作者：Leigh Alexander

你该如何让你的游戏开发更具包容性，尤其是在涉及同性恋话题的时候？游戏作家Samantha Allen（经常关注包容性和非主流话题）在最近的GDC大会上主持了一场座谈会，探讨了游戏开发者对这一话题的思考和建议。

评论家、学者、激进主义分子Mattie Brice称开发游戏面临的挑战是多样性而不是象征性的。她表示有许多开发者向她咨询一些如何“植入古怪元素”的方法，但以一种基本方式想象个体并不是很有建设性的做法。

关于“奇异性”的定义一直在不断变化，我们很难创造出不存在讽刺特征的角色。

麻省理工研究人员及eSports专家Todd Harper指出“这是工作，你得投入工作。你得想做工作，如果你不想做，那可能就得离开了。”

他补充表示，“无论你喜不喜欢，游戏是一种文化，无论你身处QA、音乐还是营销领域，你都是在创造一种文化。文化涉及我们如何相互理解。所以如果你理解自己在制作一个文化产品，我们也会理解我们很担心它对其他人的终身影响。”

“拥有特权的人可以说‘这没有关系’，‘我不想要这种内容’，如果你是单性恋、男性、白人异性恋的话，你当然不想。但我们其他人可能会想。同情心是看到他人遭遇的能力，它是一种看到自己以外之人所遭遇情况的能力。”

“同情心是一种我们用于让人人都站起来的力量，如果你对此无所谓，那就找一些对他人漠不关心也不会伤害到任何人的事情来做。但要注意的是：世上也不存在这种领域。”

Harper提供的一点建议就是制作内容，拷问你所有的决定，然后再试图推翻它们。“不要制作那种类似于‘我要对你拔剑相向’的游戏，而是‘让他们相互拥抱’的游戏。”尝试创造新事物并没有什么真正的成本——对你来说无甚意义的东西可能对他人意义重大。

Allen（曾为Border House及其他关注包容性的渠道写作）也提出了一个实用建议：“不要使用象征主义作为完全排斥的借口。我经常听到类似‘哦，我不想纳入一名女性或奇怪角色，因为我们并不对他们象征化’这种说法”。

她最近玩家一款有效融入“异性恋审查”的游戏——这是一款iOS约会模拟游戏，允许玩家与一名女性朋友调情，但却不会与她展开真正的恋情。她根本无法推进游戏或决定任何关系，因为她没有选择让自己的角色与任何男士调情。

当她向开发者提出这个问题时，她发现他们不敢真正开发一项女同爱情功能，因为他们的一位女同好友担心由此而创造了一种“象征”。

Allen称，“当人们思考象征主义时，他们只想到在自己游戏经济圈中的角色。”她认为担心自己的游戏只含有一名少数群体的角色的人们没有意识到，他们自己也在延续其他游戏和其他角色所创造的社区传统。

Depression Quest(from kotaku.com)

在开发《Depression Quest》的过程中，Zoe Quinn最初是让主角的伙伴性别模糊化，但之后意识到了一些个人情况：“我借鉴了许多与自己所爱的一些女人的经历。”

“所以在游戏的最后阶段让该角色性别为女性，并将她描写得更为个性化一点。在我完成这一操作时，所有的爱情内容描写明显更棒了。许多人认为在《Depression Quest》中你是在扮演一名白人直男……如果你不明确指出他们的个性框架，人们通常会假定主角为白人直男。即使你为其留下想象空间，人们也还是会自动在脑中补充想象。”

她经常听到来自无法将女性想象成爱人的女性玩家的声音，“她们基本上认为我的个性并不具有关联性”。但这对她的自我表达来说仍然很重要。现在，她正在制作一款讽刺性的喜剧约会模拟游戏，这是一种制作无关角色性别的爱情游戏的有趣挑战。

她称“我知道自己实际上是在以多种方法制作‘怪异的角色’……它是实际上有点棘手的东西，但最终你得相信自己，听从自己的声音，并与他人进行大量交谈。这是你能做的最棒的事情：与他人交谈。不要只是与自己的‘女同好友’打交道。要考虑到你的系统对性别的立场，要考虑玩家实际上打算做的事情，然后再同人们交流。”

Allen有一个担忧：所有人将定制选项视为包容性问题解决方案的现象，会进一步限制怪异角色的发展。她指出，“人们开始将角色定制视为包容性问题的万能丹，这就好像是‘如果我们在其中添加一些滑块，人们都可以随心所欲地玩游戏了’”。

她觉得EA最近的Full Specturm活动（该发行商决定关注包容性问题）是这家公司的积极举措之一，但同时也出现了一个令人担心的分水岭：“我们为兄弟们制作了《战地》这种游戏，至于其他任何人你们都可以玩《龙腾世纪》！”

“我希望在《战地5》中看到男同角色，我想看到正式而有意为之的古怪和女性主角和辅助角色。所以我担心角色定制化虽然很强大……但我们不应该止步于此，就好像‘只要我们让角色定制化，任何游戏中就永远不需要怪异的角色了。’”

Christine Love的首款游戏《Digital: A Love Story》包含一位与女性有暧昧的性别不明的主角。她并没有强调其中的怪异性，但对她来说，“如果能让任何怪异的女性从中看到自己，那就够了。”

她认为“让有些人对游戏产生共鸣，而其他非代表性的人也从中看到自己的影子，这种做法并无不妥。”她的游戏《Analog：A Hate Story》（专注于讲故事和人物关系），“会询问玩家的性别，之后角色在前进过程中会忽略玩家所说的性别。它这么问是为了让你感觉到性别的重要性。玩家会发现‘我可以选择自己是女性，但仍然可以享受这段爱情’。”

在她的游戏中，玩家性别对某些角色来说并不重要，而对他人却极为重要（取决于他们在故事中的背景）。“我觉得让玩家获得两种经历很重要，所以我引进了一项成就：如果你作为男性而通过了一段旅程，你就会得到半数成就，如果你是作为女性，那就可以得到另外一半成就。因此，只有半数玩过游戏的人得到了这两半的成就。”

她表示，“这些问题确实存在：你可以吸引人们对它的注意力，但我不知道如果有人不注意，只要它对其他人也同样具有易用性，那就是否就是最大的问题之一。我从中发现的另一个经验就在于，这与你是否制作象征性角色的担忧密切相关——无论某人的怪异性对他们来说是否重要，对他们在广泛范围内有何意义。”

通过吸引人们对其游戏怪异性的关注，她成功地抵消了人们基于这些游戏是与可爱的女孩打交道而产生的期望。她发现，多数铁杆玩家性别比例相当均匀。

“这表明无论人们怎么看待你的游戏，即使人们认为它可能是面向异性恋的游戏，你也可以通过包容性对他们产生强烈的影响。”

类似“怪异”这种词语和LGBTQ（同性恋）这类简写可能本身就存在问题，因为身份是许多人用不同方式重视的一个广大范围。雌雄同体并非“白板”——不少双性恋群体会为角色是由性别选择而决定的这一理念而觉得受伤。

Harper提醒道，“我们无法捕获一种通用的怪异体验”，但倾听、交流、询问和关注同情心这些方面甚为关键。

“如果你无意间伤害了他人，那没有关系，但你得从这一经历得到教训并改变自己的行为。如果你真的搞砸了，倾听部分就尤其重要了，因为这正是你避免再犯错的唯一方法。”

Love补充表示，“用你自己的方式完成这一点后……你应该探索对自己来说最重要的东西。即便它是来自特权领域的东西也仍然值得探索，你不应该对此感到害怕。”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Practical advice about queer characters in games

By Leigh Alexander

How can you be more inclusive in your game making, especially when it comes to LGBT issues? Samantha Allen, a games writer who often focuses on inclusivity and queer issues, hosted a panel at GDC offering thoughts and advice for game developers.

Critic, lecturer, activist and “cyborg witch” Mattie Brice says there are challenges to developing games that are diverse but not tokenistic (‘We haven’t had a lesbian in here, so let’s dorp her in there,’ she jokes).

She believes a lot of developers approach her asking for some kind of list or prescription for how to “put the queers in,” but imagining individuals in an essentialist way is not especially constructive. The definition of “queerness” is constantly evolving, and it’s difficult to create characters whose identity comes across without making caricatures.

But one approach that helps is working in unreality, says Brice, who likes to cite the work of Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler for the ways the manage to fold social issues into science fiction work in ways that don’t feel “lesson”-y.

“It is work, and you actually have to put in the work,” says MIT researcher and eSports expert Todd Harper. “You have to want to do it, and if you don’t want to do it, maybe you should go.”

“Like it or not, games are culture and whether you’re in QA, music or marketing, you’re making culture,” Harper adds. “Culture is how we understand each other. So if you understand you’re making a cultural product, we understand that we’re worried about what matters to other people all of our life.”

“Privilege is the ability to say ‘it doesn’t matter,’ he says. “‘I don’t feel like I need this?’ of course you don’t, if you’re a cisgender, male, white heterosexual. But the rest of us kind of do. Empathy is the ability to see what matters to other people, it’s the ability to see what matters to someone who isn’t you.”

“Empathy is a muscle, and you have to flex it over and over,” he continues. “Empathy is the muscle we use to lift everybody up,” he says. “If you don’t care, find something else to do, where the desire to not care doesn’t hurt anyone. Protip: No such space exists.”

His one tip is to make something, question all of your decisions, and then try inverting them. “Instead of making a game that’s like “yo, I’m going to sword you in the face” let them hug it out,” Harper suggests. “Or dance it out.” There is no real cost to trying something new — something that means little to you can mean lots to someone else.

Allen, who writes at the Border House and other outlets where she focuses on inclusion, also has a piece of practical advice: “Don’t use tokenism as an excuse for total exclusion,” she advises. “I often hear ‘oh we didn’t include a female or queer character because we didn’t want to tokenize them.’”

She recently played a game that effectively included a “heterosexuality check”: it was an iOS dating sim that let her flirt with a woman friend, but didn’t let them pursue a real romance with her. She was not able to advance the game or conclude any relationship arcs at all because she didn’t choose to have her character flirt with any one man.

When she asked the developer about it, she found out they were afraid to actually develop a lesbian romance option because their one lesbian friend was worried about creating a ‘token.’

“When people are thinking about tokenism, they’re only thinking about the character within the economy of their own game,”Allen says. People who worry it might be weird or offensive to have only one minority character in their game have lost perspective on the idea that they’re contributing to a community of other games and other characters, she suggests.

In the development of Depression Quest, Zoe Quinn initially left the gender of the main character’s partner ambiguous at first, but then realized something personal: “I was taking a lot from my own experience with a couple of women I had loved,” she says.

“So I decided at a late stage of that game to let that character be a woman, and to write her a little bit more personally. And as soon as I did that, the writing for all of the romance things got much better. A lot of people assume that in Depression Quest you’re playing as a straight white man… if you don’t explicitly state their frame of identity, people often assume straight white male. Even if you leave it blank, people fill it in in their head.”

It was hard for her to her to hear from players who couldn’t imagine having a woman as a love interest if they weren’t a man: “They’re basically saying that my identity is not relatable,” she says. But it was still important to her to express her own experience. Now, she’s making a satirical comedy dating sim where she’s trying to present a possibility space, and where it’s been an interesting challenge to make a game about love and sex without giving anyone a gender.

Eventually Quinn decided to make it so the player is given a possibility space with set genders, and they’re allowed to interact with them however they like — her own approach to love doesn’t have to do with gender, so she built an environment where other players could also have that experience.

“I know at that point I’m not actually making ‘queer characters’ in a lot of ways… it’s kind of a tricky thing to apply practically, but at the end of the day you have to trust yourself and your voice, and do a lot of talking to other people,” she suggests. “That’s the best thing you can do: Talk to other people. Don’t just have your ‘one lesbian friend’ that you base everything off of. Consider what your systems are saying about gender and sexuality, consider what the player is actually going to be doing, and then talk to people, and then talk to people.”

Allen has a striking concern: That all the focus on customization options as a solution to inclusivity issues will limit further development of queer characters. “Folks are starting to see character customization as a panacea for inclusion,” she says. “It’s like, ‘If we put some sliders in there, anyone can play it and feel like themselves.’”

She felt that EA’s recent Full Spectrum event, where the publisher committed to focus on inclusion, was a positive step for the company but also saw a concerning divide appearing: “‘For the bros, we make Battlefield, and for everyone else you can play Dragon Age!’” she laughs.

“I want to see a gay character in Battlefield 5. I want to see authored, intentional queer and women protagonists and supporting characters. So I worry that [while] a character customizer can be very powerful… I don’t think we should stop there, with ‘as long as we make a character customizer we never need to put queer characters in any games.’”

Christine Love’s first game, Digital: A Love Story contains a gender-ambiguous protagonist that interacts romantically with a woman. She didn’t emphasize the possibility of queerness, but to her, “if any queer women saw themselves in it, that was enough.”

“It’s okay to make experiences that possibly some people perceive one way, but possibly other people who are never represented at all will see themselves in it,” she believes. Her game Analog: A Hate Story, which focused on storytelling and relationships, “does ask the player’s gender, and then the character proceeds to ignore what you said about your gender,” Love says. “It’s only asking you so that you can [see that] gender is relevant. The player could see that ‘I could have selected I’m a woman, and still have this romance.’”

The player’s gender doesn’t matter to some characters in her games, and matters deeply to others, depending on their backgrounds in the narrative.”I did feel it was important that players get both experiences,” says Love. “So I put in an achievement: If you go through a route as a man you get half the achievement, and if you go through as a woman you get the other half. And as a result, half the people who played the game did both.”

“These things are there: You can draw attention to it, but I don’t know if it’s the biggest of deals if someone doesn’t realize, just so long as it is accessible to other people,” she says. “The other thing I learned here is that — and this ties into worrying about whether you’re making token characters — Whether or not someone’s queerness is important to them and what it means to them is on a very wide spectrum.”

By drawing attention to the queerness of of her games she can counteract expectations of her game that may arise based on the fact that they’re all about interacting with cute girls. The gender ratio of her most committed players is actually pretty even, she’s learned.

“I think that shows that no matter how your game is perceived, even if people think it might just be for straight people, you can clearly have such a strong impact on people just by being inclusive.”

Words like “queer” and acronyms like LGBTQ (“and all the letters we keep tacking on!”) can be problematic in and of itself, since identity is a broad spectrum that a lot of people value in different ways. And androgyny is not a “blank slate” — plenty of nonbinary people are likely to feel stung by the idea that character is determined by choosing gender.

“There’s no way to capture a universal queer experience,” warns Harper. But listening, talking, asking questions and focusing on empathy matters.

“If you accidentally hurt someone, that’s fine, but you have to use that experience to learn and change your behavior,” he says. “The listening part is especially important once you’ve really screwed it up, because that’s the only way you learn to not do it again.”

“Once that’s done,” adds Love, “in your own space, in your own way… you should absolutely explore what’s important to you. Even if it’s coming from a place of privilege it is still valid to explore those, and you should not be afraid to do it.” （source：gamasutra）