Queer Indie Games and the Stories They Tell
The video game industry has historically been an exclusive club. Getting an idea off the ground requires a great deal of time, money, and manpower. Development studios rose and fell in a few years, and only the true titans of the industry endured. This cutthroat industry has not changed — many big game companies face bankruptcy if their big release flops. As a result, they are less willing to take chances.
And given the lack of historical acceptance for the LGBT community, who is telling these stories? The answer is LGBT indie devs.
The indie scene has been churning out top quality games for a while now, with some notable examples in the last few years being Hades and Celeste, with each game featuring prominent LGBT characters. Madeline from Celeste is especially praised, because although she did not start the game as a trans character, she developed into one to mirror the experiences of the developer Maddy Thorson, who used the game development to explore her own identity.
But not all indie devs are located in the Western world. Some are located elsewhere, and much like Celeste, use their games to explore their own identities both LGBT and their cultural heritage.
I spoke to one such indie dev, a duo known as Oracle and Bone, about one of their games, A Summer’s End — Hong Kong 1986, as well as their experiences not just as game devs but as lesbians.
The game follows an office worker named Michelle, and follows her life as she has a chance encounter with a young woman named Sam. It is a love story at its core, and the visual and musical style of the game is very reminiscent of the 80s.
For many indie devs, a visual novel style of game is excellent, as they are by nature story and character driven narratives with relatively simple art assets compared to a high budget action game. As O&B put it, “We decided to make our game a visual novel as we wanted our debut game to be story-focused. Visual novels are a game genre that could combine our strengths as a writer and artist duo and allow us to craft a game narrative within a shorter development cycle. We wanted A Summer’s End to read and play like a film in which our players could visually immerse themselves in Michelle and Sam’s world, and take a glimpse of the culture and environment of 1980s Hong Kong.”
They continued, “We have personal connections to Hong Kong. The writer, Charissa So, was born in Hong Kong and has family ties in the city. Tida Kietsungden has family connections to the city and travelled there extensively throughout her childhood. We’re deeply inspired by Hong Kong pop culture and its history of queer expression in film. We found Hong Kong’s culture and unique political history an interesting setting to explore as the 1980s was simultaneously a culturally rich time and also a time marked with political uncertainty over the city’s future following the 1984 Sino-British Declaration. We felt it to be an appropriate setting for our story about LGBTQ identity and self-determination as it serves as an allegory for the political climate of the past and now.”
People can often forget that being LGBT is not a standalone experience. Much like video games, people are collections of a variety of things, and as gameplay and visuals will naturally overlap, so do the aspects of our identity. To many, their LGBT identity and their nationality cannot be split apart, as they each inform each other.
They go on to state that “As openly lesbian identifying creators, we feel we have an opportunity as independent creatives to authentically include queer expression in our game and stories. We believe diverse stories benefit everyone. Media representation is important for us as it’s a way in which we see and understand ourselves as well as others with differing experiences. We felt a need to create space and discussion for such stories. In particular, Asian cultures do not openly discuss female desire, much less queer female desire. We wanted to change the narrative by having A Summer’s End’s storyline focus on a mature adult relationship depicting queer desire and identity.”
Another very strong point for many indie games is that they can be more out there in content. It would be much harder to sell a game to a wide audience with a massive marketing team when the game is about queer desire, but with indie devs they have that freedom of expression to create something that authentically reflects the queer experience.
I asked them about what I believe to be the most important part of queer art — the community response, the reason for representation to exist. They responded, “We very much appreciate the feedback and response we received from our players and fans. We’re touched by the global response and we’re glad to hear that our story could speak to the hearts of people from around the world from a diversity of backgrounds and cultures. We feel encouraged when we hear that our story closely reflects the real experiences of our players and that it made them feel seen or more hopeful. It reinforces our motivations to create games that reflect our authentic experiences.”
It isn’t hard to see just how much queer experiences mean to people. Knowing that you aren’t alone, and seeing the joy and the sorrow of the queer experience reflected in art is freeing, especially when made by queer creators.
I can’t wait to see what games continue to surface in the indie scene reflecting queer experiences, telling our stories, and bringing it to the wider world. Queer people are as old as art itself, and our stories are worth sharing.
