Scarlett.
28-05-2009, 01:16 PM
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In the past 30 years gays and lesbians have broken out of the closet in spectacular style. Before the 1980s it was hard to find any openly gay characters in popular entertainment, but in the last 10-15 years it has been hard to avoid homosexuals in films and on TV. From Academy Award winning films such as Brokeback Mountain and Milk - not forgetting one of Australia’s most popular films Priscilla: Queen of the Desert - to prime-time TV shows such as Will & Grace, gays are here, they’re happily queer and everyone else is getting used to it. However in gaming it seems the closet door is still closed.
No one is expecting games to suddenly start showing sodomy in a tent, Brokeback Mountain style – game publishers still have issues depicting heterosexual sex scenes (check out Are Gamers Scared of Sex? for more) – but where is the gay video game hero? Or strong supporting characters? They are very hard to find, just as they were in films and TV before the 1980s. Bisexuality is starting to be seen - or at least accessed if a player is looking for it - but unlike other entertainment forms, games have not joined the 21st century by displaying diversity in human sexuality.
Japanese games have long featured minor gay characters – almost always flamboyant cross-dressers and fitting the ‘girly’ gay cliché – but in the 1980s and 1990s these characters were censored or changed for a Western release. The original Street Fighter character Eagle, who also appears in Capcom vs. SNK 2, was gay but several of his quotes obviously displaying his orientation were taken out for the game’s release outside of Japan – and Eagle didn’t make the cut for the rest of the Street Fighter series.
In 1988, Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. 2 featured a mini-boss named Birdo who was described in the Japanese instruction manual as thinking he was a girl and wanting to be called "Birdetta" – but this was changed for release outside Japan. In 1994 Sega’s Streets of Rage 3 was altered for Western release, removing a gay boss named Ash (distinguished by his Village People style fashion) and replacing him with a straight character named Shiva. Sega also removed minor gay and transgender characters from Final Fight and in RPG Phantasy Star II, a helpful town's musician's homosexuality was edited so that the only hint of his persuasion was that he charged less money for music lessons for male characters than female ones.
The censorship has now stopped thanks to the implementation of ‘mature’ classifications and many Japanese RPGs feature androgynous characters, whose sexuality – and often gender – is hard to determine. Flea in the Chrono Trigger series is one obvious example – he dresses like a girl (in Chrono Cross wearing a pink and white school-girl style outfit) but is apparently male. Even the family-friendly Zelda series has Tingle - a 34 year old man-child who wants nothing more in the world than to be a fairy. He’s annoying and ugly but obviously popular enough to appear in several Zelda games since making his debut on the N64’s Majora’s Mask in 2000.
It took French publisher Ubisoft to give a Japanese RPGs an openly gay character. In Enchanted Arms (Xbox360/PS3) one of the main characters, Makoto, is clearly gay and in love with fellow character Toya. In fact, his character bio makes no bones about it - “Makoto is openly gay and his friends like to call him “yellow otomegokoro”. Otomegokoro translates as “girl’s feeling, maiden’s mind”. While Makoto follows the ‘girly’ gay stereotype at least he’s not hiding who he is under a cloak of androgyny and asexuality.
In Western RPGs, Juhani from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is perhaps the first openly lesbian character – and also the first gay character in the Star Wars ‘universe’. When first meeting Juhani, you have the option of either killing her, or beating her and convincing her to return to the Jedi order. If you choose to kill her, a female Jedi at the temple screams at you for murdering her beloved - saying that she and Juhani spent many nights under the stars together. Later, that female Jedi will attempt to murder you for what you did to her lover. Lesson: you interfere with lesbian love at your peril.
Research shows more and more women are playing games but hardcore gamers are still predominantly male, so when lesbians have surfaced in games they have mainly been used to titillate males, such as in Outlaw Golf 2 and Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude.
Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix, a survival horror released on PlayStation in 2001, did feature main character Hana in a lesbian relationship with a fellow character and the PR/advertising pushed the sexy cel-shaded girl-on-girl angle. However the game’s director Stan Liu stated in several interviews that Hana was not lesbian, but bisexual – he told Game Critics: “Once and for all, let me set the record straight. Hana is not a lesbian! She likes men... and she likes women. Who she chooses to go to bed with at the end of the day is not a big deal!”
And it’s bisexuality where the closet door has been easing open in recent years. You could flirt with both male and female characters in Fable – although many more females will respond to your attention than males - and in RPG Mass Effect you can sleep with an androgynous alien whether you are playing a male or female character.
One of the world’s biggest selling game series, The Sims, also allows for same-sex action if the player wants to swing that way. In fact, a 2001 US TV commercial for The Sims actually featured an attractive man in a nightclub flirting with a woman, until he is suddenly drawn to another attractive man and after a brief pause agrees to date him. This is perhaps the only time the games industry has made any attempt to explicitly go after the gay gamer dollar.
In Rockstar's Bully/Canis Canem Edit the game's central character Jimmy Hopkins can be bisexual (if the player so chooses) and kiss both males and females in order to regain health. All of these characters will, if romanced, assist Jimmy in fighting. One of the female characters in the game alludes to Jimmy's 'experimentation' with boys in a cut scene and in the game’s Scholarship Edition, Rockstar added an achievement award called "Over the Rainbow", which is unlocked by Jimmy kissing a boy 20 times.
So can we expect Rockstar to continue to innovate with its biggest franchise Grand Theft Auto? Will the next GTA feature the ability to have sex with male prostitutes as well as female, or have boyfriends as well as girlfriends? And after choosing an African-American thug hero in GTA: San Andreas and an Eastern European war veteran in GTA4 could Rockstar make an even bigger call and make the next GTA central character – whether DLC or retail release – a non-stereotypical gay man or woman?
We would have thought that the second option seemed unlikely, even for a ‘boundary-pushing’ developer such as Rockstar – but The Sims and Bully/Canis Canem Edit prove that same-sex attraction can be successfully, and non-controversially, included in gaming. Thus today's announcement that the second instalment of GTA's DLC will have a narrative that revolves around glam nightclub owner Gay Tony, although players will control his assistant Luis Lopes, is sure to stir a lot of debate.
While little is known about the game at this point, the disco-themed new GTA logo and title choice suggest that the mighty developer will most certainly be tackling the notion of homosexuality as core to game narrative in a major western game release. Will it be more Studio 54 than Brokeback Mountain we cannot say, however, we do know that Rockstar's dedication to research and deep understanding of the extremes of western culture could signal it as the most important release of the year.
Even if gaming's equivalent of Brokeback Mountain may still be years away, it seems likely that bisexuality will play more of a role in the future of games, allowing gay gamers to feel more comfortable and not excluded from the action. The closet door is ajar after all, will Rockstar open it?
Article (http://www.gameplayer.com.au/gp_documents/GTAIVGay.aspx?Page=1)
An intresting article :thumbs:
In the past 30 years gays and lesbians have broken out of the closet in spectacular style. Before the 1980s it was hard to find any openly gay characters in popular entertainment, but in the last 10-15 years it has been hard to avoid homosexuals in films and on TV. From Academy Award winning films such as Brokeback Mountain and Milk - not forgetting one of Australia’s most popular films Priscilla: Queen of the Desert - to prime-time TV shows such as Will & Grace, gays are here, they’re happily queer and everyone else is getting used to it. However in gaming it seems the closet door is still closed.
No one is expecting games to suddenly start showing sodomy in a tent, Brokeback Mountain style – game publishers still have issues depicting heterosexual sex scenes (check out Are Gamers Scared of Sex? for more) – but where is the gay video game hero? Or strong supporting characters? They are very hard to find, just as they were in films and TV before the 1980s. Bisexuality is starting to be seen - or at least accessed if a player is looking for it - but unlike other entertainment forms, games have not joined the 21st century by displaying diversity in human sexuality.
Japanese games have long featured minor gay characters – almost always flamboyant cross-dressers and fitting the ‘girly’ gay cliché – but in the 1980s and 1990s these characters were censored or changed for a Western release. The original Street Fighter character Eagle, who also appears in Capcom vs. SNK 2, was gay but several of his quotes obviously displaying his orientation were taken out for the game’s release outside of Japan – and Eagle didn’t make the cut for the rest of the Street Fighter series.
In 1988, Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. 2 featured a mini-boss named Birdo who was described in the Japanese instruction manual as thinking he was a girl and wanting to be called "Birdetta" – but this was changed for release outside Japan. In 1994 Sega’s Streets of Rage 3 was altered for Western release, removing a gay boss named Ash (distinguished by his Village People style fashion) and replacing him with a straight character named Shiva. Sega also removed minor gay and transgender characters from Final Fight and in RPG Phantasy Star II, a helpful town's musician's homosexuality was edited so that the only hint of his persuasion was that he charged less money for music lessons for male characters than female ones.
The censorship has now stopped thanks to the implementation of ‘mature’ classifications and many Japanese RPGs feature androgynous characters, whose sexuality – and often gender – is hard to determine. Flea in the Chrono Trigger series is one obvious example – he dresses like a girl (in Chrono Cross wearing a pink and white school-girl style outfit) but is apparently male. Even the family-friendly Zelda series has Tingle - a 34 year old man-child who wants nothing more in the world than to be a fairy. He’s annoying and ugly but obviously popular enough to appear in several Zelda games since making his debut on the N64’s Majora’s Mask in 2000.
It took French publisher Ubisoft to give a Japanese RPGs an openly gay character. In Enchanted Arms (Xbox360/PS3) one of the main characters, Makoto, is clearly gay and in love with fellow character Toya. In fact, his character bio makes no bones about it - “Makoto is openly gay and his friends like to call him “yellow otomegokoro”. Otomegokoro translates as “girl’s feeling, maiden’s mind”. While Makoto follows the ‘girly’ gay stereotype at least he’s not hiding who he is under a cloak of androgyny and asexuality.
In Western RPGs, Juhani from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is perhaps the first openly lesbian character – and also the first gay character in the Star Wars ‘universe’. When first meeting Juhani, you have the option of either killing her, or beating her and convincing her to return to the Jedi order. If you choose to kill her, a female Jedi at the temple screams at you for murdering her beloved - saying that she and Juhani spent many nights under the stars together. Later, that female Jedi will attempt to murder you for what you did to her lover. Lesson: you interfere with lesbian love at your peril.
Research shows more and more women are playing games but hardcore gamers are still predominantly male, so when lesbians have surfaced in games they have mainly been used to titillate males, such as in Outlaw Golf 2 and Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude.
Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix, a survival horror released on PlayStation in 2001, did feature main character Hana in a lesbian relationship with a fellow character and the PR/advertising pushed the sexy cel-shaded girl-on-girl angle. However the game’s director Stan Liu stated in several interviews that Hana was not lesbian, but bisexual – he told Game Critics: “Once and for all, let me set the record straight. Hana is not a lesbian! She likes men... and she likes women. Who she chooses to go to bed with at the end of the day is not a big deal!”
And it’s bisexuality where the closet door has been easing open in recent years. You could flirt with both male and female characters in Fable – although many more females will respond to your attention than males - and in RPG Mass Effect you can sleep with an androgynous alien whether you are playing a male or female character.
One of the world’s biggest selling game series, The Sims, also allows for same-sex action if the player wants to swing that way. In fact, a 2001 US TV commercial for The Sims actually featured an attractive man in a nightclub flirting with a woman, until he is suddenly drawn to another attractive man and after a brief pause agrees to date him. This is perhaps the only time the games industry has made any attempt to explicitly go after the gay gamer dollar.
In Rockstar's Bully/Canis Canem Edit the game's central character Jimmy Hopkins can be bisexual (if the player so chooses) and kiss both males and females in order to regain health. All of these characters will, if romanced, assist Jimmy in fighting. One of the female characters in the game alludes to Jimmy's 'experimentation' with boys in a cut scene and in the game’s Scholarship Edition, Rockstar added an achievement award called "Over the Rainbow", which is unlocked by Jimmy kissing a boy 20 times.
So can we expect Rockstar to continue to innovate with its biggest franchise Grand Theft Auto? Will the next GTA feature the ability to have sex with male prostitutes as well as female, or have boyfriends as well as girlfriends? And after choosing an African-American thug hero in GTA: San Andreas and an Eastern European war veteran in GTA4 could Rockstar make an even bigger call and make the next GTA central character – whether DLC or retail release – a non-stereotypical gay man or woman?
We would have thought that the second option seemed unlikely, even for a ‘boundary-pushing’ developer such as Rockstar – but The Sims and Bully/Canis Canem Edit prove that same-sex attraction can be successfully, and non-controversially, included in gaming. Thus today's announcement that the second instalment of GTA's DLC will have a narrative that revolves around glam nightclub owner Gay Tony, although players will control his assistant Luis Lopes, is sure to stir a lot of debate.
While little is known about the game at this point, the disco-themed new GTA logo and title choice suggest that the mighty developer will most certainly be tackling the notion of homosexuality as core to game narrative in a major western game release. Will it be more Studio 54 than Brokeback Mountain we cannot say, however, we do know that Rockstar's dedication to research and deep understanding of the extremes of western culture could signal it as the most important release of the year.
Even if gaming's equivalent of Brokeback Mountain may still be years away, it seems likely that bisexuality will play more of a role in the future of games, allowing gay gamers to feel more comfortable and not excluded from the action. The closet door is ajar after all, will Rockstar open it?
Article (http://www.gameplayer.com.au/gp_documents/GTAIVGay.aspx?Page=1)
An intresting article :thumbs: