“We Need To Pull Every Lever We Have” - Insomniac's Narrative Director Discusses Lack Of LGBTQ Content in Video Games - We talked to Mary Kenney, associate narrative director at Insomniac Games about the lack of LGBTQ representation in gaming.

Highlights​

• LGBTQ gamers still don't feel seen in the gaming industry.
• Insomniac associate narrative director Mary Kenney emphasizes the importance of designing games that make players feel accepted and important.
• The gaming industry has a long way to go in terms of queer representation, despite the significant number of LGBTQ+ players.

It can be easy to feel shunned when it comes to queer representation within gaming. Not only do LGBTQ people put up with endless derogatory, homophobic, and transphobic comments littered around every grimy corner of social media whenever a queer character crops up in a game, but a recent report showcases just how little this group is represented in the medium.

Things have changed significantly, the tides have turned, and developers are including fleshed-out and interesting queer characters in their games. Still, it hasn't been enough. According to GLAAD's recent study, more players than ever identify as gay, bisexual, queer, or transgender, and yet, only 2 percent of games on major consoles and PCs include queer characters.

Mary Kenney, an associate narrative director at Insomniac Games, opened up to me to give her opinion on the "heartbreaking" state of LGBTQ representation amid GLAAD's report.

LGBTQ Gamers Don't Feel Seen​

Kenney, who started her career as a journalist, has written for some of the industry's most popular video games. From Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Batman: The Enemy Within to The Walking Dead: The Final Season and the upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine. Kenney has helped construct some of gaming's most diverse characters, like Clementine and Violet from Telltale's The Walking Dead, but freely admits that more needs to be done in game development to make LGBTQ people feel like they are an important part of video game structure now and also its future.

In a moment of reflection, Kenney credits the late great Danielle Bunten Berry, a trans woman and pioneer game developer who created one of the first successful multiplayer games on the Atari platform, M.U.L.E., Kenney says that Berry's influence on the game industry was a powerful presence as she often "spoke about video games as a means to create connection" due to her unwavering advocacy for online community spirit. "In the decades since, this has proven true in fan communities, conventions, and multiplayer games," says Kenney.

Delving into GLAAD's latest report, Kenney offers up two important insights. While one is a positive and welcoming outlook as often the LGBTQ community wants to seek out safe spaces so they can feel accepted, the other is extremely worrying and disheartening. "The GLAAD report tells us something key - games are a way for LGBTQ people to socialize. But it also tells us something heartbreaking: that LGBTQ gamers don't feel that developers are thinking of them when they design games."

Thankfully, there hasn't been a shortage of LGBTQ developers over the years. We have seen incredible talents coming from the minds of people like Maddy Thorson, who created the transgender character, Madeline, in the game Celeste, Cathryn Mataga, a transgender programmer and founder of the independent video game company Junglevision, who worked on X-Men: Reign of Apocalypse as well as Spider-Man 2 and also D.E. Chaudron from Larian Studios, a queer and nonbinary video game developer who worked on Baldur’s Gate 3 - to name only a few.

We Need To Pull Every Lever We Have​

Kenney echoes this evidence by saying "There are so many LGBTQ developers, and we want what players want - to design experiences that tell the player we're here, we're important, and we belong." This could become increasingly difficult as we see more and more pitches turned down amid one of the worst years ever for gaming. However, Kenney remains adamant that something has to give way to allow change to happen.


"We need to pull every lever we have," Kenney says. "Characters, community support, mechanics, to make it so. It's a subject she's clearly passionate about, and her insights are thought-provoking.


Even though the gaming industry is touted as the modern entertainment giant and is worth more than film and music combined, it has a long way to go in terms of queer representation. Only 2% of games feature an openly LGBTQ+ character, in comparison with 28% of films released in 2022, and 11% of primetime TV characters in 2022 and 2023. Surely it makes better sense for gaming studios to want to include the queer community into their games due to 1–5 players identifying as LGBTQ+, since, at the very least, the financial pull is there, so what is the issue here?

Although just throwing queer characters into games isn't what the LGBTQ+ want either. Representing these characters in a meaningful and authentic way through deeply woven stories to really feel understood is what will always be needed, and more than anything, allowing LGBTQ+ people to feel truly seen in the process.



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[Super-Chevy454]

And yet, they still wonder why homophobia is still rising....

 

[Uncle Joey]

So is the next R&C gonna feature Ratchet using Clank as a dildo or something?

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Every single game puts this shit front and center now. What fucking "lack"?

Reminds me of how SJWs claim there's "systemic racism" against "people of color", when there is really "systemic racism" against whites. Or claiming there's "rape culture" and "the patriarchy", despite the lopsided relations against men. SJWs like pretending it's like the 1950s with Jim Crow laws, no feminism, and gays "in the closet" still.

 

[Safir]

I have asked quite a few people this; WHY do you need to see yourself on screen? They never have a good answer for that at all.

Are you serious? The answer is because people like it, AND because media is how behavior is modeled, culture is spread and preserved, and national identity is maintained. Wokists fight for culture because they know it's how you win. Some US conservatives have understood it too and have been creating Christian movies and children's entertainment. Those usually suck because of the lack of funding and a shallow talent pool exacerbated by self-selection out of pedowood, not because Christian entertainment is inherently bad.

My country is an excellent example. I'm harping about this every other post, but I Lived Through The 90s, I watched our culture get murdered and replaced.

The Golden Age (early 19th century) was when Russian literature first emerged. I want to ask you, why is it important for a people to have literature in their natuve language? Why couldn't have French and German originals suffice? A lot of the Golden Age works were remakes and reimaginings of French and German originals. Even, especially, folktales -- actual Russian folktales of the time were dirty jokes. Russian writers would take a European fairytale collected by Grimm or Perrault, translate, file off the serials, and publish. None of that Campbell bullshit. They had detractors! There were people who said what these translators were doing was stupid and embarrassing, that a Slavic setting was absurd for a refined Gothic romance. Nevertheless, those works are now considered gems of Russian culture.

The USSR had nearly no culture in its early years, aside from a handful of revolutionary poets -- but the people were illiterate. And yet the revolutionary era is considered the tail end of the so-called Silver Age. What was the Silver Age? Degeneracy, faggotry, chickenhawk orgies, satanism, Rekieta family drama, Best Fucked-Up Books: the thread. The Soviets shipped most of the authors to Europe to infect the capitalist demimonde with nasty venereal diseases.

Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar for Culture, drafted a plan to produce educational and propaganda movies (50% each). Lenin turned it down: feature films, he said, were just as important. Eventually Lenin's literacy program succeeded; by that time people had enough books about themselves, as well as translated (thanks to Lunacharsky again) and original sci-fi. That was also the time when children's literature evolved as a separate branch, again a mix of "adapted" and original works. Filthy pedo Nabokov, no revolutionary, renamed the heroine of his Alice translation to "Anya". Certainly he had a reason to do it. Alexey Tolstoy wrote a Pinocchio fanfiction, replacing Christianity with Soviet virtues (the protagonist remains a mischievous wooden doll but learns to not fall for get-rich-quick scams).

The GPW necessitated the creation of contemporary patriotic content. Surely you don't think that stories just about any other war from anywhere around the globe would've worked just as well!

The 70s are widely considered the peak Russian culture, but the rot had started to show slightly before: the old revolutionaries were killed in the war or died and were stealth-replaced by the professional creative class, who started trying to push the now very familiar multi-culti wokeshit. Government officials demanded works for the people and about the people, creatives cried muh censorship and muh oppreshun. If you click the link, the best-rated live-action work is a TV series titled Seventeen Moments of Spring. Its (((female director))) is an interesting person: she cried the loudest about "censorship" w.r.t. wokism, made a movie ridiculing the idea that children of workers and peasants can ever hope to become artists (the movie got made and released nationally, at which point you could stick a fork in the USSR), and spent her later years mourning the destruction of the USSR. Libs, amirite.

The 90s was when Russian culture was taken behind the shed and killed. Yeltsinist faggotry could not compete with the best Western culture had to offer. Translators who made voiceovers became minor national celebrities.

In its death throes, Russian culture produced two highly popular Russian gangster movies, and in the 21st century, two good war movies which were Belarusian co-productions (Russian war movies shit on Russia because they're made by you know who). The maker of these gangster movies was instantly catapulted to mega-stardom. (Nevertheless, he stayed humble; the guy who sold us our family computer filmed his wedding.) Two other phenomena were Slavic fantasy and urban fantasy. Among the glut of translated Western fantasy and faux-translated imitation Western fantasy produced by pseudonymous Russians and hohols, the authors who started the trends were catapulted to mega-stardom. It turns out Russians really liked to read about Russians, go figure.

And, anecdotally, I saw how girls got excited about female protagonists in imported Western children's media. In 20 years on the English-speaking internets, I've never once seen one of those cheapass series mentioned, and yet medieval Australian ladies in Polish castles are always fondly remembered by Russians wherever 90s preteens congregate.

Also anecdotally, anything Russian in Western media caused a lot of excitement. Ooh senpai noticed me. This has mostly faded, the turning point I remember was the hero Soviet sniper fucking a whore in a US war movie. (Not to be outdone, """Russian""" """patriotic""" directors would proceed to portray Russian heroes as grosser degenerates.)

I hope this is sufficiently illustrative why native culture is good.
PLEASE don't take it as an endorsement of multi-culti wokism (foreign culture forced on native consoomers for #diversity, native artists forced to produce foreign culture for #diversity, native artists forced into other jobs to be replaced with foreigners for #diversity).

---

Now, how is it different from LGBTQIAP representation?

1. Faggotry is bad. Bad things should not be portrayed in a "neutral" or positive way.
2. Faggotry is violent; fag "representation" is sex offences against the audience. Most media characters are only assumed to be normal; fag representation therefore requires characters who are openly, "unapologetically" deviant.
3. Faggotry is naturally gross. Both forcing people to be subjected to gross shit and pushing them to get inured to gross shit is degenerate.

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

The way I see it, all the zombies I mowed down in Left for Dead 2 were troons.

 

[Jarl Varg]

I'm fine with them putting troons/fags into the games. As long as the player is able to shoot them, execute them, run over them with a car, etc..

 

[ToroidalBoat]

turning Gandhi into a genocidal nuclear psychopath

I think that came from a bug in early Civilization vidya. In the vidya, Gandhi is already low aggression, and the "aggression index" decreases as the game progresses. Eventually, it gets so low that it resets to maximum aggression. By modern tech with nukes around.

 

[St.Davis]

I think that came from a bug in early Civilization vidya. In the vidya, Gandhi is already low aggression, and the "aggression index" decreases as the game progresses. Eventually, it gets so low that it resets to maximum aggression. By modern tech with nukes around.

That is a myth, and not actually the case.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Pretty sure there are now more gays in media than confirmed hereros

 

[Otterly]

I hope this is sufficiently illustrative why native culture is good.

I don’t mean native culture. Reading your own culture’s myths and history is a good thing, it gives you background.
I mean ‘identity.’ Like ‘I cannot relate to this modern film unless the protagonist is exactly my demographic.’ I’m taking about gays complaining the main character isn’t gay, fat Latino chicks complaining the main squeeze is a tall blonde girl.
The idea that people can’t enjoy a book unless the main character is ‘literally them’ is utterly bizarre to me

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

In a moment of reflection, Kenney credits the late great Danielle Bunten Berry, a trans woman and pioneer game developer who created one of the first successful multiplayer games on the Atari platform, M.U.L.E., Kenney says that Berry's influence on the game industry was a powerful presence as she often "spoke about video games as a means to create connection" due to her unwavering advocacy for online community spirit. "

Dan Bunten hadn't trooned out when he was involved in creating the game. And who the hell even bought an Atari 800 in the first place? It was all Apple II+, TRS80s and maybe IBM XTs at that point.

 

[Tepes Thot]

Fuck off. You can’t escape them, they’re like bedbugs. Now that the industry started adding them en masse, it’s looking damn near impossible to get them out without burning it all down.

They don’t need to be in everything.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

They don’t need to be in everything.

If Current Year somehow never ends, then eventually there may be no more straight characters at all in any new mainstream vidya.

(which could still be seen by SJWs as a "lack of representation" somehow)

 

[Jarl Varg]

I'm fine with them putting troons/fags into the games. As long as the player is able to shoot them, execute them, run over them with a car, etc..

Now that I think about it, they're pretty much all NPCs anyway.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

The sooner the industry 41% itself, the better.

 

[Archie_Kimkicker]

Nothing makes queers seethe like the image of a normal, happy child, performing normal activities he or she was evolutionarily optimized to perform.

 

[Well Intentioned]

I think that came from a bug in early Civilization vidya. In the vidya, Gandhi is already low aggression, and the "aggression index" decreases as the game progresses. Eventually, it gets so low that it resets to maximum aggression. By modern tech with nukes around.

I've heard that, was just making a general joke about how well the industry treats 'serious' issues.

Like, you can have your 'real world commentary' stuff a la X-Men (or whatever), but expecting it to be a serious deep dive is retarded. The medium isn't really equipped for that level of nuance, just as mass market comic books can only do the bare minimum.

Dan Bunten hadn't trooned out when he was involved in creating the game. And who the hell even bought an Atari 800 in the first place? It was all Apple II+, TRS80s and maybe IBM XTs at that point.

There's a funny anecdote, which I'm unsure if it's true or not, that Bunten joked that they weren't as good a programmer when they trooned out. It could be a case of the industry passing them by or just a real unintentionally honest moment.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Sounds to me like some commie revolution with "no bourgeois luxuries allowed", because "there's work to be done" making the "glorious people's republic" a horrible reality.

Oddly enough, legit communist propaganda is more entertaining.

Here's a scene from a North Korean cartoon.

That was intended for kids, by the way.

 

[Soyjak Enjoyer]

I actually can't name a single multiplayer game that is still active today and doesn't either have a pride month event or an LGBT character. I don't even say that to be negative just to say that I truly don't get how the article reaches this conclusion

 

[Vyse Inglebard]

I actually can't name a single multiplayer game that is still active today and doesn't either have a pride month event or an LGBT character. I don't even say that to be negative just to say that I truly don't get how the article reaches this conclusion

It is never enough, and it never will be enough.