I am a lesbian and a gamer and I make no excuses for either of those things. It has been a very, very long time since I have tried to hide either of them. I am unapologetic though I get disapproving looks from most folks for one or the other (especially when I tell them that I play games as a part of my research). I have been a lesbian gamer for a long time, probably pretty close to 40 years. But it wasn’t until recently that it struck me as to how inextricable these two things actually are.
Let me start by saying that this epiphany has come about because of Mass Effect 3. Not because of the game per se but because of the identity issues that arose around the game. It’s been a long time since I felt this was about a game. I have been pestering friends to play and/or finish it so that I can talk to them about it.
In the interest of full disclosure I have to admit that I did play all of the games in the Mass Effect series and that I have always played FemShep. In the first two games in the series I played a FemShep that looked like me but made decisions based on what I thought would bring about the best ending. With the last installment in the series I played a FemShep that looked nothing like me but was an Earthborn, Ruthless, Renegade and I played her just like me. I made decisions based on what I would do in the same situations. I was the ultimate hard-ass. Unfortunately, my decisions did not always bring about the endings that I wanted to situations, but I rolled with it. They were my choices and I was going to live with them straight through to the end. I won’t detail them here, but I did end up killing one love interest and watched another one die in my arms.
[SPOILER ALERT] For the first time in the Mass Effect Series and probably the first time ever in a game my character was me and I didn’t realize it until the game was over. When I finished the game I talked a lot about replaying as BroShep so that I could see the difference in interactions with the other characters on the ship and to see how different decisions would effect key moments in the game and the final outcome. That’s when it struck me. I couldn’t roll a new Shep, definitely not a BroShep. Josephina Shephard was the only real Shep for me in this final installment. She had fallen in love with Liara, had the star named after her, killed Ashley, watched Miranda die, made friends with EDI, Samantha, James, and Cortez. She (and I) had made these friends and mourned them when they died in battle. She had definite lesbian sensibilities about her and this was all because of me. In the end it felt as if it would have been too much of a betrayal of Josephina (hell of myself) to roll a BroShep regardless of whether I played him as gay or straight, renegade or paragon…he could never be Josephina, he could never be me.
That was when I realized that not only am I a lesbian and a gamer, but that I am a lesbian gamer and that my identity has a great deal to do with who I am as a gamer and how I play the game. Thinking back I am sure that being a lesbian gamer has affected the way that I play other games, the decisions that I make, and the games that I make or not. More recently I recalled rage quitting Red Dead Redemption because of the rape of a prostitute, feeling uneasy when too many men are around female characters in games like Heavy Rain, or thinking that the investigative poses in L.A. Noir were just too damned necrophiliac like.
This is not to say that I don’t think that folks in other subject positions don’t also embody their subject positions in their gaming practices, this is just my own experience and a realization that games do go much deeper than just innocent entertainment and that game devs should take into consideration how games and their characterizations and depictions may be received by the gamers who purchase their product.
