Week 8: “Even a game with queer characters, queer plotlines, and queer approaches to game design can be recast by players resistant to diversity.”

Before this class, I never really questioned representation and diversity in video games. I, a woman of color, am still trying to see why diverse representation in video games matters so much. Sometimes a video game is entertaining because the characters in the narrative are hilariously unrelatable, and sometimes I don’t want to relate to the characters at all. Looking back, I realize that playing games with characters that I cannot relate to was self-exploration, and I am beginning to understand that, for some, representation allows for exploration, and these individuals can discover their identities through video games like Undertale. Straightwashing a game tells members of the LGBTQ community that they are not considered “the norm,” and that they are not important. As a woman of color, I can make sense of straightwashing in terms of whitewashing, and I can completely understand how harmful straightwashing a queer narrative can be to a community who is already immensely underrepresented. As much as I wish it wasn’t true, representation and diversity in video games reflects societal values, and straightwashing “demonstrates how a game’s reception by straight and/or anti-LGBTQ players can problematically resist and obscure its queer representational elements, as well as its values of inclusivity and tolerance” (Ruberg).

As I mentioned last week, Kingdom Hearts does not incorporate any queer characters into the game’s narrative, and, perhaps, this reflects the values of Japanese culture (as the game is developed by the Japanese company Square Enix). Do I agree with how the developers of Kingdom Hearts represent both male and female characters? No, not at all, but I think the way these characters are represented speaks volumes about how we, as a society, view men and women.