than the one we’re discussing (i.e. gay representation in choicescript games).

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Well, I guess we could write a gay-locked game. :thinking:

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The only trope/stereotype (or whatever you call it) i personally hate is the fact that once you come out, you’re a totally different person now. Being gay doesnt define you - that dude isnt the gay guy in the group; he’s the star wars/game of thrones/deadpool geek. Just because you are out doesnt mean how you act changes either (you dont dress or talk more effiminate).

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But then again, someone who’s in the closet might end up acting in a far more “straight” manner than they would naturally, so there’s some truth to the stereotype. Of course, it’s still not a very good stereotype to use, so it would probably be best to be careful about using it.

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Well, if I ever do write a locked game, it would be that.
(That or other LGBTQ, would presumably be a necessity for any kind of interactive “coming out story” :thinking:)

Very true. People are much more complicated than that.

Well, generally true, and certainly true about personality. But you might see someone more willing to express previously existing feminine traits that he’d been hiding because he didn’t want to seem too gay. You might see someone putting on some stereotypically gay traits because he thinks that’s what he should do. Or in order to make a deliberate statement, or to symbolize it… like getting his ears pierced as a way of saying “yeah, I’m out now :triumph: :rainbow:” Or even just to try to get the attention of other gay guys :stuck_out_tongue:
Ah, and conversely, after coming out, I worried about being too stereotypical and was thinking I should tone down some of my more feminine characteristics, before realizing that that wasn’t really being true to myself either :stuck_out_tongue:

But yeah, a lot of times, it’s just lazy characterization.

Oh, hey, looks like @ParrotWatcher ninja’d me with a similar point… since when does that ever happen? :stuck_out_tongue:

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Again, yes and no, some people in real life only know (of) me exactly because I’m a gay rights activist. Do I wish it wasn’t necessary to be a gay rights activist, hell yes! But the truth is what it is and I’ve accepted that being gay now plays a larger role in my life and consumes more of my time then my sexuality would have done had I been straight or even bi.

As for “coming out” since the default assumption is still that somebody is “automatically” heterosexual until they make it known or it is discovered that they are not, coming out for some people can have the effect of rendering them into a (vilified) “other” to their friends and family, where it indeed becomes a case where they often begin projecting gay stereotypes onto you while disregarding that you are for the most part still the some boring old you they’ve always known. My own (wannabe) club-kid days can at least partially be explained away as me trying to conform to some gay stereotypes after “coming out”.

That said ideally gay people would be treated as being just as mundane and boring as their straight counterparts for the most part. Sadly we’re a long way from that point in social and cultural development right now.

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I don’t like that the only mention here is being effeminate. My dad was convinced I was a lesbian for almost three years, because I dressed down, wore sweats, cut my hair into a pixie (can provide pics if wished; idrc. doubt you could dox me over a senior picture) for two years straight (lol), and just sort of didn’t put any emphasis on my appearance. Add in that I never talked about or brought guys home (though that’s because my dad was and is super strict about dating, sooooo whatever floats your boat, Dad), and my dad was convinced I was butch/a dyke.

These things go both ways. However, to be fair, in media, we only ever see the super sexy lesbians or the super masculine lesbians. Most of the lesbians I knew were terrible at makeup but still liked to wear girly clothes back in high school. Even now, most of the lesbians and pansexual women I know are far better at makeup than I am but are just as willing to walk around in pajamas all day as I am.

Basically, women are complex creatures who don’t always like to wear dresses and glitter all the time, and just because they don’t does not make them the stereotypical lesbian, nor, if they do, does it make them heterosexual or the super hot, wet dream worthy lesbian.

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No. Nothing complex to see here… carry on folks. :stuck_out_tongue:

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