It’s a video about sexuality as a gaming mechanic. The same way you might play as a mage or a warrior, you can choose who your character is interested in. Except you don’t realize you have an option until someone else that played the game in a different way tells you. There’s a focus on bisexual erasure as well.
If the video is too long for you, watch the first twelve minutes and you will get the gist.
You can read the transcript here: https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=iZGkxUTbDqw
Watching this now, it’s hard not to think about social media and how the ecosystem is tailored to make you see exactly what you want. We will always interpret the world though the lens of our personal past experiences, but tech is able to steer us away from anything that challenges our point of view these days. It’s a common practice for big companies to edit their products to comply with the demands of specific cultures or the powers that be.
There are the players and the world. There are well-crafted narratives and player choices. Being able to role play as much as you want is good, and the same can be said of a world that adapts to your decisions. On the other hand, experience something that is beyond or at the edges of my imagination has great value, and a world whose personality changes solely for my benefit is limiting in a way I’ll never be aware.
As a pansexual man, I like that games do this. But what I actually want to see from a game at some point is characters whose diversity includes their sexuality – not just characters that mirror my own. (For simplicity’s sake I’m lumping romantic and sexual attraction together here, though I know they are different.)
I want a male character to turn down my advances because he’s straight, or a female character to do the same because she’s just not in to guys. Or the hot pink-haired enby punk to turn down everyone because they’re ace/aro.
But I also want scenes where a same-sex character awkwardly confesses their feelings with the protagonist, and players who are straight end up in the situation of having to let them down. (Or, perhaps, decide that it’s okay if your character’s preferences don’t mirror your own.) And maybe those players discover the character they’ve been crushing on all game isn’t interested in them – but with mature options for handling that rejection.
In a world where people are always talking about the patriarchy and toxic masculinity, why aren’t we presenting the idea that its okay for a straight man to continue to be good friends with a woman who loves other women without the “maybe I can change her mind” mindset?
We really do need more romance in games not being presented as a mean to get a prize. Maybe some randomness could be applied and the same actions would not always result in the desired outcomes.
It was curious when I realized, not many years ago, that people found strange to play a character with a different gender. Imagining a different sexuality is probably the same. In both cases, games don’t go deep in making you feel like the other, which is kinda sad.
There are completionists out there who want to get every bit of possible story or every affordable achievement possible out of a game.
If written well (and that in itself is a challenge), I can see a game encouraging people to do a second playthrough as a different gender or sexuality just to unlock more of character backstories or achievements or whatnot. If that means some of them better understand what life is like for people of different genders or sexualities or learn something about themselves, that can only be a good thing.
It’d be a monumental task to develop such a game though. You’d need a writing team that fully understands all of this and a large enough cast where there are enough options for everyone. You can’t just have one token character of each representation – there still needs to be meaningful choices and characters that are deep enough where you can get invested in their story.
Having romanceable characters be “playersexual” drastically reduces the required size of the cast and all of the development benefits that come along with that. But by doing so, you aren’t really representing diversity – you’re just making character identities mirror whatever the player wants them to be. This appeases LGBTQ+ players who want to be able to romance whomever they are attracted to but doesn’t help with visibility to or acceptance from cis/het people.