Queer characters in games: between pandering and representation – Interview

Dumbledore is homosexual, Arielle is played by a black actress, and the Doctor in Doctor Who is played by a woman after decades. “That’s forced diversity!” comes from the back row. Any deviation from a supposed standard – white, heterosexual, and at best male – is perceived by many people as fundamentally bad. However, the fact that this supposed standard is not based on facts is often forgotten. For example, women in the medical field still struggle to get noticed by doctors. Here, women were usually only perceived as a deviation from men, which is why diagnoses and treatments are often completely inadequate.

However, this cry about “forced diversity” doesn’t just happen when a well-known character suddenly switches sexuality or gender, but also with brand new projects. Blizzard made quite the joke a few months ago when their tool for various characters made the rounds. Characters were assigned arbitrary numbers to reflect their diversity. If a certain number of points was reached, the character was considered diverse enough.

For example, Zarya, a muscular woman who deviates from an equally arbitrary standard of non-muscular women, who also speaks with a Russian accent and has short, pink hair. Blizzard has done it: template diversity.

One could talk for hours about why this forced diversity is actually not that bad and in many cases even quite helpful, but the opposition got one point right: these characters are often not particularly authentic. A queer character often just ticks off various items on a list so that the studio behind them can be seen as particularly forward-thinking.

There is no passionate developer behind this who would call himself queer and just wants to tell a story that is close to his heart. I guess you can draw a clear distinction between games and stories that feature certain diverse characters just to fill some sort of quota and queer stories.

A game occupying the second category is the recently released one I Was a Teenage Exocolonist. The team at Northway Games, the studio behind Teenage Exocolonist, is made up of a diverse range of individuals who all wanted to tell an authentic story.

A story that sprang from her own experiences, from her own life, and from her own imagination, and not from a list of specific qualities that absolutely must be included.

Queer characters in games: between pandering and representation – Interview about I Was A Teenage Exocolonist (1)

Source: Lindsay Ishihiro



The interview was conducted with Lindsay Ishihiro. Lindsay is responsible for the writing and creature sprites of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist at Northway Games. Her repertoire also includes a few comics about “geekiness,” motherhood, feminism, and video games.

With experience gained through comics and a love for city building and management games, Lindsay was understandably a perfect candidate to bring the world of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist to life. Her penchant for “making fictional characters kiss” certainly helped with that, too.

The only thing we were originally told about the game was that it wanted to challenge “heteronormative storytelling”. However, both we and the creators believe that this is not necessarily the way to think about the game.

Sure, it deviates from the traditional storylines we’ve come to expect from various genres, but the team behind I was a Teenage Exocolonist didn’t want to challenge anything with their game. They just wanted to tell a righteous story that can be experienced by people around the world. There are just a lot more queer characters in the story than you’re used to.