Gay Representation in ChoiceScript games?

Poor Ubisoft, they make a canoically bi protagonist with an onscreen gay romance and a triple A RPG where you can be trans and people only care about Bioware until the Spartans come.

Let’s see… still wouldn’t call this site inclusive. Pretty easy to say when you’re not one of the groups they pay attention to, just as it’s easy to do the opposite.

Totally if you can write about dragons and aliens without eyes totally could write about some other person interested in other things lol. After all we are all humans

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15 posts were split to a new topic: Gay Representation in non-Choice Script Gaming

Done.

There was also a thread about LGBTQ and Feminism Issues in general. Although it’s been inactive for a while.

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I think the problem is that it’s harder to make a choicescript game than it is to simply tell a story. When you are constructing a game that will actually work and you’re pulling your hair out it can seem a lot easier to shift focus away from romance durine the action. It’s simply easier to treat romance as a bolt on coding wise if the author is inexperienced bease that’s the easiest way to make the damn thing run.

I am grappling with these problems you describe in my own WIP.

The romantic conflicts need to mesh well with the main plot conflicts. If they don’t mesh if the two sets of conflicts are tangental then it just becomes overwhelming tempting for the author to ignore romance while they are pulling their hair out trying to get a game that works.

But it’s not an unsolvable problem. I think it’s skill, thought, hard work, experience and a lot of conversations like this. These conversations are enormously helpful to the authors.

These projects are too big for the authors to hold all the possible play styles in their heads at once. Getting involved with playtesters is uber important more so than any other kind of game design I’ve seen (and I’ve seen most).

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And in a lot of cultures bisexual ity is ubiquitous. Choicescript games should be open to them too.

I think it would be interesting to simply copy and paste the flings then rewrite them. In version 2 This character is a gay man. You can describe him differently. And you can tweak the stats. The version one straight man is the strong silent type with the heart of gold and he’s ruggedly handsome. The gay version is suaver, looks different talks different, flirts differently.

So you write two flings. One male fling and one female fling. Then you rewrite each of them as gay or straight. That way you have 4 flings but it’s less work and it’s easier coding wise.

And it might reward replaying if you could romance multiple versions of the same person.

Sorry, I just woke up, and it’s the middle of the night, but I don’t really understand what you are saying? :sweat_smile:

I should copy-paste the flings? Um, what, why?

I was just thinking aloud how I would solve the problem you posed.

So for example let’s say I am creating a fling with a male character. I write and code the entire encounter. Now I copy and paste all that code back into the same chapter give it a different *label.

Now I would just rewrite the fling where this character is a gay man. Talks and looks differently but basically the same structure plot as the straight version.

So now I have two sets of labels. When the game gets to the fling an *if statement decides which label the narrative proceeds to.

After either fling is over you *goto or *finish back into the main story