A Review Of Gaming s Lgbt Representation - 1115 Words

A Review of Gaming’s LGBT Representation â€Å"In Qunandar, Krem would be an Aqun-Athlok. That’s what we call someone born one gender but living like another,† says The Iron Bull. â€Å"And Qunari don’t treat those Aqun people any differently than a real man?† Krem asks. â€Å"They are real men. Just like you are.† The Iron Bull finishes. Above is a conversation between two characters in Bioware’s 2014 smash hit RPG, Dragon Age Inquisition. This conversation took the transgendered community by storm. Krem, second-in-command to the mercenary group ‘The Bull’s Chargers’, is a man born a woman, and a hero to many transgender gamers. Transgendered people are often grossly misrepresented in entertainment media. They are made a mockery of through cheesy†¦show more content†¦It featured a male character flirting with a woman at a bar, before another male distracts him and he leaves to flirt with him instead. It was both ground-breaking and controversial, and the most ‘normalising’ representation of LGBT since 1998’s Fallout 2. 2004’s Fable took a whole new step in LGBT representation. Players could create their own male or female character, and then initiate flirtation, romance, or marriage with anyone they liked. Their character’s profile would then reflect their sexuality by listing either Gay, Straight, or Bisexual, depending on whom you may have slept with or married. Fable was congratulated on its normalisation of LGBT characters in games, as other in-game characters had neither positive nor negative reactions to your character’s sexuality. It’s later in 2004 where LGBT representation in games received somewhat of a kick to the face from Rockstar North’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Homosexuality is used to denigrate the police in the game, the player-character’s enemy. They repeatedly shout flamboyant and degrading comments including â€Å"Drop the soap, honey!† Used as a negatively contextualised joke, the popularity of the game was rather unfortunate. It spread a negative image of more flamboyant gay men, and was the first truly harmful representation of LGBTs in video games. Appearing to set a trend of negative representation of LGBT communities, Rockstar’s 2006 Grand