Positive examples of representation in games!

If you take out the extremes of criminal ties in Sleeping Dogs the character of Wei Shen might be the closest representation of Asians and American Americans life in video games. Just the balancing and blending of the west and eastern culture and families is something that is easy to relate to especially when you are second generation kids.

The Cat Lady: This one's a little esoteric, but it's one of the best takes on suicide and mental illness I've seen in gaming.

If you think about it, that article is kind of going *backwards* in it's mindset of what LGBT represents. It sounds like these characters were struggling with whether or not they were gay or transgender and what was really bothering them as the true underlying issue for them as individuals. If they were shoehorned into LGBT roles because you expected them to be then that would not be true representation of LGBT struggles, but simply a politically correct statement that has a game with a gay and a transgender because you think that's what those character should have chose.

Basically, *not* allowing a person to decide that they really *are not* LGBT seems just as bad as forcing someone to be ashamed of being LGBT!

And this section in particular was pretty shocking...

"To me, it's unheard of for a person to go so far as to live as a gender other than the one they are physically assigned at birth simply because they feel a connection to fictional characters of that genre or because their assigned gender doesn't fit their ideal image of a person in a certain profession." --- Carolyn Petit

...because I happened to do exactly this for several years due to this very gaming industry and how I felt I didn't belong as a female and tried very hard to feel and portray myself as male, but was ashamed of also liking some of my female feelings and hobbies. Then I realized I was exploring my gender and sexuality as any normal person does and not everything is that simple. People struggling with LGBT issues don't always come to the same conclusions about themselves, including whether or not they actually are. For me, that conclusion was complicated and possibly not able to be categorized, but in a nutshell, I really enjoy exploring both gender feelings and roles within myself and have no desire to choose one or the other. I don't feel like being shoehorned into society, so I be whoever and whatever I want to be at any given mood.

This sounds like it was an excellent game for representing the issues involved, including my own, but really not an excellent article if it's trying to force a role onto a character. The fact that this game even explored this level of humanity is amazing and great progress toward what we are trying to achieve and am now tempted to go play it myself! :)