***
So, I guess we had to end up here eventually. Where does one even start when trying to cover this? The difficulty with a rant like this (for me, at least) is that I'm not entirely sure what is or isn't stepping over a line when talking about it. At time of writing, this rant's sat in my drafts for a full week with only four paragraphs, simply because any time I tried to write any more it felt like it was either breaking what little flow there was or like I was stepping over some sort of line. What I'm trying to get at here is that as I said in my Overwatch review, the most I can really hope to do in this area is simply point out what kind of things cross the line into insensitivity, and do my best to help people understand what pushed it over the line.
I suppose there would be worse places to start than current affairs in the field. So: as some of you may have heard, The Sims 4 recently (to a given definition of 'recently') released an update that, among other things, allowed even more extensive customisation of the gender of Sims, things like being able to decide whether a Sim can get pregnant/get other Sims pregnant, if they stand up at the loo, stuff like that. On top of that, a Sim's gender no longer limits what clothes or walk style can be used. This essentially means that you can now have transgender or non-binary sims, whereas previously you had to kind of make-do with significantly more restricting tools.
It's actually quite impressive, and it leaves me in the uncomfortable and unique position of having to go up to other developers while pointing at EA of all people while saying "You see? That's how you do something right!", which anyone who's even vaguely been keeping up with what EA have been doing for the past few years will understand is a surprising situation to be in, regardless of context. There is the other side of the coin, however, with things like Skyrim's "misleading gender slider", which gave the appearance that you might be able to make a non-binary character at a given value in-between male and female, but upon inspection revealed only two settings.
Jumping streams a bit, representation feeling workshopped was one of my nitpicks when reviewing Overwatch, but realistically it actually did pretty well with diversity for a mainstream game (although they've yet to make up their minds on how to introduce a character as non-straight/cis). They managed to cover non-standard body types with Zarya, Mei, and arguably Roadhog; Racial diversity is admittedly a bit scatterbrained, but of the human characters they've managed to get about half and half non-white characters, and they managed to have a canonically Autistic character with Symmetra, which regardless of intention is more than most mainstream games can claim these days. Granted, there was the whole thing with Pharah's skins which arguably renders it all moot, but it's still there.
To clarify, I specify 'mainstream' because Indie games have been a lot more reliable at 'getting with the times', as it were. Toby Fox's Undertale is one of the games that I generally point to as an example of this, on the grounds that it manages to have a non-binary protagonist, a lesbian relationship, and on top of that have the way it gets revealed feel like organic character development instead of just shoehorned in to sell copies of the game. The Fullbright Company's Gone Home is another good example, although I hesitate to put it on this list given that saying it's representative in this context is kind of major plot spoilers.
Going back to diversity in Overwatch and with it my earlier stance of 'cover the topic through current affairs', most of you have probably heard about how two professional players recently quit after having their accusations of cheating towards a 17-year-old girl conclusively disproved. For those that hadn't heard, what essentially happened is that members of esports Team Dizziness accused 17-year-old Geguri of using an aimbot in a tournament qualifying match, on the basis that her Zarya beam seemed to be sticking to enemies a lot more than it should. Not exactly unusual behavior for people who got their asses rather thoroughly handed to them. What was unusual is that they then a) stated that they would quit Overwatch for good and retire from esports if Geguri was found to be clean, and b) threatened to (and I quote) "...visit Geguri's house with a knife in hand. I am not joking."
The eventual outcome of this was that Blizzard Korea investigated and found Geguri to be clean, the two players quit, and Team Dizziness disbanded. Situations like these are always really bloody depressing to see unfold, because they're almost as harmful to the gaming community at large as they are to those directly involved. If we as a community keep treating any female gamer that shows any capacity for being better than ourselves with absolute contempt and disbelief, then we have very little right to complain when the outside world start to perceive that behavior as the rule rather than the exception. Diversity is as big a problem in the gaming community as it is in games, and that's not going to get fixed unless as a community we can get out of the 'witch hunt' mentality that's worked *so* well for us all thus far.
I'm going to wrap this up now, because it's honestly really draining to try and write about this. Between lack of diversity and representation in games, the treatment of any call for more of the aforementioned as 'political correctness gone mad', and the idea that a female gamer might be better than you being generally treated by male gamers with the same amount of plausibility as pigs flying over the frozen landscape that was once Hell, games as an industry and we as a community need to get our collective heads out of our asses. Thank you, and have a lovely whatever-time-of-day-it-is.
As always, anyone who has a suggestion for a review, rant topic, or just wants to say "hi!", can do so by emailing me at pressxtoreview@gmail.com
-Harry
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