Their Lot Will E’er Be As Prey: a trans boy gamer’s experience
I would like to tell you some things about my new favorite video game, but first I’d like to tell you about my first favorite video game.
Diablo II was the game that turned me into a gamer.
I’d played computer games before, of course. First it was childen’s educational games that, in the 90s, were all the rage for middle- and upper-middle class families who knew computers were the future of the new world economy and wanted their children to get a head start in using them, or at least to get away with spending less time helping us with our homework. Then there were some games that were genuinely for fun, no ulterior function required, but none of them really stands out as meaningful to me; I could get into them, but none of them ever got into me.
Diablo II is a fantasy RPG about fighting monsters. It’s the sequel to Diablo, which I hadn’t played and have no interest in ever playing. I tried Diablo III briefly in 2013, but it couldn’t hold my interest. Neither of them is Diablo II. No game has ever been Diablo II except Diablo II.
Sometime in my preteens, Diablo II got into me. It didn’t just change me, I felt it change me. Not entirely in a good way. I can’t completely blame the game, though. I was an adolescent with a lot going on: mental illnesses that felt like monsters living in my own bedroom, a body I hated and a sexuality I hated even more, but nobody I really felt safe talking to about any of those things. I was growing into my flaws, one of them being that I am chronically prone to obsession. Addictions festered in any dark corner I occupied for too long. I didn’t do any drugs — not till much later anyway — but I did binge on any pleasure within reach. It just happened that the worst addictive substances weren’t within reach at the time.
In that sense, a gamer is sometimes like a drinker. Most of us who got hooked, we got hooked young and vulnerable. Or there was an untreated trauma being soothed in the light of the screen late at night. We built a hobby out of our vice, just like any beer snob. And doing it at a party with your friends doesn’t make a difference to your brain. So when my brother and I got into a fight over whose turn it was to play, he threw the disk. I watched it sail through the air, across the room and across the next room, until it landed gently on the cushion on the bay window. And then, when I saw that it was safe, I turned around and savagely tackled my older, larger brother.
I lost, of course. I suck at fighting, and my brother has always been my superior in all physical contests*, and I love him with all the hate in my heart. But the point is, this game got into me.
Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen reminds me of Diablo II, except it’s better by every metric I can think of.
Let’s talk about gender politics in video games. And yes, I realize that’s a dragon I shouldn’t necessarily challenge before grinding to a higher level. But what the heck; I’m stocked up on curratives and I’ve just saved my progress, so I may as well give it a try.
Diablo II has five character class options: Amazon, Sorceress, Barbarian, Necromancer, and Paladin. My first character was an Amazon; my brother’s was a Necromancer. My second character was a Sorceress, and I did enjoy playing as a Barbarian for a while and even tried the Necromancer class once, to see if it might be my brother’s secret to success in the game. The Paladin class was boring and I never saw the point. At least that’s what I remember, after almost twenty years. Oh, and by choosing a class, you necessarily chose a gender. That was normal at the time. Did you know that? Amazons and Sorceresses were female. If you wanted to raise the dead and command an army of skeletons, or take a supernaturally high leap and land with a rumbling crash back to earth, or… whatever it is Paladins do? You have to be a guy. It’s just the rules. You can’t change the rules; you can’t even break them. Isn’t that a fun start to an escapist fantasy? We can whisk ourselves away to a land where magic is real and we can slaughter demons by the dozens to save the world against impossible odds, but a girl doing a man’s job? That’s just out of the question.
It wasn’t just that it was sexist. It was unrealistic. I was a child of the late 20th century. My mother was a second-wave feminist who was a military officer in the first years that women were allowed to be military officers alongside men. My dad did the majority of cooking and cleaning in our house. I knew that gender roles were bullshit. But gender itself? That’s real. And I was only at the beginning of my decades-long journey of gender defiance culminating in the affably deviant genderqueer I am today. Back then I was still heavily invested in playing as a girl, both in life and in imagination. I selected the Amazon and the Sorceress as my two favorite classes. Will I ever know if that decision was strictly due to gender, or if it’s just because I like ranged attacks so I can stay conveniently away from harm while still posing a threat? Or is a focus on ranged attack somehow an inherently feminine playstyle, and the game designers simply understood evolutionary psychology better than my 12-year-old proto-SJW self?
Whatever the truth, I remember feeling unjustly restrained by this failure of representation. I could go into this video game to escape the bullies and the depression and my failing grades and the Bush administration and even from the drab reality of a world where I couldn’t enchant my arrows with ice magic, but I couldn’t escape the gender binary. I couldn’t escape that question: will you be a Woman, and everything that implies, or will you be a Man, and everything that implies? Make this decision, and make it now, but make it carefully: everything about you will depend on this.
God, no wonder I took so long to come out as trans. Not that it’s all Diablo II’s fault, mind you; it’s the general culture that influenced both Diablo II and all the other culture that surrounded my adolescent brain. It was the Patriarchy that was bothering me, as it still does. If nothing else, I want it made clear that I only complain about sexism in video games because ultimately, I love those games, and I don’t like when the things I love are sexist. The games I don’t love can be as sexist as they please, and I’m not going to complain. I probably won’t even notice. But when it shows up in the games I love, it feels like a betrayal by a friend.
In 2019, yes, this year, I happened to see a video of two of my favorite comedic entertainers playing Dragon’s Dogma as a wildly gender-nonconforming fighter who expresses her love for her child by throwing him at their enemies during battle. Now, other people have sung the praises of Monster Factory with greater skill than I could so I’ll just say that I saw something in that video that made me want to play the game. And honestly? I think it was the character customization engine. Monster Factory as a series focuses on character customization as a function of gameplay, and especially as a channel for individual imagination and creativity — in other words, as a basic building block of fun. In this particular episode, Dragon’s Dogma allowed them to customize a female fighter whose every physical characteristic defied cisnormative assumptions: she was tall and massively muscular, with a balding head and long chin, and even named after a man: legendary baseball thrower Randy Johnson. (Yeah, that’s McElroy humor for you. Just go with it.)
I went into playing Dragon’s Dogma with the goal of playing a gender-nonconforming player. I began my transition a few years ago, and haven’t played an RPG with this sort of character selection engine since then; I wanted to see if I could find gender affirmation in such a game. And I was not disappointed. I think it’s a very useful tool in that regard, and frankly revolutionary.
I don’t think we often stop to think about video game design as an opportunity to explore gender. When we think of “video games” and “gender” in the same context, it’s hard to avoid thinking of Gamergate, Anita Sarkeesian, and the dangers of being openly feminist in gaming communities. This tends to stifle all but the most heavy-handed of discussion, like whether something is sexist or not and whether saying so is somehow antithetical to freedom of speech.
But I know I’m not the only person to think this was a worthy focus of analysis. It’s been a subject of discourse among feminist gamers for years. Mike Rugnetta, a pioneer in contemporary media criticism, analysed the Sims’ character creation engine through a lens of gender performativity theory in 2015, in a video called How Do We And The Sims Perform Gender. But as a cis man, albeit one with good working knowledge of feminist theory and praxis, Rugnetta has never experienced gender within a game the way that cis women and transgender and nonbinary people do. And neither do most cis men and boys who play games. And furthermore, cis women do not experience gender in games the way that many trans and nonbinary gamers do.
In making a video game, developers have an opportunity to create a simplified version of a world and, depending on the kind of game, a society. All the rules and laws and customs of that society are deliberately encoded by the developers. And when a game begins in an encampment occupied exclusively by powerful and sexy women, that’s a deliberate choice by the developers. It’s not “just how the world works.” It’s how the developers wanted the world in their game to work. They wanted to tell a story about a hero coming to an encampment occupied exclusively by powerful and sexy women, impressing the (powerful and sexy) woman who leads them by killing her old friend who’d become evil (and sexy) because of magic, and then exploring a dungeon where the bodies of sexy women lay disemboweled and otherwise maimed in various positions. Several such dungeons, actually.
Diablo II is a gory, violent, horrifying game. I loved it very much. But I was, at the time, a dysphoric adolescent who hated their newly growing breasts, and every single female character in this game was designed in such a way that their breasts were huge and fully on display. And I don’t think it will surprise you to hear that this was quite normal in games. The trend is well-documented and thoroughly discussed.
But I told you this so I could tell you some of my thoughts about the Amazon class. As I said, my first character was an Amazon, and in similar RPGs I still prefer a playstyle that class exemplifies: using ranged attacks to keep myself out of danger for longer. You know, the coward’s playstyle. It’s very much not the prefered style of the macho, who depend on brute strength to wield huge swords and equip heavy armor so they can get into the thick of battle and let the enemy swarm them at their own risk. It’s a style that privileges long-term survival and preservation of resources over short-term dominance and ego — a feminine style, come to think of it. Father Christmas gave Susan a bow, after all. And it makes sense that I would choose this styel, given that I was never dominant in any social situation back then, and I really wouldn’t know what to do with dominance if I had it. It was simply easier, less painful, and more fun to see how may shots I could get in on an enemy before they came close enough to attack than to see how may shots I could take before dying.
But though I describe the playstyle as feminine, I’m not the one who decided the Amazon had to be female. The game developers did. If you just wanted a character class who relies on ranged weapons, you could easily call it a “ranger”, which is consistent with preexisting RPG tropes, and make it gender-neutral or male as easily as female. Why an Amazon?
Amazons were, for thousands of years’ worth of myth and legend, a whole reclusive society of women who were fighters and probably lesbians and definitely very sexy and powerful. They were a standby in the fantasy genre for decades or more. Before Gal Godot ever graced the screen, generations of geek boys have been drooling over busty women with boob-armor who could challenge the greatest male armies of the world, and inventing all kinds of stories about them, without ever needing to fear a woman looking over their shoulder because… well, these stories were for boys, weren’t they?
Except sometimes girls get into these stories too, because they’re often good stories. And sometimes, the girls talk amongst themselves about how gross it is that a society of powerful women, whose entire culture revolves around their independence from men, still wear outfits that only make sense if they’re designed to be attractive to men.
If you don’t have breasts, don’t even think of trying to design an outfit for a fighter with breasts. You have no idea how that shit works, and we can tell.
But the existence of the Amazon myth implies something about the people who perpetuate that particular story, especially when you understand that most of those people are men. Cis men get some weird ideas about what women do when they’re alone together (and, for that matter, why they would want to be alone together), and stories about Amazons epitomize those weird imaginings. Not just the fact that they so often dress like strippers — not that there’s anything wrong with strippers, it’s just very unrealistic to the point of cringe that a whole society of women who don’t need men would dress like them. And not just that all such societies were founded in direct opposition to male violence and sexism, as if the creators of these stories are aware that the Patriarchy is a thing but would still prefer to fixate on the bodies of the women who object to it more than the actual objections.
But the idea that powerful women who don’t need or want the company of men must necessarily form their own society, and still end up structuring their society so as to idealize conventionally masculine pursuits such as fighting, strikes me as especially evident that the storytellers who nurtured the Amazon myth weren’t thinking about women as people with experiences meaningfully distinct from their status as the object of men’s attraction and/or insecurity. If you ask a group of real-life women who don’t need men (you know, queer women and feminists) what a matriarchal society would look like, they probably wouldn’t come up with anything resembling the Amazons of Diablo II. That’s why it’s a bad trope: not because sexy women in video games are bad, but because a whole society of sexy women who are made to look sexy for no reason that makes sense in fiction is just dumb and makes for a bad story.
But perhaps I’m too hung up on the Amazon class. There were two options for female characters, after all, and I did enjoy the Sorceress class, which was similar in several ways. They both depended heavily on ranged attacks, and the Sorceress’s gravity-defying underboob-revealing costume haunts my nightmares to this day. As for the in-story background for her character… well, according to official lore, “The female mage clan of Zann Esu … possess many of the same skills as the male members of the Eastern mage clans.” That’s right… like the Amazon, the Sorceress comes from a society of powerful, sexy women who live apart from men. I guess if girls want to play boys’ games, they really do have to do it as far away from the boys as they can get.
And that really is the most telling detail of all.
Now, Dragon’s Dogma is designed with much more sophisticated gender dynamics. Not only has it become standard in the intervening years to allow a choice of gender in RPGs with customizable characters (this was one feature I liked in Diablo III), but this particular engine seems especially amenable to gender-nonconforming bodies. I could create a soft-featured boy with a beard and a full face of makeup, or a black butch lesbian with natural hair and a cute goth girlfriend, or a body that more or less matches my own after almost two years of testosterone and chest masculinization surgery. (Except my belly. Bellies like mine aren’t really an option in Dragon’s Dogma.)
I found when I played that there were some ways that my character’s gender would affect the way the world treated them. For instance, there is a particular kind of monster who attacks more aggressively against women than against men. And there is an entire community of female NPCs who will only trust your character if she’s also a woman. (And yes, they’re sexy and powerful women who live apart from patriarchal society. But hey, it’s only been a few years since Gamergate, so I’m gonna count my blessings.)
I find these details interesting because it means that the choice of gender, while no longer completely deterministic with regard to playstyle or mechanics, is still not purely aesthetic. It does affect gameplay — just not that much, and in ways that actually reveal something about the world depicted and the story being told. It makes it rewarding to think about gender while making choices in the game, just like we all think about gender when making choices in real life, even if it doesn’t rule every decision we make. And thinking about gender is something I enjoy doing for fun.
But while all I’d really hoped for in this game was to explore a medieval fantasy setting with the genderqueer character of my dreams, I found something much more waiting for me in the fictional land of Gransys. Gransys, a country troubled by monsters and living under the looming threat of a dragon and clinging with all their hope to the promise of the Arisen, prophesied to have the power to defeat the dragon and end this terror. The Arisen, whose wound is thought a curse by the only one who’s seen it up close, because their heart has been stolen by the Dragon, eaten, and yet they live still, marked by that same wound as the one with the power to defeat Him. It’s like Harry Potter meets Lord of the Rings.
And like those classics, in Dragon’s Dogma I found a story as captivating as it is detailed, and a world as deep as it is vast. I found what, many years ago, I once found in a game called Diablo II that transfixed me so deeply that I would try to tackle my older, larger brother just to get my turn to play. I found a character I could fully relate to, in a body that I felt could be mine, playing out a story that felt inspiring to me.
Diablo II was inspiring to me. It had a story I remember clearly after all these years: the three Prime Evils, Diablo, Mephisto, and Ba’al (look I didn’t say it was particularly original) threaten to destroy our world. The demons you spend your days slaughtering in between towns? They’re all serving the Prime Evils, and you’re killing your way through the entire army of demons and monsters, through three separate regions of the world and even into Hell Itself, not just keeping yourself safe but rushing headlong and as brutally as possible into the heat of battle. It’s… not exactly a story that matches my preferred playstyle of “use ranged attacks to stay out of danger longer”. But the tension between those two motivations, to fight and to stay safe, was what made the game exciting. And that’s what made it fun to do what I really like most about fantasy RPGs: exploration.
In 2017, I traveled for two weeks alone, camping in state parks and national parks along the way, to see the total solar eclipse from Wyoming. The whole trip was just an opportunity I manufactured for myself to drink in the magesty of the natural world: a tour of one of the most beautiful places on Earth, capped off with one of the most stunning and mythically significant astronomical events one can possibly witness. I’m a glutton for beauty in whatever form it takes, and I will sleep for twelve nights straight on a sleeping bag on the rocky ground in a tent just to witness a few moments of sublime beauty. Exploration is a pleasure I find more satisfying than almost any other in this world. And video games are worlds I can explore whenever I want, even in November when those beautiful places are all expensively far away and I have work in the morning and I can’t just spend all my days wishing, in vain, to go west…
Gransys, the fabulous countryside where Dragon’s Dogma takes place, reminds me of the Rocky Mountain region that I explored on that trip in 2017. It’s wild and expansive, and the sky is so real I feel I could lose myself in its stars — just like in Wyoming and South Dakota and Colorado. And I love just wandering around in this land, being there and seeing it and being part of its landscapes. I collect herbs along the coast and learn their names and uses. I speak to people in town and learn their names and change their stories through my actions. I discover a society with myths and legends that are relevant to my existence, for I am the fabled Arisen, and I am still figuring out what that means for my story.
In other words, what I liked about Diablo II and Dragon’s Dogma is that they’re really good fantasy stories that I can really live in and explore, and thereby explore myself and my relationship to the world… I mean the real world, the one I live in as a very vulnerable person trying to sort out the legend from the facts under threat of terrible monsters whose true nature is as enigmatic as my identity is to me. A game where I could practice fighting monsters, in preparation for the monsters I would have to fight in my daily life — monsters like my personal flaws, the betrayal that lurks behind a friend’s smile, the trolls and assassins that lurk in open places, especially wherever the small dare to challenge the mighty. For instance, a trans boy challenging sexism in gamer culture.
This is Simon. He’s a Strider, which is the class within Dragon’s Dogma that most closely resembles the Amazon I remember playing in Diablo II. He uses a ranged weapon to stay out of danger as long as possible, but can quickly switch if needed to a rapid attack with dual daggers that doesn’t only deal close-range damage but propels him forward, closer to his opponent, pressing ever onward toward the danger. Simon has a blend of the feminine and masculine tactics I described above, and a blend of the feminine and masculine aesthetic traits I like to display on my own body. He’s not stuck in the Amazon’s boob-centric universe, not forced into a role defined by a straight male gaze. I think he’s the Diablo II character I always wanted, but wasn’t allowed to play.
Remember this meme? I think we ought to bring it back. Gamers have gotten too fixated on defining our culture in terms of what it isn’t: not for girls, not for queers, not for disabled people, not for feminists or diversity or SJWs. But what has always been captivating about gaming is that it allows us to experience all kinds of stories outside our own limited abilities. It’s about imagination and fantasy and, yes, empathy.
If you’re a gamer, I would encourage you to take up this meme again. It’s a powerful forgotten proverb of our tribe, one that we need more than ever now. I encourage you to look at this image, and see the hypocrisy, even if it is accidental, in showing a multitudinous diversity of only male characters. I want to see new versions of this image with more diverse characters represented. I love the sentiment, and it needs to be expanded. We all need to expand. We need to explore. That’s the only way we’ll survive in this fabulous countryside full of monsters and wonders that we live in.
* except, as of 2014, marathon-running. This remains the one thing my brother will never best me at. Mainly because he’s unlikely to ever try it. Because he’s a CHICKEN. COME AT ME BRO.
