Text of my "Gay Rant" at Games for Change 2012

I spoke at Games for Change 2012. It was very well-received, and I'm so relieved because I wrote and re-wrote this speech like 20 times, revising it constantly in the nights before the festival. Here's the full text, though I ended up flubbing some of the lines as well as running a few seconds over.

Hi, I'm Robert Yang. I'm an indie game developer as well as a practicing homosexual.

Stuff I'm Working On, GDC 2012 Edition

Souvenir is a group MFA thesis project at Parsons about exploring your memories and holding onto the ones that mattered most. You start disoriented and overwhelmed, figuring out how to walk on walls and ceilings, but eventually you get the hang of it and start sorting stuff out. We started with Portal as our template, but eventually we came to dislike how everything felt so designed -- go here, go there, find the next step someone intended for you to find... For a more "organic" feel we started building areas around ideas instead: nature, school, and religion.

Zobeide, meanwhile, is a collaboration with sound designers Robin Arnott and Eduardo Ortiz. It's my super secret Proteus-killer. (... Well, not really.) In it, you build cities on top of other players' cities, chase naked women through moonlit alleys, and listen to the music that results. It is also an experiment with combining first person interfaces with hypertext, as a literary ode to Borges' Calvino's "Invisible Cities."

CondomCorps XL did pretty well at Jaime Woo's queer games show in Toronto. Apparently it's going to be on a Canadian TV news program too, or something? I'm going to do some more interface tweaks, add a silly campaign mode / narrative, and then call it done. I'm aiming to mirror the final feature scope of "Fear is Vigilance"... well, maybe half of that.

Radiator 1-3 might get dusted off. When I talked about it a few months ago at SVA, it reminded me how much I liked working on it sometimes. Maybe the San Francisco air will do me some good.

If you want to see any of these at GDC (or at the associated parties) come say hey at me, especially if you're a big important games person. Also, if you'd like to give me a job when I graduate, that'd be nice! My portfolio is here.

CondomCorps XL is crowd-sourcing fake orgasm sounds from you, soldier!

I'm currently re-mastering my Ludum Dare game CondomCorps into CondomCorps XL -- that is, making it minimally playable for humans -- and I just realized I need some sexy moaning sounds, yet I am only one person. Then I remembered the wonders of the internets and its powers of protein folding.

Unfortunately all the in-game character models (all one of them) will appear male, due to the nature of the patented bulge-gaze mechanic, so I would greatly prefer audio that "sounds like a man." (Non-men: please do your best impression of a man, or even your worst. Feel free to exaggerate / be silly. Drag is fun!)

> > > To submit:

On All That Gay Stuff: A Statement

I, of all people, have the least interest in getting typecast as "that guy who always complains about gay stuff in video games." However, the combined weight of Rock Paper Shotgun and Jim Sterling's vast and powerful Twitterverse have motivated this statement... (plus, I'm getting bored of arguing about this)

0) To everyone who can't fathom how I could so horribly misconstrue Jim Sterling's words: have you forgotten the 3rd image he posted in his article? You don't remember? Well, here, let me link you to the image of a man getting fingered, with an effeminate anime-style gay male character photoshopped on top.

That is the face of your beautiful, tolerant, post-sexuality paradise: it's riding on a steady undercurrent of homophobia and revulsion of what gay sex represents. Wait, no, you're right: Jim Sterling included that image because he wants you to like it and be tolerant! Of course.

... or is his point that gay sex is funny / gross, so video games should avoid it -- because only normal people should have normal sex, right? However, let's assume that image is completely innocuous and Jim Sterling means completely well, as so many people have assumed for some reason. Okay:

Gay (But Not "Gay") Characters in Video Games

(EDIT 2: I have an updated statement here, where I attempt to defend myself from the avalanche of criticism engulfing me. I also explain the Matthew Shepard comparison better. The original post, however, remains unedited and in its original form below.)

(EDIT 3: Since this gets linked in forums all the time, often to the clucking of virtual tongues, let me clarify two important points: (1) this isn't about New Vegas and (2) this isn't about Jim Sterling. Instead this post (and the rebuttal) was about a subtle but widespread homophobia that has infected much of society, even among gays -- it's actually more akin to misogyny since it relates to gender, but I call it homophobia because we're basically talking about different generalizations of gay men here.)

* * *

Over on Filefront (when did they start posting articles? wha?) there's a piece by Jim Sterling about a gay dude in Fallout: New Vegas. Read Sterling's complete argument and give him some page views, or just look at this sentence that irritated me:

Jim Sterling: "Arcade Gannon’s sexuality isn’t a big deal, and that’s how videogames should play it."

The argument that [all] gay video game characters should downplay their sexuality might be well intentioned, but is ultimately representative of the most dangerous kind of homophobia -- a homophobia wrapped in intellectualism, appearing "tolerant."

True, sexuality isn't the only thing that defines a person -- but for the vast majority of LGBT people, I would argue that it's a crucial part of personal identity. To insist that effeminate gay men are "camping it up" and should just "be normal" is homophobia. That's the same type of attitude that murdered Matthew Shepard -- he would've been fine if only he didn't act so damn gay around people!

Now, this thinking isn't exclusive to homophobes; gay men discriminate against each other all the time. Some might brand me as "straight-acting" when (a) I'm not acting, and (b) straight men don't have a monopoly on being more "masculine." But then many gay men also discriminate against "feminine" men and imply they're not "acting like real men" -- whatever that means. So yes, everyone is guilty, there's plenty of self-loathing to go around, blah blah blah.

But I digress. Perhaps my main point here is that the vast majority of adults on this planet have been known to care about sex. Sex is kind of a big deal -- and thus, so is sexuality. Games aren't exactly evolving as a medium if we always downplay this aspect of life -- or worse, downplay it only for LGBT characters to make them seem more palatable for people who think gay sex is icky.

Not all video games have to engage meaningfully with sex (... although it helps) -- but I would argue that there have to be some, at the very least, that do. Now, criticism without a solution is simply whining, so here I propose an alternate model for the portrayal of gay characters in media, a model that acknowledges -- hey, some gay men like having teh gayz-zex: