Queer IF

Exhibition comes to mind. A puzzleless IF piece where one of the characters you play (the boy) is homosexual.

This may not apply since it’s non-parser, but FALLEN LONDON presents a sort of omnisexuality. The player can choose “no gender” when asked (the branch says something like “You mean you have people with tentacles on their face running around and you have the nerve to ask me…!” Within the game you can choose the gender of an admirer you have multiple trysts with, and there are characters of assorted genders that provide lucrative or story related game choices if you carry out some of the romance branches with them. I have both a devil and a deviless who keep turning up to ask me to the opera or croquet, but I think they are both only in it for my soul!

True that.

Weirdly, Blue Lacuna’s simplistic treatment of queerness has been coming up with increasing frequency in the last 12 months. All I can say in its defense is that I wrote it between 2005 and 2008 while living in Salt Lake City, Utah, not too many years after growing up there in a high school without any openly gay people, and with hardly any positive gay role models in the media or in my life. The very basic idea of “yes, there are gay people, and hey, it’s okay to be one” seems increasingly simplistic from my current perspective of 2013 in Santa Cruz, California, but it was important to me at the time. And there are a disturbingly large number of places in the world where people still need that basic idea.

There are a lot of things I’d do differently now: I probably wouldn’t make a game these days with a binary gender choice, or where sexuality is just a cosmetic detail, for example. But that’ll have to wait for future games.

One of my goals with the Alex and Paul series was and is very specifically to write a game with gay people in it that isn’t only about being gay. I feel some games in the series are more successful than others. And they are all pretty silly and Speed-IFfy.

Thanks everyone for a really interesting collection of things to read, which has turned out to be much richer and more extensive than the resources I had originally found had identified.

I’m sure Maga’s/Aaron’s point about the difficult of NPC interaction in general (and therefore the relative paucity of realistic straight relationships in IF) is well taken. One interesting thing about reading these stories is to see how they deal with this. Success is, predictably, variable, and (though it’s a gross generalisation) direct PC/NPC interaction is by far the hardest thing to get right. Equally it’s a particularly interesting test case for the differences between static, hypertext-interactive and parser-interactive fiction.

I don’t think this’ll help much, but the protagonist of The Intercept - which is an inklewriter game, so choice-based - is gay man in the 40s, which is sort of what the plot hinges on. I’m also sure I had a gay character in one of my parser games, but I’ll be darned if I remember who or what, so it was probably only in passing.

Jon

I’m not sure I understand “keeping it as background” (queer characters in IF). I can think of a shit-ton of queer-in-the-foreground stories one can make:

  • Fighting the Religious Right (you know how they want our rights to end where their beliefs begin)
  • Dealing with bullying issues (which seem to be a hot topic in high schools nowadays)
  • Dealing with discrimination (per usual)
  • Dealing with a society oppressive to gays (like the Amish, or other (sigh) religious people)
  • Dealing with family issues

I’m not saying queers in IF need to be in the foreground, in fact, it’s great to be treated and accepted as everyday people, but I just didn’t understand the line about needing to keep it in the background.

There are plenty of IFs out there dealing with str8 couples.

Thanks for letting me put in my 2 cents!

Speaking as a (mostly) straight writer, it’s much easier and less problematic to write queer characters whose queerness isn’t foregrounded. (This is an essay-length subject, but that’s about the size of it.)

Other than that, the only need I see expressed here about background queerness is that it’s a thing that should exist, rather than not. I don’t see anybody saying that it should exist at the expense of foregrounded queer characters.

Which is to say, political-issue games - and politics games have, if anything, an even more difficult track record than relationship-based games.

Hm. I can’t think of that many where actual relationship dynamics are all that important.

Assuming parity (which may not be the perfect outcome, but would be what you’d expect in an unbiased population), you’d expect (very roughly) one queer-relationship game for every nineteen straight ones. If you look at this IFDB poll, f’rinstance, there are two games with established queer love interests, three with optional queerness or ambiguous-gender principals, one with a prominent some-other-gender character (I’m not sure if there’s a same-sex ending for Pytho’s Mask, it’s been a while), and (I think) nineteen with established straight ones.

Out of interest, how did you come to that figure?

I’m also curious how an IF about family relations (with a queer family member) or an IF about an Amish community (with a queer member) is political?

The problematic is the political.

Could you write a story about homosexuality in an Amish community without raising or answering the question ‘are Amish attitudes to homosexuality good or bad?’ Because once that question’s raised, you’re in the realm of political questions - how much control should religious communities be allowed to exert over their members, or parents over children? what exactly should count, legally, as abusive behaviour? was this person treated justly or unjustly?

Sadly, ‘is it okay to treat people like shit because they’re gay?’ is still a political question, almost everywhere in the world.

…handwavily. Stats on LGB demographics vary widely, and are plagued by self-reporting issues, but most modern surveys in Western nations get something between 2.5% and 6%; I usually go with 5% as a tidy back-of-the-envelope number. (If you ask about same-sex attraction or same-sex sexual experience, rather than LGB identity, the stats are a fair bit higher; I’m making the big assumption that identity is the gold standard here.)

Okay, so any IF that has a problem in it is political. Gotcha.

Not what I said.

If it has a problem that pertains to how society and social attitudes are constituted, that’s political. If the problem is that you’ve lost your keys or have to solve 10-stack Hanoi to get past the troll guard, that’s (probably) not political. If it’s about how your parents are treating you badly because you’re gay, that’s political. (If only because, in the non-fictional world, there are plenty of politicians who are cheering those parents on.)

Further two cents – depending on how big your fabulous rainbow umbrella of queerness is, the plot-twisting NPC at the end of Guilded Youth probably warrants a note; Deirdra Kiai’s aggressively androgynous characters are also somewhat related to this area.

Let’s form a gender-neutral punk band called “Aggressively Androgynous”. Who’s in?

Apropos the discussion between Maga and MTW about Politics, one can see how history repeats itself if one looks at the RAIF thread referenced on the IfWiki page on homosexuality. One of the topics of discussion then was how far fleshing out a character’s (homo)sexuality was a political matter, and Graham Nelson weighed in in this answer

But I’m not sure. I can certainly see that the motivation for writing a “foregrounded” queer character may be non-political, but as things stand I’m inclined to doubt that we could stop people from reading/experiencing such a character as political. So maybe the point is that in choosing (a) or (b) an author need not intend a political statement, but can’t help but make one malgre lui.

Yeah, I was conscious of the parallel. I’m saying something slightly different, though.

I’m absolutely not saying that all stories about foregrounded queer people are inevitably political. I’m saying that stories about queer people that centrally deal with homophobia (which seemed, to me, to describe all of MTW’s examples) are.

(I’m also not saying that political games are undesirable; I’m saying they’re difficult to make well. I’m all in favour of people tackling difficult things; I apologise if my point suggested otherwise.)

Oh, that’s political alright. It is a direct affront to the beliefs of the “5-Stack Max for Trolls” party, and you shall be receiving a stern letter from us post-haste.

  • Wade