The Sunday Independent

How video games can help LGBTQ+ players feel like themselves

LAKEN BROOKS

THE lesbian kiss was an accident. In 1999, developers for The Sims displayed a prototype of the game at a booth at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the world’s leading gaming and tech convention. In the game, players simulate a virtual life as they build their own avatar, meet friends and lovers, and create a home. Patrick Barrett, a gay man, trained the AI that determined the characters’ romantic relationships in The Sims.

Barrett had been working with old code. He wasn’t aware that at the time, his team had decided to limit the game’s romance options to heterosexual interactions. So when the expo simulation showed two women getting married, news of the lesbian characters quickly spread among E3’s audience of roughly 602 000 attendees.

This homosexual marriage in The Sims forecast sexual liberation not possible in other games on display at E3, or legally recognised across many countries at the time.

Today, plenty of games, such as Stardew Valley and LongStory, allow players to pursue queer relationships or use non-binary pronouns. Life simulators and role-playing games continue to expand their avatar and relationship diversity. In many cases, these games have helped LGBTQ+ players feel seen for the first time.

Steven Arnold is an avid Dragon Raja and Black Desert player, and not solely for the gameplay. Both mobile titles have robust avatar systems, in which Arnold can cycle through a number of hairstyles and outfits, independent of whether playing as a “masculine” or “feminine” character.

"While now I’ve dyed my hair every colour under the sun, tried make-up, and played with different styles and fashions, it took me a while to get to this point,” Arnold said.

“Something as small as getting to play with the way an avatar looks, even if I only ever saw their back for the whole game, felt really reaffirming.

“Picking make-up or a crazy hair colour for my avatar was a way for me to affirm my own gender, even if it wasn’t something I was okay with doing in the real world just yet. It gave me an outlet where I really felt like I was a powerful person and the main character of my story.”

The ability to express oneself in a video game can help an LGBTQ+ person feel more confident in their actual life. Much of this comes down to the proteus effect. Named after the Greek mythological deity known for shapeshifting, the proteus effect is when people in virtual environments – video games, chat rooms – begin to adopt characteristics from their virtual representations. Just as the mythological Proteus can take on many forms, so too can gamers try new identities, faces and lives.

In 2007, the Stanford University Department of Communication began studying how the proteus effect impacts gamers. Researchers Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson did experiments to observe if and how an avatar’s physical appearance may influence a player’s behaviour in the game.

In the first experiment, players ranked different avatars according to their attractiveness. Then each participant was assigned an avatar to play in a virtual environment, where they would chat with another avatar.

The gamers with avatars that the participants deemed most attractive would act more confidently in the game than other participants: walking closer to other avatars in the VR environment, revealing more personal information about themselves and starting more conversations.

In the second experiment, Yee and Bailenson also studied if a gamer might change their behaviour due to the physical appearance of their avatar.

This time, participants participated in a VR negotiation. Players with taller avatars were most likely to demand a higher split of money, whereas players with shorter avatars were more likely to settle for smaller amounts.

“Although extreme self-transformations are expensive (for example, cosmetic surgery) or difficult to perform (gender reassignment surgery) on our physical bodies, nowhere is self-representation more flexible and easy to transform than in virtual environments, where users can choose or customise their own avatars – digital representations of themselves,” Yee and Bailenson wrote in the Stanford study. “Who we choose to be in turn shapes how we behave ... Our avatars come to change how we behave.”

These findings have obvious ramifications for players of marginalised backgrounds and gender and sexual identities.

From the safety of their phone or computer screens, players can transform and live vicariously through avatars with physical traits that represent their ideal selves: androgynous, femme, masculine, or – in games like the indie release 2064: Read Only Memories – somewhere outside of the gender binary altogether.

The proteus effect is a sort of psychological self-fulfilling prophecy. Many LGBTQ+ people want to try different kinds of gender expressions. However, these individuals may feel unsafe when wearing make-up or a different hairstyle in public.

Queer people can feel more comfortable in their identity when they have LGBTQ+ role models, which they can create for themselves in video games. The proteus effect may help queer players feel more confident after they’ve envisioned their ideal self as a character in an RPG or life simulator, even if they fear harassment or discrimination in public.

Kaehla Michele Bryant, another gamer, recognises the proteus effect at work in her own life, as she pursued LGBT+ relationships in video games. As a child, Bryant accepted she was queer when she played The Sims. In the game, Bryant could do what she never thought possible: have a girlfriend.

“I could accept that I’m not heterosexual, at all,” said Bryant. “It gave me the avenue to explore the attraction I felt toward those of my own gender without having to ‘come out’.”

Even now, many players struggle to find authentic or relatable queer characters in games. In Assassin's Creed Syndicate, players quickly recognised that protagonist Jacob Frye does not have a female love interest. The game’s producers later confirmed that Frye is bisexual, but players had to piece together much of this information based on hints.

For LGBTQ+ players to receive the positive benefits of the proteus effect, they need to be able to identify with the queer characters and relationships in their games. As Bryant continued playing The Sims, for example, she could relate to her LGBTQ+ character. Therefore, Bryant grew more comfortable with the idea of having same-sex partners in real life.

When the real world fails to provide LGBTQ+ people with the opportunity to express their gender and sexuality, the virtual world can be a sanctuary.

People who can openly express their identity are less depressed, according to a 2013 study published in The Atlantic, and less likely to commit suicide than their closeted peers. |

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2021-06-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thesundayindependent.pressreader.com/article/282381222492042

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