Representation is Not "Politics"

Let’s say you’re playing a video game, or watching a movie, and the protagonist and most of the supporting characters look like you. What’s your reaction? And how would you describe the choice the creators made in choosing those characters? Now imagine the protagonist and supporting characters don’t look like you, but are of a different race, gender, or sexuality.

For a lot of white men, particularly those with a right-wing and socially conservative perspective, the former case—where the characters are largely straight white men—will just feel like an unremarkable default. Of course the protagonist is white, male, and straight. That’s what’s normal.

But in the second case, they’re likely to feel there’s something suspicious going on. A black woman protagonist, a gay friend, maybe even a trans woman isn’t normal. It makes them uncomfortable, because representation of those kinds of people is out of the ordinary. Maybe they can appear on the periphery, but if they’re centered—if they’re the antagonist, the primary characters, or maybe even all the speaking parts—is so far out of the ordinary that something must be up. You don’t do this unless you’re trying to send a message, and that message must be political.

There’s a new gaming in the long-running Dragon Age series out, the first in ten years. As was the case with the prior four, the character you play can be male or female. But this new game, Veilguard, doesn’t give you two options. Rather, you can construct your character from a number of variables, all independent of each other. Choose a voice, whether that’s masculine-sounding or feminine. Pick whether your character has breasts, or a penis, or both. Go nuts with hairstyles, heights, body types, and so on. What’s more, you can change any of these, at any time, even after you’ve started playing. And, of course, you can pick any skin color you want. (If you want vitiligo, you can have that, too.)

The first three companions you meet are women. Half your companions throughout the game are female. Dragon Age let’s you “romance” your companions, and all of them are pansexual. All are warriors and wizards and champions, and aren’t forced into “traditional” gender roles. And the game, and its world, treats all of this as normal.

This has, predictably, upset the worst people on the internet. Metacritic, which aggregates reviews, from both critics and users, has Veilguard scoring quite high with the former and quite low with the latter. To take just one example from the first page of them:

The rest of the pages—and pages, and pages—are much of the same. And one common acquisition they hurl is that BioWare, the game’s developers, have injected “politics” into the game.

It’s an acquisition you see all the time, whenever a pop culture property prominently features racial minorities, women, or LGBTQ characters. Frequently, it’s quite funny, as when not terribly bright guys lambast Star Wars or Star Trek for suddenly becoming “political,” betraying their history, these men imagine, of someone not featuring political themes.

I want to zero in on the rhetorical move these guys make. Let’s say you object to homosexuality, and so object to the presence of gay characters in a movie or game in a way that’s portrayed as unobjectionable. What might you label their inclusion? If you think being gay is wrong, the most obvious term would be “immoral.” But instead they go with “political.” Why?

Because we tend to think of “politics” as slightly sinister. And position “political” as in opposition to “artistic” or “authentic.” Thus if Dragon Age has made a choice about its presentation or story for political reasons, that’s a fair target for criticism.

Or, at least, it’s a fairer and easier target than what’s actually going on in Dragon Age, and every other example that’s upset the same not terribly bright right-wing gamers: representation.

The fact is, gay people exist. As do black people. And trans people. And women. In fact, people of those sorts are all over the place. The world is full of them. So it’s perfectly reasonable for a game to include them. It would be weird, in fact, if a game’s vast world of a setting didn’t. So these games are representing the world that exists, not the strangely and preposterously monotone world these kinds of far-right gamers imagine exists.

What these guys want is for everyone else to simply accept that representation is necessarily political, because then it makes it easier for them to demand straight white male uniformity in the name of banishing politics, instead of in the name of banishing representation. And they want to do that because these gamers are a particularly socially and emotionally stunted sort, people who are too emotionally fragile to experience pop culture products with characters who don’t look like them.

So don’t let them get away with it. By all means, critique a game’s politics. But don’t let angry gamers convince you that the mere inclusion of non-whites, non-straights, and non-males counts as that.