Originally published in the Summer Issue 2020.
Recently I was playing a game called A Fold Apart. It is a romance game, but what was striking to me about the game was its use of gender. Choosing one’s gender in a game is not a novel feature by any means, however A Fold Apart is slightly unusual in that it is not a game about creating a character or defining the avatar’s personality. The game’s two central actors are entirely pre-determined characters, the gender of which being one of the few decisions the player gets to make. This shows A Fold Apart employing a narrative device that is not available to other mediums, and it left me asking, when is gender of a character, or the sexual orientation of a character, relevant to a story, and if it is not, should designers let players define it themselves?
For context A Fold Apart is a game about two lovers, one of whom must move far away for work. The game chronicles their conversations via text message and their inner thoughts. The story is not an unfamiliar one, but it is differentiated by your ability to pick the gender of either character. Either both can be men, both women, or a man and a woman. What’s more, if you choose the straight pair either character can be either a man or a woman. This choice has very little effect if any on the narrative from what I can discern. This raises the question, why give the player the choice in that case? Personally, I think the choice was made to give the player the ability to tailor the story to be more individually resonant. If you are a man in a relationship with a man, it may be easier to relate this story to your own, equally if you are a woman who moved away from a partner for work reasons, you may like to see the game reflect that. So, is this the future of video game storytelling? Will all characters have a selectable gender and sexual orientation in the future? Well, it may be more complicated than that.
One possible caveat with this approach is players being pushed to play as a character to whom they feel they cannot directly relate. i.e a man playing as a woman. There is evidence to suggest that this is not the case, however, often players do not sit down with a game to play as themselves. A study conducted by the psychology department of Middlesex University found that in the first Dragon Age game 30% of men played as a woman and 10% of women played as a man. While not practiced by the majority of players, there are a sizable number of players that play as a different gender, and for various reasons. Whether a safe space to experiment with how one presents gender-wise or an exercise in empathy, there are numerous reasons a player may not wish to play as the gender they identify as. That being said, this is not a practice engaged in by the majority of players. Furthermore, there is a clear disparity between the proportions of people choosing to play as the opposite gender in games. A possible reason for women playing as men may be what has been dubbed the “Lara phenomenon” after Tomb Raider heroine Lara Croft. In a 2007 paper on the Lara phenomenon, researchers Jeroen Jansz and Raynel G. Martis noted that:
“The massive popularity of female protagonist Lara Croft ever since the release of the first Tomb Raider game in 1996 seems to have paved the way for a woman who contrasts the dominant stereotype”.
The majority of older video games featured men in the role of protagonists and many depicted kidnapped women as the central actor’s driving motivation, such as many entries in the long-running Super Mario series. While strides have been made to account for and ameliorate historical gender balance of video game protagonists may lead more players to play as women as a point of novelty, since many of the games they play may feature male protagonists.
A classic game that leaned into this expectation was 1986’s Metroid. The English language game manual said of protagonist Samus Aran “He is the greatest of all the space hunters”. This pronoun is also used in the Japanese version of the manual, which as noted in a 2013 blog post by Clyde Mandeline, rarely uses pronouns once the identity of the person has been discerned. As such, the use of this pronoun was very intentional. This is significant because Samus wears a robotic suit for the majority of the game only revealing after the game that she was a woman the entire time. The developers knew that players would assume the person in the robot suit was a man and that the revelation would be surprising, since the idea of a woman protagonist in a game was not the norm. While Samus has gone on to be seen as a strong female character, I will not unconditionally congratulate Metroid as the game did feature a mechanic whereby the more quickly the presumed male heterosexual player completes the game within a certain time limit, Samus will appear in a skimpier outfit. This sexualization of Samus persisted through many entries in the series undercutting the game’s feminist themes.
In spite of this, many fans of the game do still see Samus as representing empowerment. The character’s importance came to the forefront when 2010’s Metroid Other M, among other criticisms, was seen as stripping agency from Samus. Samus took orders from the male commander Adam Malkovich. This disappointment would have been nowhere near as prevalent if Samus’ womanhood were not a powerful artistic statement in 1986. I bring this up to show that a certain character’s gender identity informs how they are interpreted in a given cultural context. The same goes for sexual orientation, 2013’s Gone Home is an archaeological narrative game where the point of view character Katie learns of her sister Sam’s conflict with her parents while Katie has been away at college. This conflict stems from the parents not supporting Sam’s relationship with her girlfriend Lonnie. Gone Home’s coming out narrative simply would not make any sense if the player could choose Sam’s sexual orientation. Though it should be noted that the player’s position in the story as an onlooker means the player had no agency in the story to begin with, with the player assuming the role of a Lockwood rather than a Heathcliff.
For my final point, I must return to A Fold Apart. The reason the game can so easily implement gender choice is due to the game’s simple art style and lack of voice acting. The cost of implementing this feature is much greater for games that strive for complex, photorealistic graphics. This cost would only be compounded by having to hire multiple voice actors. This is not to say that it is impossible; games such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey offer this choice and photorealistic graphics, and an important aspect of the Mass Effect games is the player’s ability to roleplay as different gendered versions of a single character with whatever sexual orientation the player wishes. It is understandable that many studios may want to make the choice for the player however, especially with the ballooning budgets of blockbuster games.
I do think there is scope for more games to allow the player to choose the gender and sexual orientation of their character, but designers still have many reasons to make that choice for themselves, either for cost or narrative related reasons.
