The summer of 2017 brought with it one of the more surprising video game success stories
of recent years in the form of the dating sim Dream Daddy.
Widely praised as a refreshing take on the genre, Dream Daddy not only challenged expectations
of what a queer game could look like; with its success among queer and straight players
alike, it also upended long-standing beliefs about what players themselves might want.
Some games with romance elements largely reduce romantic interactions to a series of simple
dialogue choices or gift exchanges in which the correct input brings you one step closer
to a sex cutscene or implied off-camera sexual encounter, with that sex presented as the
culmination and thus the ultimate goal of all your interactions with the other person.
Of course, to state the obvious, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with sexual desire
or sexual activity, but still, this cold, transactional model for human relationships
can seem a little reductive and dehumanizing.
I mean, no matter what, we shouldn’t view our fellow human beings as something that
just provides sex to us in response to our saying and doing things calculated to produce
that specific result, though needless to say, some men view women in exactly that way.
Now, of course it’s possible for a player to approach Dream Daddy with the mindset of
just wanting to have sex with as many hot dads as possible, and hey, again, there’s
absolutely nothing inherently wrong with that.
But refreshingly, Dream Daddy pushes back against one’s tendency to view a gaming
romance in this way by making its characters so interesting and three-dimensional that
you want to spend time with them and get to know them, not just in the hopes of ultimately
having sex with them, but also just for the sake of spending time with them and getting
to know them!
They may be hot, they may, on some level, be objects of desire, but they’re always
also more than that; they’re men with their own interesting lives, their own problems,
their own relationships with their own kids, all of which the game takes pains to establish
and develop.
As a result, all the sexual tension and shameless flirting one wants from a dating sim coexists
here alongside measured commentary about emotional vulnerability and healthy interpersonal communication.
As you get invested in these other dads, you begin to care about their lives as well as
your character’s own, and you find yourself wanting to make choices not just for your
own character’s benefit, but also for the benefit of the dad or dads you’re trying
to romance or just build friendships with.
Also, the freedom to design your own character allows players to feel a connection to the
game’s protagonist, and bisexual and trans identities are represented in addition to
cis and gay identities.
Your character can be a trans man who wears a binder, and at the beginning of the game,
players can choose whether their late partner was a man or a woman, while some of the other
dads you meet currently have or have previously had partners of different genders as well.
Refreshingly, none of this is really represented as a source of anxiety for the dads; rather,
it is treated as a normal facet of everyday life.
Agonizing over sexuality and sexual orientation is not a focal point.
These are simply queer people who have had different relationships with their own difficulties
just like anyone else.
"Hi. I don't know."
For all of its focus on romance, Dream Daddy is also truly a game about, well, being a
dad.
Beyond the player’s central relationship with their own daughter Amanda, you also get
to learn about the other dads and their children.
Through the development of all those relationships, , the player is invited into an emotionally
rich experience of the joys and difficulties of “dadding.”
Dream Daddy not only offers up a richer experience of dating and relationship building than so
many other games.
By being a commercially successful game that centers fully realized queer characters and
queer narratives, Dream Daddy also undermines the unfortunately common belief that the mainstream
gaming community is not ready for explicitly queer games.
Through Dream Daddy, queer and straight players alike are given a gaming experience in which
queerness isn’t othered, presented as strange or gross or immoral.
Instead, here we see queer relationships that are complex and messy and fun and meaningful,
not unlike the straight relationships that so much media has centered and celebrated
for so long.
Now, if it feels like we just spent a lot of time on Dream Daddy, well, that’s because
unfortunately the fact that it incorporates queer relationships into gameplay in a way
that treats those relationships with respect makes it pretty rare.
I mean, look: straight relationships are central to the narratives and identities of so many
games and characters from throughout gaming history.
From Mario’s perpetual efforts to rescue Princess Peach to Nathan Drake’s romancing
of various women on his adventures to men like Max Payne and Kratos seeking vengeance
for their dead wives, and countless examples in between, straight identity and sexuality
has been a non-optional, inescapable aspect of thousands of games.
However, for a long time, games have hardly acknowledged queer relationships and identities
at all, except to ridicule them, and when they have been present, they’ve largely
been treated as a detour, an option quarantined on the side that you have to deliberately
seek out, rather than something that players simply have to accept and experience if they
want to play a particular game.
This structure contributes to the larger cultural perception that straight relationships are
standard, while queer relationships are, if anything, the result of veering off of the
standard path, when in truth, queer relationships ARE standard for the millions of people around
the world who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
Now let’s take a look at a few of the small handful of games that did offer homosexuality
as any kind of option during the 90s and early 2000s.
The RPG Fallout 2 was released in 1998, and it offers a few notable options for same-sex
pairings.
The hero’s quest quickly leads him or her to a bathhouse, where the player can choose
to solicit the services of male or female sex workers, regardless of their avatar’s
gender.
Male or female protagonists can also date Miss Kitty, the owner of the Cat’s Paw brothel,
if their charisma and intelligence stats are high enough.
And while exploring the town of Mordoc, the player character, regardless of gender, can
choose to have sex with either the son or daughter of the town’s slaughterhouse owner
Grisham.
After having sex, Grisham forces the player to marry whichever child they chose.
Violently coerced into the situation though the protagonist might be, this is considered
by some to be the first instance of same-sex marriage in a video game.
However, these options in Fallout 2 underscore a longstanding trend in games to handle queerness
as simply a matter of who someone wants to have sex with at any given moment, ignoring
more complex notions of sexual identities and sexual cultures.
Now, Fallout 2, as an individual game, treats straight relationships and sex in much the
same way it treats gay relationships and sex, so the problem here isn’t so much with Fallout
2.
It’s with a landscape full of games that has routinely acknowledged and centered straight
male sexuality and presented heterosexual relationships as normal and valid, but that
only acknowledged queer identities, on the rare occasions that it acknowledged them at
all, as optional choices about who to have sex with.
In the original Fable, released in 2004, all NPCs, regardless of gender, can be wooed by
the game’s male hero.
However, when the player marries a male NPC, there’s no special wedding cutscene as there
is when marrying a female NPC.
Like Fallout 2, Fable treats relationships with men and women largely the same, except
for the notable absence of the wedding cutscene when marrying a male NPC; these romances are
not something that has any bearing on the larger storyline.
Homosexuality exists only as an inconsequential option, something you can choose to dabble
in or ignore completely.
In Fable 2, players can choose a male or female hero, and the relationship system is changed
a bit.
Each NPC now has an established sexuality of their own, so you can’t just seduce any
NPC in the world.
And now, getting married prompts a wedding cutscene, regardless of the gender of the
hero and their NPC partner.
So it’s an improvement, though one’s choice of spouse doesn’t change the game’s outcome
in any meaningful way and it still feels like it’s up to the player to essentially “press
a gay button” in order to encounter any same-sex content.
The Rockstar game Bully similarly gives you the option to kiss certain boys as well as
certain girls at the protagonist’s private school, which is a welcome option, but not
one that has any real bearing on the overarching narrative.
Okay, now contrast this handful of games in which homosexuality is presented as any kind
of option, no matter how inconsequential and avoidable, with the incredibly vast number
of games in which the protagonist’s heterosexuality is entirely unavoidable to all players as
a core component of the narrative, or gameplay, or both.
Games like:
...just to name very, very few.
One problem with the way games like Fallout 2 and Fable represent queer relationships
as something that’s cordoned off and doesn’t influence the rest of the game in any way,
is that In actuality, for most people sexuality impacts much more than just who we might choose
to have sex with or date at any given moment in time.
It’s a core component of our lives, influencing what kinds of social events we might attend,
who our friend groups consist of, the experiences that we might have with our families, or even
the kinds of places we might want to live.
Sexuality is about identity and culture, just as much as it is about who we might want to...kiss.
When games only represent homosexuality as a shallow option that doesn’t extend beyond
sexual encounters or marriages that have no real impact on one’s experience, they are
reinforcing the notion that queer relationships are inherently lesser than straight relationships--more
frivolous, less emotionally substantial.
Among more recent gaming franchises, the Mass Effect series has been particularly notable
for its representation of same-sex relationships.
While sex and romance are largely optional in the game series, the avenues available
allow the player to have a number of different relationships with NPC humans and a few sexy
aliens.
Oh, Garrus, I’ll never forget our time together.
Where was I?
Oh, right...The majority of available romance options are heterosexual pairings, but Mass
Effect 3 did introduce two canonically gay characters in Samantha Traynor and Steve Cortez,
and three other romanceable characters are best described as bisexual since they can
be romanced by a male or female hero.
These options are very much appreciated, but still, it’s entirely possible to play through
these games and never experience queer content or engage with queer notions of identity.
It’s only in the past few years that more games have started presenting queer relationships
not just as an option that players can choose to engage with or not, but as a core part
of their narratives and the identities of their characters.
In 2014, The Last of Us: Left Behind gave us a very special queer narrative in a mainstream
game through the relationship between teen girls Ellie and Riley.
Throughout the game, the two girls grow closer as they explore a long-abandoned shopping
mall.
Their romantic feelings for one another are slowly developed as the game progresses, and
culminate with a kiss.
This is a particularly notable example of a queer relationship because it is a core,
non-optional part of the story, and the characters’ feelings for each other shape how they relate
to one another.
Gone Home traces the story of a young queer woman named Sam Greenbriar, as the player
pieces together what happened to her and her family from the perspective of her older sister
Katie.
The game deliberately evokes horror tropes by taking place in an empty house on a rainy
night and encouraging you to fear the worst, but Sam’s heartfelt journal entries about
falling in love with her classmate Lonnie subvert those expectations and the game ultimately
creates a feeling of warmth and safety that validates queer love.
And 2017’s Butterfly Soup is a heartwarming and hilarious visual novel game about a group
of Asian high school girls, some of whom fall in love with each other over the course of
the story.
Again, players can’t choose to avoid this plot line.
It’s a core component of the narrative, just as the protagonist’s heterosexuality
is in so many other games.
"Put this on and let your inner punk rock girl come out. You can afford to
take chances with Warren and tell him he doesn't stand a chance."
Throughout game history, queer relationships have overwhelmingly been treated as bonus
content or the result of optional decisions that the player needs to actively seek out.
But players shouldn’t always have to “push a gay button” to encounter queerness.
The prevalence of games that present homosexuality in this way, while games have so consistently
presented heterosexuality as a core character trait for so many protagonists, suggests that
being gay or bisexual or any other non-heterosexual identity is just a matter of choice, one that
doesn’t really impact the trajectory of a character’s journey.
It isn’t necessary to make every single game that has a queer character about that
character’s sexuality, but at the same time, queerness shouldn’t be something that is
just treated as an afterthought or simply a cosmetic difference by game designers.
We need more games in which queer characters and queer identities simply exist, whether
the player chooses to access that content or not.
Games like Dream Daddy, Gone Home and The Last of Us: Left Behind are examples of how
queerness can be integral to a game without necessarily being the sole focus of its narrative,
offering a wonderful and engaging experience to players of all genders and sexual orientations.
More games would do well to take inspiration from them, offering up deeply human and fulfilling
representations of queer life that validate and normalize queer identity.