Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Gays in Games!

Gays are tragically underrepresented in video games. Along with blacks, women and just about anyone who represents someone outside the cultural and social milieu of the action hero in the 1980s, but I digress. Gays have it particularly bad. At the very least black people and women have attempts, albeit all too often ignorant and pandering ones, made at positive portrayals in games. Some of them still turn out to be incredibly offensive, but the attempts are still made. But with an impressively spare selection of exceptions games don’t really have any positive or intelligent portrayals of homosexuals, male or female.

The most prominent one to emerge in recent memory was the unfortunate DLC for GTA4, the Ballad of Gay Tony. In this add on to a game which was already offensively ignorant towards a number of cultures in general and is woefully misinformed about the way homosexuals live and act we were treated to Gay Tony, a character who was simpering and homoerotic in all the wrong ways, a faggot through and through in Rockstar’s eyes, an ineffectual leader who required the machismo of a straight man he had simultaneously mentored and corrupted in order to survive. Which might’ve made for an interesting dynamic if the straight character so reliant upon him had not been cast as an ultra-masculine in the opening scenes of the game, so incredibly potent that the ladies just couldn’t keep off him, preventing any of that messy gay from getting on the player and making them feel all icky.

I’m hard pressed to come up with another specific portrayal of a homosexual character in a video game in recent memory. Even Dragon Age, and Mass Effect, which had some nice positive things to say about characters who would totally go tab to tab or slot to slot if the case arose, hedged it by making those characters bisexual. And let’s face it, Mass Effect’s questions about sex and sexuality are a lot more concerned with the mechanics of doing it with aliens more than the politics of same-sex relationships in the future. Alpha Protocol’s Marburg, who could be an incredibly interesting character if he was given a little more screen time, is barely developed at all, and his sexuality is little more than a joke we get to chortle at – the bad guy is a homo, tee hee! So we’ve been left with The Path, which has a brief, touching, horrible moment centered around a young woman’s first lesbian experience, and World of Goo, where I am almost positive one or perhaps all of those little ball guys are gay. I’m honestly not even sure how they could tell, so I feel like it’s a safe bet.

Perhaps much of this blame can be laid upon the facile understanding that the majority of game makers seem to have of human interactions in general. The relationship section of most games consists of some stunted bullshit some asshole tacked on to an existing game engine, and it rarely simulates what it means to be a person who loves, loses and grows. Far more often it just exposes the relative immaturity that people accuse us of as a culture all too often, giving them more fodder they didn’t need in the first place. There’s also the fact that most games aren’t concerned with relationships, which aren’t really things that can be easily fostered between people and virtual beings easily. And the best attempts at crafting relationships have to be done in broad strokes so that they can work in a video game context. For example, Alyx Vance is more or less a cipher in Half-Life, even though the weirdly sexualized relationship Gordon has with her is a key part of the game.

So I was quite pleasantly surprised when, during Fallout: New Vegas, I discovered something about Felicia Day’s character. While talking to her about her travels through the wastes and just what she’d been through I found out that she was still nursing some heartbreak. And, when pressed, I found out the object of her affections had been a lady, a lady who had left her society because they’d looked down on lesbian couples for their refusal to reproduce. The Brotherhood of Steel, the relatively magnanimous organization which seemed to want to seem like a bunch of angry isolationists sometimes, was a bunch of breeders who couldn’t tolerate her lifestyle. But she was so loyal to them, to their principles and the way she’d been raised, that she couldn’t reject them. So Veronica, little Felicia Day, stuck around as her lady love wandered into the wastes to forge her own future.

It was a smart, poignant moment about real loss, about a real reason for loss, about an every-day kind of loss that I could relate to, that people force their children into all too often in our society every time they try to pray the gay out. It wasn’t a big plot point, and as far as I could tell Veronica’s lady wasn’t present in the game at all. It was just a part of her character, a part of who she was, the same way that Cass was an irascible, drunk or that Boone was a humorless dipshit. Paired with New Vegas’ new perks, which allowed characters to essentially choose a variety of sexual orientations which would provide them with special dialogue options, it was very clear that New Vegas had taken an adult stance on human sexuality, that it wanted me to realize that just because the world had ended we hadn’t stopped having feelings and we hadn’t stopped mistreating people because they were different.

As I explored the world I saw more and more examples of this sort of equaninimous treatment of human sexuality. I saw gay and straight characters who were assessed not by their preference but by what they could contribute to society. They fit into the world perfectly, and while their sexuality was a part of their character it was just that: a part. You’d never see a straight character defined as “the straight guy,” and that seems to be what Fallout: New Vegas got, what every other game has missed: that sexuality is an aspect of a person, not something that defines them. That a gay character is a gay character, but that they’re something more than just gay.

I’m eager to see just what Arcade Gannon has to say to me on this second playthrough, on a related note, because I’m almost positive that he’s gay. I want to see how they take an arrogant asshole and make me like him, because even Boone got me to like him by the end. I’m more interested in his deal than I am in Danny Trejo’s no doubt hilarious Raul or the weird and fascinating Lucy who, let’s face it, is perhaps the single most original companion in any game ever. I shouldn’t be so shocked, given the care that went in to making each and every one of these characters a unique and interesting person, that the same care would’ve extended to the social issues that are a reality in this world, but I am. So Gannon, and Gannon’s sexuality or lack thereof, is something I want to see fleshed out.

I’m not writing this to say that the flag of homosexuality is flying over gaming in general and that gays will, forevermore, be able to look to games as a media where they are treated with equality and respect. And I’m not writing this to say that the cause of gay rights has found a particularly strong champion in Fallout: New Vegas, which is a game that likes being funny just about as much as it likes being serious about things like issues of the heart. But I did want to recognize, in some small way, the manner in which Fallout: New Vegas respectfully and intelligently addresses the idea of sexual orientation in general and homosexuality as an element of human nature. Sure, it’s a small step, but it’s encouraging, especially given the number of copies that New Vegas moved and the sustainability of the game in general.

My only woe is that the game had to be so riddled with bugs, so often unplayable, that the conversation on it will never turn to this minor, powerfully encouraging part of one of the best games I’ve played in years. The press is far from likely to step back from the buggy mess that Fallout: New Vegas is surrounded by and pick out little heartwarming moments like their ability to evoke and portray real human relationships, especially as things speed up with the start of the holiday season (and what a holiday season, Jesus). In a way this brings up a problem I have with the gaming press, with their desire to find a story and run with it, their desire to act as a consumer assessment tool rather than a device for cultural discussion, but really it’s not entirely their fault here. There’s only so much time to discuss things like the way gays are portrayed in the medium we love and, as I’ve already pointed out, gamers don’t seem to think about that too much.