Queer Tropes – Feminist Frequency

Queer Tropes vs Video Games: Video Games’ Relationship Status – It’s Complicated

Ebony Adams — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 16:00:31 +0000

In this installment, we examine the complex history of gay relationships in games, from Fallout 2 in 1998 to much more recent games like Dream Daddy and The Last of Us: Left Behind. For a long time, even those rare games that included any opportunities at all for players to pursue queer romance or sex options often cordoned off that content like something that needed to be carefully quarantined, requiring players to make a series of specific choices in order to access it, even as those same games frequently put heterosexual content front and center. Narrative and gameplay mechanics have regularly been used as tools to normalize straight relationships while othering or demonizing queer ones, but a relatively recent wave of games that center gay relationships demonstrates how games can serve to normalize and celebrate queer love as well.

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Queer Tropes vs Video Games: Are You Gay or Just Coded That Way

Ebony Adams — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 16:00:28 +0000

Video games have inherited a thing or two from the movies, including a troubling tendency to equate being gay with being evil. From The Legend of Zelda’s most flamboyant antagonist to a sadistic butch lesbian psychopath in Dead Rising to a murderous “crossdressing freak” in Resident Evil, we take you on a guided tour of gaming’s queer-coded villains, and look at the insidious ways that heroism and virtue are often equated with heterosexuality and gender conformity, while homosexuality and gender nonconformity are depicted as direct cousins of chaos, instability, and destruction.

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Queer Tropes vs Video Games: Press ‘B’ To Hate Gay People

Ebony Adams — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 16:00:09 +0000

Throughout much of game history, from early Leisure Suit Larry adventures to the latest installment of Grand Theft Auto, gay and trans characters were rarely depicted at all except to serve as cheap punchlines, perpetuating harmful stereotypes in the process. Sadly, it’s still not unheard of for queer characters to be nothing but objects of ridicule. In this episode, we explore the homophobia and transphobia that has dominated games from the text adventures of the early 1980s to some of the biggest blockbusters of recent years. We also address why “If you don’t like it, don’t play it” is not a reasonable response to these issues, and we look at some games that represent queer characters in more positive ways.

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