Diversity in Video
Games
What We Can Learn
from Siege of Dragonspear
By Shane Black
After waiting 17 years, fans of the Balder's Gate video game finally got an expansion called Siege of Dragonspear on March 31, 2016.
However, after the expansion’s release, many users have been giving the game negative
reviews due to the inclusion of a transgendered character named Mizhena. Take,
for example, Steam user Chrjs’s review of the game. In his review he claims
that he has no problems with “gays or transsexuals in any way,” but then
proceeds to state that he only has a problem when it is shoved down his throat.
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| Negative reviews of the game often revolve around Mizhena's choice of dialogue. |
Chrjs then attempts to justify his position by stating that “it is not natural for a person to just come flat out and tell you their sexuality when you meet them for the first time,” claiming that the dialog is a mark of poor writing designed to fit a social justice warrior, SJW, agenda. But, honestly, does anyone really believe that people would be complaining about poor dialogue in a game where limited dialogue options come from an in-game decision tree of no more than 3 choices if it didn’t pertain to a transgender character’s identity?
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| Steam user Chrjs's objection to the game. |
Here is the deal, the world has become a more inclusive
place, and, like it or not, it is only going to become more inclusive. It used
to be acceptable to make a character of a minority race act in all stereotypes,
but now we know better than to reduce someone’s visual appearance to such
stereotypes. Nowadays, we know that race is simply nothing but pigment in our
skin that has been categorized by those with different shades of pigment in
their skin. How long will it be before we realize that someone’s gender
identity and sexual orientation is nothing more than an attempt to categorize
people?
Beamdog, the developers of the Siege of Dragonspear, has done an exceptional service to the gaming
community by introducing a scenario where a character did not fit into the
normal box assigned to her by her parents, and in regards to the dialogue being
forced down someone’s throat, the option to find out Mizhena’s backstory only
takes place after asking about her unique name. A player in the game may miss
the dialogue option, all together, but that isn’t the point.
Lately, it has become increasingly difficult to feel safe in
the real world for those who identify as transgendered. Video games have always
been an escape for anyone playing them. Therefore, shouldn’t video games represent
everyone? Siege of Dragonspear was
not developed just for Chrjs and other negative reviewers, and when the Mizhena
haters realize that, then the gaming community can finally proceed with
inclusion instead of under-representing a demographic—which in effect, can hurt
the gaming industry.
The game is based on the pencil-and paper-tabletop
roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons(D&D). D&D has always been inclusive to all genders and sexual
orientations. In the current edition of the game, the Player’s Handbook talks about how you can choose to make your
character anyway you desire:
“The elf god Corellon Larethian is
often seen as androgynous or hermaphroditic, for example, and some elves in the
multiverse are made in Corellon’s image. You could also play a female character
who presents herself as a man, a man who feels trapped in a female body, or a
bearded female dwarf who hates being mistaken for a male. Likewise, your
character’s sexual orientation is for you to decide.”
The elf god’s gender fluidity isn’t new either. In the
earliest renditions of the game, the elf god was described as male, female,
both, or neither.
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| Dungeons and Dragons has always been an inclusive game. |
I, for one, am looking forward to seeing new characters that
are diverse and vastly different than myself, and I welcome any game that
challenges the labels placed on people. We need to keep pushing boundaries
until the gaming community, and all of society, finally accepts that people are
free to be who they are.
