this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Gaming

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How bisexuality changed video games (www.youtube.com)
submitted 1 year ago by elfpie@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org
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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.

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[–] elfpie@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] dewin@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Imagining a different sexuality is probably the same.

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.