Delving Deeper into Diversity

Veteran game developer Brenda Brathwaite (she’s worked on 21 published titles) hopes the un-sensationalized portrayals of gay people in games like Fable and Bully eventually become the rule rather then the exception.

“There just haven’t been many” gay characters in video games, she says, “especially normalized ones."

“The same-sex kiss in Bully was newsworthy to me precisely because it wasn’t sensationalized. Just two kids kissing,” adds Brathwaite, currently working as an interactive design and game development professor at the Savannah College of Art & Design. “That this is coming to video games is, to me, normal. People of all different sexualities are a part of our daily lives and the media we consume. We’re not shocked to see a GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered) character on TV, so why should we be shocked when he appears in a game?

“What I find particularly warped about this is that the perception exists that if you show a kid a gay character in a game that this will somehow affect him negatively,” she says. “That type of thinking is so illogical and insulting to me. I just don’t understand it.”

The public isn’t wholly to blame for the lack of gay content in mainstream video games, however. As implied earlier by Carter, those behind the scenes play a role as well.

“Consider that our industry is largely composed of straight, white guys,” suggests Brathwaite, who recently published her first book, Sex in Video Games. “Diversity—both in our workforce and in our games—has been an issue for a while now. The more diverse we are, the more diverse our content will be.

“That doesn’t just cover GLBT characters,” she adds. “I’m also talking about non-hypersexualized females and characters of color. There was actually a game made where you could create a blue character, but the game made no allowance for brown. Can you imagine?”

That said, Brathwaite says “game developers are fairly liberal in my experience.”

That’s certainly been the experience of Jeb Havens, a lead game designer for 1st Playable Productions, based in Troy, N.Y., and a regular speaker on GLBT issues within the industry.

“I've always been in companies that are very gay-friendly,” he says, “and I'm always very open and honest about my gayness at work.”

Havens, who acted as a designer on Cyberlore Studios’ Playboy: The Mansion (published by Groove Games in 2005 for PC and Xbox) and was lead designer on the game’s “Private Party” expansion pack, agrees with Brathwaite that the industry’s gay-friendly attitude doesn’t always translate into the games it produces.

Playboy: The Mansion

“From my experience, this seems to be because most developers—especially those in the position to make the big decisions of design and marketing—are straight and wouldn't feel comfortable including gay characters/scenarios even if they wanted to.”