Games with strong LGBTQ characters?

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jeffrud

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#101  Edited By jeffrud

@mc_hify: I've played a few of Love's games, and actually was in touch with her about doing grad school level research on Analogue: A Hate Story (appropriation of Korean culture, Korean indie scene online, etc.) Digital: A Love Story was the best game I played last year, hands down. I shared Don't Take it Personally with this housemate a while ago and she enjoyed it quite a bit.

@endaround This outfit has a ton of stuff! I don't think $20 is an unreasonable price for a thoughtfully made visual novel-ish game; are they worth the price of admission? My frame of reference is unfortunately Christine Love's stuff, most of which is free.

Also, I guess it's encouraging that this conversation could stay somewhat on the rails over time. I agree that the lady in question is pretty damn picky about what she'll play, and that this is probably a wasted effort. If anything, it's nice to see a discussion of how people or various gender and sexual identities have been represented in our collective hobby. That's the whole point of this site, isn't it? A compendium of all video game knowledge?

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TheHT

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@video_game_king: Plenty of people actually! Their reasoning tends to range from bunk to just plain rude.

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Mister_Avatar

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#103  Edited By Mister_Avatar

My fiance and I have a lot of LGBT friends. I won't get into the details, but lets say she bounced around a lot in college. If your lady friend is anything like them you really should give Dragon Age a shot. Like mass effect there are LGB options in the game for the main character, plus the expansion and follow up game DA:2 has Anders who not only is a gay character, but one that actually acts like a human being. I have yet to meet a lady with even the slightest interest in fantasy, dislike Dragon Age. I'm not saying they're not out there, I'm just saying I haven't met them.

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tsutohiro

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#104  Edited By tsutohiro

@jeffrud: Couldn't any character who's sexuality, preference, or orientation that isn't explicitly defined, be seen however you like? Are you looking for strong female characters, or specifically asking that they be LGBT?

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AlecOfTheWest

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Fallout: New Vegas and The Ballad of Gay Tony are about the only games I can think of. People are going to say Bioware games, but making every character in your game bisexual is hardly what I'd call tasteful.

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maverick1

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whats the q stand g for?

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Darji

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#107  Edited By Darji

@oldirtybearon: really you do not find serendipity offensive? Even I find her offensive and I am normally immune against this^^

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endaround

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@jeffrud: I haven't really delved too much into them. Everything has a demo though so you can gt a sample. They just had a 50% off sale after Thanksgiving so they may have another after Christmas.

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Oldirtybearon

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@darji said:

@oldirtybearon: really you do not find serendipity offensive? Even I find her offensive and I am normally immune against this^^

No I can't say that I do. A transexual prostitute is probably a little weird for a fantasy RPG but I wouldn't call her existence offensive. What's so offensive about her?

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artelinarose

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@darji said:

@oldirtybearon: really you do not find serendipity offensive? Even I find her offensive and I am normally immune against this^^

No I can't say that I do. A transexual prostitute is probably a little weird for a fantasy RPG but I wouldn't call her existence offensive. What's so offensive about her?

The representation is offensive.

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JoeyRavn

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whats the q stand g for?

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual and Queer.

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Oldirtybearon

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@artelinarose said:

@oldirtybearon said:

@darji said:

@oldirtybearon: really you do not find serendipity offensive? Even I find her offensive and I am normally immune against this^^

No I can't say that I do. A transexual prostitute is probably a little weird for a fantasy RPG but I wouldn't call her existence offensive. What's so offensive about her?

The representation is offensive.

You and some other people keep saying that as if that should just answer my question; it doesn't. How is Serendipity offensive? I'm curious.

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planetfunksquad

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@jeffrud said:

Digital: A Love Story was the best game I played last year, hands down.

I see this sentiment a lot, but when I played it I thought it was badly written and the characters were underdeveloped. Am I missing something?

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Video_Game_King

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notdavid

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@jeffrud said:

Digital: A Love Story was the best game I played last year, hands down.

I see this sentiment a lot, but when I played it I thought it was badly written and the characters were underdeveloped. Am I missing something?

The interface was fantastic. I don't think Christine Love's storytelling talents really started showing until her next game.

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artelinarose

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@artelinarose said:

@oldirtybearon said:

@darji said:

@oldirtybearon: really you do not find serendipity offensive? Even I find her offensive and I am normally immune against this^^

No I can't say that I do. A transexual prostitute is probably a little weird for a fantasy RPG but I wouldn't call her existence offensive. What's so offensive about her?

The representation is offensive.

You and some other people keep saying that as if that should just answer my question; it doesn't. How is Serendipity offensive? I'm curious.

Loading Video...

Another trans character that is a prostitute with a girl body, deep, husky man voice, overly sexual towards everybody with the writer's intent being to cause discomfort treated as awkward, disturbing and/or a joke.

It drags down the concept of being transgender to just being the butt of a joke. It continues to circulate the belief that trans people are mostly sex workers and only weird people that fetishize us want anything to do with us. The disparity between body and voice is often an attempt to show how "weird" or "unnatural" trans people are. The two characters you're supposed to identify with or respect treat the whole interaction as uncomfortable and Hawke even goes so far as to look directly at her and sarcastically refer to her as "upper class."

And please feel free to read the comments on that video. Tons of people pointing out how creepy and disturbing the character is. It's unfortunately a very widespread belief that transwomen actually are like this. It's part of the reason why girls like us tend to get murdered a whole lot.

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f1reflygr7

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Video games are a medium about mechanics, not about people and characters.

It's only been fairly recently that video games have started to tell meaningful stories about actual characters rather than just presenting a set of tools and mechanics with a goal to achieve and obstacles to overcome.

Expecting something like gender and sexual diversity to be equally represented in this medium is just completely ludicrous. It's very sparse, and in most cases poorly done.

If someone can't enjoy and appreciate a game on its mechanics alone they should look somewhere else for entertainment, because it doesn't have what they're looking for.

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Oldirtybearon

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#118  Edited By Oldirtybearon
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EthanML

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#119  Edited By EthanML

Shit you're right, I guess I'm no longer comfortable playing video games because of a lack of strong Irish characters in them. Because...that...has some sort of impact on their entertainment quality, I guess..?

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endaround

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deactivated-5e49e9175da37

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For what it's worth, I didn't peg Serendipity as a prostitute, I thought she was just someone's fuckbuddy who had been magically reassigned. For me it wasn't "ha ha let's mock trans folk" it was "imagine how people in this setting use magic for sexual gratification". Like the joke about Anders using electricity during an orgy earlier in his life.

As for portraying trans people as having distinct gender fluid traits, or some tell that causes that character to stop passing; I don't know how much of that is socially prescribing how to view trans people, and how much is just a simple comedic outcome around things that we recognize as trans-related. In the same way that we might portray a group of men or women as having comedic characteristics, without necessarily prescribing that you should view all men as grunting apes who gather around cars and grunt at them, or women as shrill, cackling harpies sharing gossip and passive aggressively competing with each other.

A part of comedy is poking fun at our differences. I take the Serendipity joke to be poking fun at our differences, without the condemnation or intent to demean that I believe is being tacked on. The problem is not that trans people get depicted as prostitutes, since we know there are trans prostitutes just like we know cis men and women can be prostitutes. The problem is just that they don't yet get thrown in any other roles. In the 70s there were arguments that black people were only being shown as a part of the criminal element, nowadays when you see black actors playing criminals, you don't jump to racism because black actors also play world leaders, family men and women, God, pilots, executives, labourers, so on. I'm not going to lean on prostitute being an arbitrarily negative representation because I think sex workers probably receive more than enough social condemnation and judgement, but certainly it's becoming stereotypical, a little rote, and I think people are ready for trans people to show up in different roles. I don't want it to become "isn't it time for GTA to have a trans protagonist" or "I'm taking a star off this game because it doesn't have any trans people in it" and I'm sure most reasonable people would agree, but I think a television show for instance would have a huge competitive edge if it were a family sitcom in which one of the kids is trans. But of course I would see that as a competitive advantage.

It may have been because I was high at the time, but I thought the trio of trans prostitutes on Bob's Burgers were awesome. Even though they smoked crack, they just seemed like nice people, which you wouldn't expect from people on the fringes. Plus, one of them was Jack McBrayer. Which I guess explains the niceness.

I wonder if switching from a very feminine voice to a very masculine voice, or vice versa, was the world's first gender fluidity joke..? Or, person looks very feminine but has a super masculine voice or vice versa. Like that scene in Mrs. Doubtfire where the guy tries to steal Robin Williams' purse, and he responds first effeminately and then "GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!" in full dad voice. I wonder neurologically, what elements of a person we use first to determine gender, I feel like face and voice are the top two. The more extreme the difference is, the larger the incongruity, is where the comedy comes from. Breaking expectations itself has comedic elements to it, especially if it all still makes logical sense. When people play Saints Row and make big beefy guys with massive survivalist beards and then give them the effeminate lady's voice, it's not to demean transgendered people, it's to have fun with the incongruity.

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thatpinguino

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Dragon Age 1 has some lesbian options if you roll a female main character.

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tooPrime

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#123  Edited By tooPrime

I agree. I refuse to play any game that doesn't prominently feature straight white males. I played half way through Portal, realized I was a lady, and never played it again.

More seriously, this is the only gay character I can think of, that and the cursed monkey from I have no mouth and I must scream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-te_jTkmVKo

Wait, now that I think about it, probably the Mass Effect games would actually be good. If sure that's been said like 9 times already though.

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development

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#124  Edited By development
@wjb said:

@alexw00d said:

@mb said:

@alexw00d said:

@twolines said:

The hell does Q stand for? And why are they all lumped together? That's dumb. You know what's not dumb? The ballad of Gay Tony. It's a damn fine game/expansion.

I think Q refers to Queer, which is fucking ridiculous considering the word queer means weird/strange/odd. The fact that people in this thread are happy to use that term is fucked up.

I hate to break this to you, but the term queer is very commonly used as a self-descriptive term by quite a few different orientations. If you don't believe me, take a look at the Craigslist personals in San Francisco.

And black people commonly refer to themselves and their friends with the N-word, but that doesn't mean I can use it too does it?

The world is so cruel.

I always thought Q was "questioning," like @alkusanagi mentioned. A person who doesn't necessarily define himself or herself as LGBT. I suppose some people refer to it as "queer," but it's not something I think about much, honestly.

My favorite thing about this tree of comments is that it's founded on complete ignorance (no offense). I didn't know either, but did a literal 10-second Google search and found that the "Q" stands for "questioning." Why would it be "queer" if it already had "gay" and "lesbian" covered? Come on, people; think before you get angry.

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I_Stay_Puft

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Hmmm the topic is a good question. I know Gone Home was the first game to make coming out the focus of the plot. But if I had to think of one game where a character was LBGT and was pretty damn cool has to be Anders from Dragon Age / Dragon Age II.