Time to Put the “Keep Your Politics Out of My Games” Fallacy To Bed

Another week, another childish gaming controversy so silly it would have been taken as satire ten years ago. Right on the heels of Blizzard changing a female character’s victory pose in Overwatch from a classic over-the-shoulder gun pose that tends to show one’s backside as a matter of course to a reproduction of a classic pin-up pose in profile (which also has booty, go figure) as a response to complaints about sexualization and the usual over-the-top reactions to those complaints came the Baldur’s Gate expansion, Siege of Dragonspear, which traumatized some gamers with an extremely brief optional exchange in which a non-player character mentions being transgender.

I know, right? A transgender person in popular media in 2016? Simply terrifying. The real world suddenly seems so big and scary now that a video game world filled with monsters and bizarre non-humanoid sentient races also has stuff from real life. I, for one, am simply mortified. Oh, wait. No. I actually can’t imagine a single thing in the world that would bother me less. Why is it people care again?

Good job, Mizhena, you just ruined an entire game with four sentences. The industry will never recover from this travesty of writing.

Oh, right. The infamous “SJW shit” being shoehorned in. And written by an honest-to-goodness female, no less. NOW I’m pissed! Who are these female creatures to create and contribute to MY video games? Do they not realize how hard it is for me to get out my bed to play the game they worked to make and have to see people representative of the the world I live in who aren’t me? Some people just have no empathy.

In all seriousness, though, the primary complaint among the sayers of nay is an objection to the writer, Amber Scott, daring to put her own thoughts, feelings, and political leanings into her art. Or as they so clichely put it, “keep your politics out of my games”, as though the thought of politics in entertainment is some new thing just now gaining traction among radical thinkers.

Well, that’s a load of bullshit. I probably don’t have to point out that any statement that begins with “I have nothing against [race/gender/sexual preference/etc.] but….” is an inevitable cringe factory and has no purpose being in anything claiming to be an objective review, but just in case, humor me while I put this ridiculousness in a shallow grave, relieve myself upon it, and be done with it. You know, just in case you aren’t aware of how ridiculous this idea is.

Let’s just assume that the very existence of an individual of any given minority class in a work of fiction even qualifies as a political statement. Even if that extremely flimsy assumption were universally accepted truth (and if we’re accepting that then we’re also accepting the pseudo-feminist assertions that Donkey Kong is a celebration of patriarchal oppression since all things are now apparently political statements), it’s entirely beside the point. The harsh, inescapable truth is that personal politics always have and always will be an integral ingredient of any and every form of art. If you can’t divorce from your own biases enough to get over that fact, then you are divorcing yourself from a genuine appreciation of the finer things in entertainment. This is as true of Gamergaters as it is of Anita Sarkeesian.

White Knight alert! Turns out the entire fantasy gaming genre was just a subterfuge for the SJW revolution from the get-go. #GGTruth

A Christmas Carol? Anti-capitalist tripe. Portal? A post-feminist parable. Freebird? Faux-sentimental ode to male non-commitment. Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Vegetarian propaganda. Bioshock? Totally jealous of Ayn Rand. Call of Cthulhu? Born of xenophobia. X-Men? Minority oppression much? Layla? Muh sanctity of marriage. Popular art and fiction of every type are fueled by human thoughts, feelings, and values. In other words: politics.

Not a lot of great works ever come into being without their creators putting their own heart and soul into them. Bob Dylan? George Orwell? Stanley Kubrick? Alan Moore? Joss Whedon? Johnny Cash? Would we know any of these people’s names if they didn’t create the things they wanted to see created from their own point of view, off-kilter political values and all?

I believe that some day, gaming developers will earn their place in popular culture among the legends of cinema, literature, television, and music, but only if we let them. It’s time for gamers of all stripes to recognize that whether or not you agree with the thoughts being expressed has no relevance to the value of the work itself. These expressions themselves are a vital part of what separates true art from the chaotic scribblings of toddlers.

So don’t go telling people with a straight face that artists shouldn’t be able to put the things they want to see into their creations. It’s a bad look for an adult. And gods help you if you can say something like that out of one side of your mouth while the other side claims to be anti-censorship. Point is: if an artist can put a shot of a girl’s ass into a video game, the same rights are afforded to a writer who wants to create a transgender character. You can’t have freedom for what you like AND freedom from what everybody else likes at the same time. It’s a two-way street.

When Ms. Scott was asked about her reasoning for putting a transgender character in the game, her response included the following statement: “I consciously add as much diversity as I can to my writing and I don’t care if people think that’s “forced” or fake. I find choosing to write from a straight default just as artificial. I’m happy to be an SJW and I hope to write many Social Justice Games in the future that reach as many different types of people as possible. Everyone should get a chance to see themselves reflected in pop culture.”

Remember all of those bad reviews for Skyrim carrying on about guards blatantly screaming disabled veteran rhetoric about how they used to be an adventurer ruining the entire game? Me neither.

As hard as it is to take anybody who uses the term “Social Justice” unironically (and as a proper noun, no less) completely seriously, you can at least admire the honesty there. If you’re going to create or contribute, do it unapologetically and openly or don’t do it at all. Honesty equals integrity.

On the other hand, if you’re saying you don’t have anything against LGBT people, but you express offense when a single one shows up in a video game you are playing, then there’s not a person alive who isn’t going to know you’re full of shit. Ditto if you claim to respect women and yet the only people in the gaming industry you feel the need to criticize this excessively happen to all be women in spite of the fact that they make up less than a quarter of the developer workforce.

So sorry, guys: no safe space for you. Reality is a thing and you can’t keep it out forever. Video games are increasing in both sophistication and diversity and no amount of poorly thought out Steam and Metacritic “reviews” that are nothing but semi-coherent off-topic rants barely fit for a message board are going to hold back that tide. Maybe if you speak honestly instead of making up fictional reasons why you’re offended, they’ll put trigger warnings in so your delicate sensibilities can remain unoffended. Probably not, though.

If we want games to continue to progress the worlds of interactive fiction and art to match and exceed other mediums, we need to give the developers the freedom to put themselves into their work without fear, and to do that we need to treat the medium and its creators with the same respect we want for ourselves and learn to tell the difference between our own problems and somebody else’s.

Criticism is fine, but it needs to be warranted and “keep your politics out of my game” is not a valid criticism or request any more than “stop liking things I don’t like” is. We all have our own preferences and the right and ability to indulge them, but we have neither the right nor ability to alter anybody else’s preferences and we need to recognize that and learn the difference between actually saying something and just making noise. And lately, gamers haven’t been saying much but they’ve been making a lot of noise.

ACTUALLY, IT’S ABOUT TRANGENDERISM IN GAMES JOURNALISM!

Video games are fun for everyone, all sorts of people like to play them, and it’s a natural progression that as the means to create deeper worlds and characters would bring, you know, more depth. That means more nuanced ideas, more diverse characters, and more stretching of boundaries of all sorts.

If you’re going to let a little thing like traditional gender roles from the 1950’s hold back your enjoyment of gaming, then I wonder what kind of gamer you are. Getting past obstacles is our stock and trade, and as far as dilemmas go getting over fictional representations of transgenderism in fantasy worlds in order to enjoy a video game is no Dark Souls or Battletoads. When one approach doesn’t work, we try another and another until we find one that does, and this nonsense simply is not working. So let’s get past this level and move on to the next, yeah?  

Four Rules for Sex-Positive Gaming

Once again, it’s time for us to discuss the representation of sex in video games. As the average gamer age keeps gets older with more and more games being designed with adults in mind, and as gaming strives to find its place next to film, television, and music in the mainstream with more mature subject matter, we are probably going to start seeing more and more sexual situations in our video games.

In the past, this has been a bit of a sore subject, largely due to the public’s bizarre notion that any amount of horrific violence is good times for all ages, but a little bit of virtual lovin’ is going to warp the fragile minds of our children. Here in the present, it’s still a sore subject, but the focus has turned towards the inequity present in gaming’s roots as a pastime for young males. That is to say that positive non-hetero, non-male representation in these situations is often lacking.

With consensual sex being the pleasurable polar opposite to the unpleasantness of violence on the scale of real life social interactions, it’s baffling that in the virtual realm the roles have somehow been reversed with sex being seen as unpleasant and senseless violence a preferable pastime. But that’s a discussion for another time.

When I say “sex-positive gaming” I mean normalizing sex in a manner that portrays sexuality in a light that is desirable and/or relatable for mature adults within video games. So constant mindless barrages of bouncing anime girl boobs in your face and naked slave girls chained to walls desperate to show their gratitude to your big strong hero: not the object.

Contrary to popular online opinion, the answer is not to cover up all female characters in burkas and refuse to ever show them in a manner that could be construed as attractive or desirable lest an admiring male gaze shall be upon them. If people didn’t sexualize one another, none of us would even be here. Sexuality is the most natural possible thing, so let’s get out of the habit of demonizing it in the name of impressing internet strangers with all of the intellectual delicacy of Donald Trump and Hulk Hogan discussing race relations.

Instead, let’s embrace this biological/emotional necessity and genuinely delightful part of the human experience by learning to make games that celebrate sex as a (nearly) universal human experience while respecting those involved at the same time. These are the rules gaming needs to get on board with if it’s going to wash off the sleazy sheen of sexism and push the medium forward into the present.

Damn. There goes the sancity of marriage…Bye sanctity!

Be All-Inclusive

Once upon a time, girls played with dolls and toy ponies, boys played with military action figures and video games, and straight people assumed homosexuals were just doing it to piss God off. But these days grown men are openly worshiping My Little Pony, gay marriage is the law of the land, and women are carving out their section of the gaming market.

In order to make gaming’s transition from cartoonish violence for young boys to respected interactive storytelling art form, we can’t get by servicing only vanilla preferences. We’re definitely seeing a lot more diverse LGBT representation in modern games than back in the day when Final Fight was pointing out that the women you were beating to death were transgender, so the inevitable march of social progress is not passing us by, but we’ve yet to see it catch on the way it has in film, music, and television so there’s still miles to go. BioWare has arguably made more strides than anyone else in the modern era and The Sims series normalized same-sex relationships years ago but most devs haven’t jumped onto that bandwagon just yet.

That’s not to say that every game needs homosexual romances and a transgender protagonist, but with interactive entertainment becoming increasingly immersive and offering players more and more options and more realistic and complete worlds to explore, it’s important that companies keep in mind that gaming can and should be for everyone and as such, there should be representations that reflect the diverse world we live in. That’s not “SJW shit”, that’s just properly servicing your customers. And in the spirit of eliminating long-standing gamer stereotypes…

Who even does that?

Know Where the Line Between Tongue-In-Cheek and Creepy Is

Video games can be a great way to enjoy the ridiculous and sublime in ways that wouldn’t really be advisable in real life, but are fun in digital form. The occasional ironic, self-aware suggestive pose or sex-tinged satire is good times, but sometimes when it’s slammed into your face often enough, the ironic can quickly become earnest and gamers can seem like slavering creeps to anybody unfamiliar with these tropes.

Bayonetta’s sex kitten act is an ironic caricature right down to her oral fixation and is juxtaposed with her insanely ass-kicking personality to strike the right balance of having and eating cake. On the other hand, taking a character like Samus Aran, a Master Chief-like character most recognizable in her awesome power armour, and portraying her more and more in her skin-tight Zero Suit (as in “zero left to the imagination”) is definitely altering her image for the worst. As a game-ending slice of eye candy: good times. As her new default appearance begging to be leered at: unnecessary and distracting. Or taking the female characters of Dead or Alive and crafting an entire subseries based around collecting increasingly skimpy swimsuits, participating in extra-bouncy minigames, and gawking at them while they sunbathe. Really, gaming?

It’s cool to have a giggle at the occasional moe character or sex bomb presentation complete with gratuitous booty shot, but that should never be a constant thing. When a joke is repeated too often, it ceases being funny and just becomes an annoying trope at best and downright creepy at worst. And if we want more people to respect gaming as a medium and be willing to give it a try, we need to tone it down a little and grow up a bit. Which brings us to our next point…

So let me get this straight: is the entire game hot girls fighting or making out with each other?

Portion Control is a Must

We humans do enjoy a bit of eye candy, but just like regular candy, it’s not healthy to gorge yourself. I’m a big fan of exploitation films, but I’m not really going to enjoy a film that is just wall-to-wall T&A and genre cliches. Compare late night Cinemax to old Roger Corman movies, for example. One is a fun romp of sex, violence, and foul language and the other is just fap material for desperate people with no internet.

Don’t populate an entire game with nothing but scantily-clad female stereotypes moaning and flashing their panties all the time if you don’t want to look like a goon. Just like a movie can’t get away with 20 minute fake sex scenes and be taken seriously even as light entertainment, gaming needs to learn that a constant bombardment of sexual imagery limits its appeal and murders any attempt at genuine character development and atmosphere.

And just like in real life, half the fun of sex is in the anticipation and the spontaneity of the moment. Only an adolescent should feel the need to constantly stuff their eyes with cleavage and yoga pants. A little mystery and a few surprises beat constant in-your-face sexuality any day. Even if your only opposite sex interactions are with your 2D waifus, it’s got to feel a little condescending to have them constantly set on ten. Dial it back a little and make the characters a little more believable, yeah? And while we’re at it, let’s pollinate our minds with the following mantra…

Got something for everyone.

Equality, Equality, Equality

You may have noticed that I’m focusing on female representations here. Well, name me a mainstream game where men are portrayed as hyper-sexualized….. that’s right, keep thinking. Again, I’m not against sexualizing some characters. We’ve got no shortage of real live people who enjoy playing up their own sexuality and there’s nothing wrong with representing those people in-game. And as much as some female internet dwellers may pretend to be above such base vulgarities as sex appeal, we’ve all seen Fifty Shades of Grey and Magic Mike‘s sales numbers. Money doesn’t lie.

Speaking of which, Hollywood films and network television know the value of a nice six pack, as evidenced by any number of handsome male leads whipping their shirts off because why the hell not. And yeah, the ladies like. So where you at, gaming? Japan has its otome, but that niche is a tiny one stateside with all of Hakuoki: Stories of the Shinsengumi and Hatoful Boyfriend to choose from on consoles. Plus, women (and men who swing that way) shouldn’t have to settle for visual novels about dating pigeons to get themselves some interactive romance. Game devs should want to tap into this market, and as male gamers we should want the women in our lives to love gaming as much as we do, if nothing else. There isn’t really a downside here.

One approach to a sex-positive game could be found in Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed. While it definitely toes the line between funny and creepy (what with the combat being based around publicly stripping clothing off of your foes and all), it does do a pretty good job of being equally pervy towards its male and female characters with its tongue lodged firmly in its cheek. It both celebrates and pokes fun at the ridiculous images that otaku/gamer culture puts out in the name of adolescent fantasy and give both male and female players ample opportunity to let their freaky geek flags fly in a judgement-free environment. If you want to put a wallpaper of a blushing elderly man in his underpants as your in-game cell phone wallpaper, get on with yourself. You may not get another opportunity.

And really, that’s the whole issue with sex in gaming. It’s been too one-sided for too long and it’s understandable that women would want in and desire more and better content for themselves in the games. Just like a lot of men fear an imaginary dystopian future where every game is aimed at women -which will never happen since the male base is extremely established and going nowhere- a lot of women are hesitant at best to support an industry where nearly every single game is aimed squarely at men. It will cost us almost nothing to make gaming better for everyone, and the upside is massive. Once we clear that hurdle, maybe, just maybe, we can all stop being so uptight about sexuality in video games and create an environment where more of the mature, sex-positive games we as adults deserve to play can get made.