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I've been thinking about culture war in media lately.
For those who don't know, I'm a game programmer, working to kinda move into the game-director role. Obviously at some point I am going to have games with humans in them [citation needed], and since they're humans I need to decide what they look like both in terms of dangly bits and skin color, which is of course now highly politicized, joining the ranks of literally everything else in existence.
But I'm not looking for an excuse to put characters in of one skin color or another. I want a universe that feels reasoanbly alive, with characters who are interesting and not just inserted for politics reasons. So a big part of this ends up being "how do I choose interesting characters that don't feel like a political statement, or at least, if they do feel like a political statement, it's a political statement I don't mind making, or a political statement I'm intentionally making as part of the game, and also, boy it would be nice to come up with a way to insert characters of literally any type without that also being a political statement, and I guess as a side note this involves talking about explicitly political media and what makes it work well or badly".
This has, in fact, been done well.
Let's talk about that.
One good technique is to put in characters that are politically sensitive and then just never call attention to it. Uhura was black, and everyone watching Original Star Trek knew it, because she was, you know, on screen, consistently reflecting fewer photons than Captain Kirk, as black people do. Kirk didn't seem to know it, though; Kirk just kind of ignored it. In fact, I'm not sure this ever came up during all of Star Trek. Uhura was black because Uhura was black, and the show carefully avoided ever making a thing out of it.
Another good example here is Miles Morales in Spider-Verse, who is also black, and again, I'm not sure the movie ever really mentions this. The movie is explicitly not about Miles Morales' skin color. Another example: a lot of characters from Borderlands 2, such as Ellie, who is a fat woman which is essentially never relevant to the plot, and Sir Hammerlock, who is gay.
Sir Hammerlock being gay is an interesting case, so let's talk about it more! With most characters, either you find out their skin color the instant you see them, or it turns into a serious Face Reveal thing (imagine the controversy if the Halo TV series had revealed that Master Chief was black!) But media in general tends not to show much about character's sexualities, and the game industry even less so. Even mentioning romantic choices feels like something that can't be done subtly - all characters could be seamlessly replaced by asexual beings that reproduce via mitosis unless your work is about the fact that sex happens.
(Tangent: Can we, like, do something about that? Have some main characters who start out married, and end married, and the story is never about their difficulties in marriage? Seriously, how many happily married main-character couples exist anywhere in fiction? Note to self, do this sometimes. End tangent.)
(Tangent addendum: I just played Guacamelee 2 and it does this. That's one! Anyway, moving on.)
But in the case of Hammerlock, he sends you on a quest to check out what happened to an old friend of his, and if you happen to dig into the quest details, which most people don't, you find out it's an old boyfriend, and honestly I really like how this is handled. Hammerlock is just a guy who likes guys, and he's worried about his old fling, and this is never turned into a Explicitly Political Thing, and that's cool. 10/10, very human.
Let's talk about another technique! Another technique is to, instead of making the plot not about something, make the plot extremely about something. I did a search for "movies about black people" and one site recommends Malcolm X and another hit provided by Google is a list of "11 movies that confront American racism". You can guess where that is going! Uhura could have been white, Ellie could have been a thin guy, Sir Hammerlock could have been asexual, that wouldn't really have changed any of those pieces of media, but you can't turn Malcolm X into an Asian without some pretty serious plot adjustment!
There's nothing wrong with this solution either. I am generally not interested in this kind of media, but if that's the movie someone wants to make, hey, have at it, all up to them. But because I'm thinking about this for the sake of my own games, I'm discarding this because, as mentioned, I'm just not all that interested.
But while we're on the subject . . .
. . . I can't help but wonder if this is counterproductive.
A painful thing about human beliefs is that we are very very very bad at changing our mind. And having arguments shoved in our face really doesn't help. Walk up to someone who hates skub and shout pro-skub catchphrases at them, if you like; this will not make them more positive about skub, they'll probably just become more certain that skub is bad because all skub-lovers are fuckin' jerks, man. But show them movies that just happen to include skub, in a way where it sorta just . . . doesn't matter? Maybe they'll stop caring so much about the horrors of skub. Desensitization is a hell of a drug.
Show them movies that claim to involve this, but have the movie constantly shouting pro-skub catchphrases?
Well, now we're back where we were before. Or even worse, frankly, because now they'll be expecting any movies with skub in them to be a thinly-veiled propaganda piece. So not only have we failed to convince them with subtlety and care, we've fucked up future attempts to do so. Good fuckin' job, man, way to go.
Skub is an allegory, but you've figured that out by now, so let's move on.
Specifically, let's talk about allegories.
There's an episode in Original Star Trek where the crew finds some guy in space. The guy's face is white on the right side and black on the left side. Wild, right? Aliens! Shortly thereafter, they find another guy whose face is white on the left side and black on the right side. These two people hate each other because they think the other person's face is wrong and their respective countries have destroyed their entire planet in the ensuing war. Also one of them was used as slaves by the other. What is this story really about? Who can say! It is a mystery! We shall never okay it's obviously about racism. Like. Transparently so.
(In one of the weirder and less socially-acceptable examples of nominative determinism I've seen, the script for this episode was written by a stereotypically white guy named Gene L. Coon.)
Star Trek never fucking blinks. At no point does Captain Kirk turn to the TV and say "by the way, black lives matter", or any less anachronistic catchphrase. This is doubly impressive because Uhuru is still in this episode obviously and she doesn't even mention it. There is a single mention that Earth was perhaps not entirely copacetic in the past - by Chekov, not even by Uhuru, and in response to a question that does not feel shoehorned in whatsoever - and then that's it! It just moves on.
This being Star Trek, Kirk of course has to draw a lesson at the end. And he does . . . but fascinatingly, it's a lesson about hate, not about racism. Racism does not exist for Kirk. He is not even considering the issue.
And Kirk's utter refusal to even consider racism frankly drives the point in both harder and more subtly.
It's a brilliant episode. I love this episode. It's a perfect example of how Star Trek writing, while hamfisted at the best of times, was elegant and refined in exactly the right ways. With so little effort they could have turned this into a cultural war! And they didn't!
I want more things like that. I want episodes that don't hammer in the point with a sledgehammer. I want allegories, not blatant propaganda; sure, it's still propaganda, I don't think anyone would claim that Star Trek wasn't. But it's careful propaganda. It's subtle propaganda. It's propaganda that doesn't come across like paid advertising, with the characters mugging at the camera while carefully holding soda cans so the label is visible, and the label says "vote for me in the next election, but not the other guy, he's a fascist, which is proven by this movie about comedic squirrels wearing silly hats".
And here is the point where I run out of clever inspiration.
I'm trying to figure out how I would make either characters that are never called attention to, or characters that are an allegory . . . for trans people.
And it's goddamn impossible.
The problem with trans people (if you are getting linked here in anger because I said there's "a problem with trans people", finish the damn sentence first, christ) is that the entire classic concept of being "trans" is linked, kind of intrinsically, to being invisible.
Not to the person themselves being invisible. But to the trans-ness being invisible. The platonic ideal of a trans man is someone who everyone looks at and says "yes, that is a man, I have no doubt in my mind", and then never thinks twice about. The "trans" part, ideally, vanishes. And this makes it really easy to put a trans man in a game or a movie: you just put a man in.
But that doesn't help. Uhura does not work if she looks exactly like a white guy. The point of Uhura is that she is obviously black and nobody cares. But you can't have someone who's "obviously successfully trans" - it's contradictory! You have to drop a Sir-Hammerlock-esque hint somewhere, and, one, it's really hard to do so when any mention of a trans person's birth gender is "deadnaming", while, two, Hammerlock is totally cool with casually mentioning that he used to pork a dude with a dong, but trans people themselves generally do not want to talk about their birth gender. It's similar to the whole reveal-a-character's-sexuality problem except massively boosted. Put a character in who keeps talking about all the people they're boning and they come across as oversexed and somewhat disturbing; put a character in who keeps talking about how trans they are and you get Hainly Abrams.
So, then what? An allegory? But what allegory can you possibly use?
How do you make a respectful allegory about something that you're trying to show is conceptually acceptable but whose ideal form is intentionally invisible?
Honestly? I don't know.
My best idea here is to do something with aliens; some species of alien with extremely flexible sexual characteristics, who don't mind talking about them but which are never relevant to the plot, just roll it into background worldbuilding. I guess it's ironic that I'm coming up with this idea while also playing around with the concept of an alien species with extreme inflexible sexual dimorphism, but so it goes. But this is inevitably going to result in people yelling "zomg are you saying that trans people are aliens" and so that frankly isn't even going to work.
I cannot come up with a solution here, and this makes me very sympathetic to people who are trying to do it the right way. There isn't a right way. There's never been a right way. There's just a lot of wrong ways.
Feels like a tool missing from my toolkit, to be honest.
I don't really have an ending to this post.
But even this is a culture war move--this is the classically liberal "color blind" approach. I think it's a great approach! But I am assured by the badly-named "anti-racism" crowd that the "color blind" approach is bad. We get this in the recent "Secret Invasion" scene where Fury leans on Rhodes for some color-based solidarity--using aliens as a stand-in wasn't enough, we had to get some explicit discussion of segregation so everyone knows that the only message that matters is (as Scott recently put it) "re-enacting the 60s civil rights struggle."
Sometimes, yes, but I remember someone in the last ten years (Yudkowsky?) pithily observing that it is almost impossible to write an engaging story about mature individuals making responsible choices. Without conflict, where is the catharsis? In fact I have seen (and personally very much enjoyed) a growing number of counterexamples in recent years, mostly in anime, indie games, and Nintendo titles (especially stuff like Animal Crossing)--a sort of "comfort food" genre that (for probably obvious reasons) attracts more women to traditionally masculine media. I note that even, say, Stardew Valley does not quite meet this mark, given the pressure imposed by the clock and the calendar. But many "overpowered protagonist" anime titles do seem to hit this mark--Farming Life in Another World, for example.
I think Key & Peele's "Office Homophobe" helpfully illustrates the difference--except that there are real, fairly serious disagreements about this, often discussed under the heading of "visibility." The point of "Pride Parades" is often explicitly articulated as visibility. During the "sexual revolution," the winning legal argument for pornography as "free speech" was that pornography is a special kind of argument for a different kind of world--a world where people are less perplexed and uptight about sex.
I feel like you make some good observations here but you only seem to be thinking about one half of the discussion, namely, the half where you want to know how you are supposed to "decide what [human characters should] look like both in terms of dangly bits and skin color." The other half of the discussion is, why do you need to decide that? Not in the trivial sense (you have to decide that because, if you're going to have human characters at all, they must be plausibly human), but in the deeper sense of how your artistic choices are going to be driven. Do you "need to decide so your game is marketable?" That will give you a different answer than if you "need to decide so you don't offend your development team," or "so your plot makes any sense," or "so your game meets your/someone else's threshold of realism," or whatever.
So if you want to include a "trans" character in a game, my first question is, "okay, why?" And to be clear--"I just feel like it" is perfectly acceptable as an explanation, if all you care about is art for the sake of art. But in most contexts, either your "trans" character is going to be "invisible" in just the sense you observe, or they are going to be so visible that your cultural milieu makes it a "thing." For it to not be a thing would require a world (either the one we live in, or the one in the game) where "gender markers" are slim-to-nonexistent. Feminist scholar Sally Haslanger once wrote, "when justice is achieved, there will no longer be white women (there will no longer be men or women, whites or members of any other race)." She (and many feminists) seem to really believe that the biological differences between men and women can be of no particular moment in an egalitarian world, to the point where we don't even have language to distinguish such things. Gender eliminativism, however, runs strongly counter to the gender essentialism expressed by most transsexuals today. To create a fictional universe where being trans is not noticeable, and yet trans characters are also not invisible, you can't create a universe where some characters are trans, you have to create a universe where there are no socially constructed gender norms.
I guess what I'm bringing myself around to is the idea that transsexuality just is a political identity, as surely as "Republican" or "Democrat." Either a trans character is noticeably violating gender norms (in which case, they are calling attention to themselves) or they are living up to gender norms (in which case, they are invisible). Just as you'll never know whether that background character is a Catholic or a monarchist or a /b/tard unless it comes up in the storyline, you'll never know a video game character is trans unless it gets advertised in some way.
But probably you should care about that approximately as much, and for approximately the same reasons, as you care about making sure there are enough Muslims or women or incels in your game (which, depending on your game, might matter anywhere from "not at all" to "a whole damn lot"). Depicting an in-game society where nobody cares about race is pretty easy, given the medium of video games; you see characters who look wildly different, and you see that nobody cares. Forget Uhura; check out the friendship between Han Solo and Chewbacca! But depicting an in-game society where nobody cares about gender requires you to build an in-game society where nobody cares about gender, which like... as long as we're a sexually dimorphic species for whom pair-bonding is (at least temporarily) necessary for procreation, that's probably flatly impossible. But in a transhumanist society where body-swapping is feasible and the act of sex has been obsoleted by an infinite variety of pleasure-generating technologies, basically everyone is going to be "trans" by contemporary standards.
In short: why? If you want to make propaganda, make some propaganda. If you don't want to make propaganda, then either non-attention-called trans people or an allegory for trans people will be varying shades of possible depending entirely on what else you're demanding from your game. A realistic 1920s noir thriller where one character happens to be openly and noticeably trans and nobody cares will fail to be authentic, and this will invite totally understandable criticism (in fact, it will obviously be propaganda, even if you prefer it not to be propaganda). A cyberpunk RPG where you can give your character breasts and a penis, by contrast, is unlikely to attract the same kind of attention (even though it will still probably attract some complaints).
Because if I can prove it can't be done, then I can use that to explain why people don't do it. Because if I can prove it can be done, then I can do it and gently show people how to politics better.
Because to me, "the existence of trans people" isn't propaganda any more than putting angels or nazis or bikers or forest rangers in a game is propaganda. Having things in a game does not imply support for those things, nor does it imply disapproval of those things. Having a larger palette makes for more options, which lets me make better games. And the more ways I can use parts of that palette, the better off I am.
Because it's a challenge.
So, to be sure I'm understanding: when you say "prove it can/'t be done," it seems like "it" here refers, not to including a trans character in a game--since you already know that trans characters have been included in games--but to creating either "trans characters that are never called attention to" or "characters that are an allegory for trans people."
In the case of the former, you are stuck on the "invisibility" problem: "The point of Uhura is that she is obviously black and nobody cares. But you can't have someone who's 'obviously successfully trans' - it's contradictory!" To this I can only respond that contradiction is the beating heart of transsexuality. If gender essentialism is true, then a male who is wired to pursue the Platonic Feminine will always fall short in some way (until we unlock transhumanist body-swapping in the tech tree); because males cannot bear children, there is no such thing as being "successfully" trans, only varying degrees of failure.
(Note that this is also true for infertile women, many of whom struggle emotionally with infertility and regard themselves at some level as failures as women. I observe in passing: how many pregnant women have you seen in video games? Conversely, does infertility strike you as like transsexuality in terms of how difficult it would be to depict in a video game "without calling attention to it?")
But if gender essentialism is false, then it's not even clear what being "successfully trans" can possibly mean, because there is no Platonic Feminine--there are only varying degrees of conformity or nonconformity to socially constructed gender expectations. Either a male who perfectly presents as feminine just is a woman by definition (if gender is inessential and divorced from sex, then there is no such thing as a "transwoman," just people behaving in ways that society arbitrarily dubs masculine or feminine) or there is no gender binary at all, no "men" or "women" in truth but only a whole bunch of people behaving in a diverse array of ways.
The contemporary practice of transsexuality can only even exist in a society that maintains a fairly strict gender binary but also makes sociolinguistic accommodations for people who transgress that binary. For a trans character to be a trans character, you either have to commit to gender essentialism and accept that "it can't be done," or you have to eschew gender essentialism and accept that "it can't be done," or you have to situate your character within a game setting where transsexuality is as explicitly noticeable as race but also never remarked upon. (This might be done, for example, through widespread use of neopronouns, or trans flags, or ubiquitous nudity.) But here I'm basically repeating myself: the disposition of a trans character will depend substantially on the trans-ness you put into your worldbuilding.
Allegories I think should be much easier, in part because queer theory is absolutely drowning in them. An intimately-told story of a woman's struggle with infertility could very easily be an allegory for transsexuality. There are also many, many stories of gender-norm violation throughout history, including women sneaking into Plato's Academy, women dressing as men in Shakespeare's plays, and so forth. "Are these characters actually trans?" is a common topic in writing in the humanities.
Whether any of this rises to the level of showing people "how to politics better" I leave an open question.
This seems like a bit of a motte to me, along the lines of "putting black people in a game (or movie) is not propaganda." Well, no, not all by itself. But there are settings where it makes more and less sense to do, and ways it can seem more or less like propaganda. Including a "successfully trans" character in your 21st century horror RPG is a very different thing than including a similarly-situated trans character in your 16th century open world samurai simulator (Uhura would also not go well in such a game!). Incongruously imposing 21st century American notions of sex and gender on historical settings is propaganda no matter how you might care to protest the contrary. Imposing those same ideas on a fantasy world of your own devising, much less so.
Again--if I've understood you--the "challenge" you have in mind does not seem to be the mere inclusion of trans characters in games, but the presentation of trans characters at the level of Uhura: visible, but unremarkable. What I think I am trying to suggest to you is that Roddenberry's artistic success in this regard (as distinct from his strategic success in the world we inhabit) was not his inclusion of the black Uhura character, but in his construction of a world where it makes sense for her blackness to pass unremarked. You have asked a character-crafting question when you are actually facing a worldbuilding problem.
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