RACE AND GENDER IN GAMES

Funnily enough, the topics of women in games and LGBTQ+ folks in games came up very recently! The result was a total trainwreck.

So... yeah. Beware this can of worms you have opened.

I'm actually hopeful that this will turn out to be a good topic - because it's about personal games.

Lemme see. I tend to experiment with romance options and genders in my games but it's usually behind the scenes (in that, sometimes you might be playing a trans character but never be told because it doesn't matter to the story at all, or it's only hinted at). Hm...

Current games:
A Star Inside
Main character is bi-sexual (you have the option of three guys and one female. Usually I even it out but for this game I'm not because it's more story driven.)
Two of the male options are straight, one is bi-sexual and the female option is homosexual.
The villains are mainly straight and born-gender. One is bi-sexual and the other is asexual. Two villains are in a committed hetero relationship with each other, there's a one-sided hetero crush between two others and two others flirt a lot (one with anything that is cute, male or female, the other with the opposite gender.)

Hope is an Empty Word has no relationships except among the NPCs, and there it's mainly straight with some homosexuality thrown in. In fact, the first couple I added are homosexual so... The genders are as born, but there's a story-based reason for that.

Angels Among is purely yuri - basically female dating dungeon crawl game. One of the characters is masculine in looks and name, but identifies as female. Whether she's actually trans is another matter I've been wondering about myself. I don't want to add a trans-character in just for the sake of having one, but on the other hand it would literally change nothing about the character and the interactions with her if she were trans. On the other other hand, the character herself would never tell anyone if she was trans or not, so really it wouldn't matter either way. You'd never be told, though you could always just assume she is or isn't, I guess.



Most of my games are either straight or bi sexuality mains with a scattering of homosexual. There's almost always an androgynous character or two thrown in and sometimes there'll be a trans character, but that won't really be mentioned since it's often not the focus of the plot.

This is because most games are made by straight, white males.

I find it much easier to write male characters, so I have more male than female characters in my (only one and less than a half) game. I think my first game has about 3x more male NPCs than females. My second game barely has any NPCs yet, but I plan for having 4 playable male characters and 2 playable female characters.

To not repeat what others have said but from my point of view. You really don't find a lot of games that just put a lgbt+ person in just because they're there. At this point in time if you want a lgbt character they're front and center and the story revolves around them or they're a driving force or you get some excuse like "oh that person in the back corner of that one bar is gay just fyi" while they look exactly like the 50 other same versions of the sprite. Dialogue for characters like these isn't enough like just implying they're not straight or cis to really help at all we've all grown up past the point of omg they put a........ GAY in there GAME! a GAY GAY! GAY!!!!!!! But as much as I love me some games that have lgbt people at the front of it I would love to see a point in time where games have lgbt people along the side and not just used to cause a conversation

Edit: Get these damn sjws off rmn
Edit Edit: If you took that seriously. I'm a gay trans girl.

Ah, I forgot to talk about race!

I usually edit charactersets in some way to make less white-skinned peeps, and will sometimes include a dark-skinned protag when necessary. Most of the time if there's race wars of any kind it's between two white races and mainly about cultural differences instead of skin colour. In fact, colour of skin never really factors in when it comes to hate between people - black, white... it's seen as no difference.

Angels Among has one dark-skinned main character, but again, it's not a main component of the story or world in that game. And there's a ninja.

Honestly, I don't go by real-world races. I know some people go "Oh, this person would be Chinese and this one would be German" but I don't do that when creating characters. I choose what works for that area of the world. If it's trade-heavy there's going to be a large mixture of races, colours and species. If it's secular, there's not.

And the characters reflect that.

For Hope is an Empty Word you get to pick your character looks and half of the humans are dark skinned, while the other half are light. There's three different races - Aether, which have wings and black/grey skin; Humans and Neko which are half darker fur and half lighter. As for your party members, of the three humans you can have, two are dark skinned. The Nekos are all dark-furred members and the Aether are all the same colour because they are.

For A Star Inside one of your dating possibilities is dark skinned, one is Neko, one is very pale and one is lightly tanned. The main character is white but that's for a specific reason. The enemy characters are mainly white skinned but two of them aren't human. There's two who have darker skin, though.


@char: Like I said before, a lot of the time I don't really bring up when there are trans or lgbta+ characters because it's not relevant to the story. They're just people. Thing is, they are there and you can find them if you keep an eye out. See, I do a thing with my NPCs where I give them ministories and characterisation and then build their houses and interactions in the game around that. So you'll find two men living in one house together and no mention made of them being homosexual... but they are. It's their story and the clues are there if you bother to look but I ain't spelling it out because they're just people and people don't spell that shit out to random strangers wandering through their lives. Unless it's necessary for you to know that, clues and hints might be all you see of those relationships. Frankly, that's how I think it should be done - as something that is treated as a normal, everyday occurrence except when it's necessary to expand on it.

I just want to say that one thing MV generator does right is giving you a nice dark-skin palette colour that doesn't look horribad. Granted, some of the skin colours don't look great but for the most part there's a lot of variation there which is wonderful. Just wish there were more hair options... :<

bahleted

This is an amateur community even by indie standards and I don't really feel like a 16 year old kid making a game in their spare time should feel any obligation or compulsion to address social issues in their projects, but I do think it's cool when developers go the extra mile to be inclusive, and think it's something to be encouraged.

I do think larger scale studios have an obligation to start doing better by minorities, but I'm starting to think it might not actually be their fault. They made a black guy be a main character in Star wars and people are losing their minds. I mean what the hell?

author=LightningLord2
I haven't seen a topic about this, but I really think this is something that warrants discussion. A big trend is that many important characters gravitate towards being white and male. Obviously, I am aware of notable colored/female characters, both heroes and villians, but fact is that they're a big minority. This also applies to sexuality - there'll rarely be any LGBT+ characters in games, if they are, it's usually of the homosexual variety.
Have you ever thought about this type of representation? What do you do to change this or justify the appearance/lack of them?

Also, a small litmus test: Simply count down each named Character in your game(-s) and tell me the percentage of

-female
-colored
-LGBT+

characters in your game. I exclude unnamed characters to save you the trouble of browsing through your game to find every NPC who always says the same line if you speak to her. You may count the unnamed characters within the statistic, though.

Non-white. Colored is offensive.

My main hero in Oracle of Tao is an independent female (ironically, dressed as a housewife), and my other characters are majority female. Out of 11 characters, only three characters are male, two of those are able to crossdress, and the third is an angel (possibly intersex/asexual).

In terms of race, well, we don't have alot of black characters, but I tried to make an Asian town or two, and we do have at least two non-human characters (angel, demon, half-elf, and mermaid) so I tried to at least deal with the issue of being other than than white-bread humans.

One of my male characters is LGBT (effeminate straight with trans traits), and doesn't just crossdress because you can crossdress him. This is dealt with in story as part of the character's ultimate attack. I have his voice-acting played by a female.

In Tales From The Reaper, the cast is almost universally female, and we have a lesbian relationship.

Of course this is all assuming your game is heavily story-driven. If your game has almost no story and the main character is mostly just an avatar, then let the player pick their gender and appearance. Or at least their gender. Doing so will significantly increase the reach of your game, but require basically no effort.

If you're customizing, a simple way to add immersion, is to add flags. That is, when picking the color of skin, you can add variable flags, where characters might respond favorably (or unfavorably) to race, or sex, or whatever. Of course, this extra work is lost since people get offended. But they also might be offended if you brush over the fact that people in fact are prejudiced against. The closest equivalent would probably be playing as a drow. Or a necromancer.