O Taash i idei queerowych postaci, które czują się "zbyt bezpiecznie

This is simply a communicative about fear and anxiety.

It’s besides about Taash, the fire-breathing qunari companion in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. erstwhile I was playing through the game for my review, they were 1 of my favourite folks to have along on missions. There are various reasons why and any are just practical: I was playing a mage, so having a warrior on hand for Warrior Stuff was useful, but I besides enjoyed Taash’s snarky and applicable approach to the world. all time another organization associate would get lost in their own head about something, Taash’s “That’s vashedan!” would inevitably yank them back out in a fun way.

Taash is besides nonbinary, which is 1 of 2 axes their character conflict and improvement rotate around. The another is that they were born in the lands of the Qun, a spiritual and profoundly stratified society, but they were raised in Rivain, a close-enough Mediterranean analog with a sharply contrasting culture. In both respects, Taash is presented to us as a character who feels pulled between opposing poles by these forces in their life. Taash’s mother, Shathann, is an expert in Qun past and a stern and lecturing kind who seems to disapprove of everything “nontraditional” her kid does, including both not being feminine adequate and not following the Qun enough.

My minute of fear about Taash came erstwhile I encountered a circumstantial in-game codex entry: Taash Notes: gathering Shadow Dragons to Talk sex Stuff. A hefty number of codex entries involving Taash are framed as notes they take on various subjects (including 1 on how to set traps in the Lighthouse, which I enjoyed). Their notes on sex unlock after a conversation with Neve and Rook about Taash’s discomfort with their sex identity; the implication is that Neve hooked Taash up with trans folks in the Shadow Dragons faction who might have useful information on the subject.

Unfortunately, this codex entry feels both awkward and out of place. Not necessarily harmful — there’s nothing in it that made me go “that’s evidently untrue” or anything of the sort. That said, if this were a Mass Effect game and not a Dragon Age one, it would be highly easy to paint this codex entry as Taash’s net search history. It has highly strong “baby queer individual googling what ‘queer’ means and writing it down” energy, due to the fact that that’s fundamentally what it is. Without an in-game internet, Taash has to trust on speaking to actual people; without in-game social media, they get their thoughts out on paper to make sense of them.

Taash’s notes cover everything from what dysphoria is, to struggling with the definition of the word “nonbinary,” to uplifting testimonials from said trans NPCs about what sex means, to the virtually stated “Trans female IS woman.” Speaking from experience, and as individual who was working out their sexuality at a time erstwhile the net was not even remotely as widely available as it is today, these are the kind of notes and scribbles I would have written, it’s true, but in the process they can come across in a very “here’s Taash’s Being Genderqueer 101 blog post” kind of way.

Since Taash’s way of speaking is already comparatively informal and “modern-sounding” compared to another organization members, that contributes to the feeling that this is just always so somewhat out of place. Critics and fans have argued that “nonbinary,” an already modern term, needed an in-universe equivalent, which I disagree with. Harvey Randall at PC Gamer argues that instead, Veilguard’s writers needed to establish more of how the word was situated in the DA world’s culture and history, and I do think contextualizing “nonbinary” in Thedas culture/language would have helped, but it’s not strictly speaking required.

As I read through the codex entry, I had a pit-of-the-stomach feeling getting bigger with each fresh word. I wasn’t worried about the anti-woke crowd; one, they would hatred this game regardless, and two, who cares what fools think? What worried me was what my fellow queer players would gotta say about it, due to the fact that in my imagination, the anticipation of a profoundly negative reaction loomed large. That was informed by my own reading, too; due to the fact that the applicable codex entry had a somewhat “101-level” speech — and was delivered in a codex entry and not through, say, a scene where Taash interacts straight with those trans NPCs about this — made me worried that queer players would feel it didn’t go far enough, or would believe it to be targeted at non-queer players instead.

However, a large part of my anxiousness came from individual experience. In the summertime of 2011, I was a postdoctoral investigator at the MIT Game Lab, which was at the time the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Our partnership with the Singapore Media improvement Authority meant that all summer, Singaporean game dev students from our Singaporean sister laboratory would come to Boston, divided into teams alongside local students from MIT, Berklee College of Music, and Rhode Island School of Design, and make games in an intensive eight-week program. Specifically, they would make games that furthered the investigation of academics working in games, who applied to have their projects chosen.

That summer, 1 squad was making a game for my research. The survey sought to realize a team’s process as they built a game with a very broad mandate: “Make a game with a queer-resonant theme.” In game improvement terms, I was product owner; another laboratory investigator was our game director. While we did spend time in the area with the squad to observe them and supply input and oversight, the game’s creative direction — story, art, sound, gameplay — was in the hands of the students, and it was truly their efforts that drove the project.

The consequence was a game called A Closed World, a short and simple Flash-based RPG. erstwhile the game was released, it got good press both internally and externally, with coverage by multiple game publications, including Kotaku, as well as non-games news outlets. In retrospect, I am certain the MIT name opened doors for us that might not open as easy for another queer creators, peculiarly indie queer creators working on their own. My squad was thrilled to see our small game find affirmative reception in the world, however.

This is not to say we didn’t receive criticisms for missteps or things we overlooked, and of those, many were still the products of intense discussion and debate among the team, or between the squad and myself or my colleague who was serving as game director. The game’s communicative involves escaping from a seemingly haunted forest; at 1 point, I suggested the ending affect the main character uncovering a cliffside over clouds and taking a leap of religion to leave their home and start a fresh life. Members of my squad argued, convincingly, that specified an ending might read like an effort at self-harm instead. Discussions of that kind were numerous, and that was about a thing that didn’t make the final cut, let alone what did.

However, any high-profile queer indie devs took serious issue with it, for various reasons. In 1 of the more striking examples, Anna Anthropy made a parody game called “A Closed Mind,” utilizing a akin visual kind but written to propose our game believed intolerance could be defeated like a JRPG boss. Many of the criticisms we received at the time suggested that it was a waste for MIT to spend money having my squad make this game; that we didn’t realize how to make queer games, or realize the issues.

At the time I needed to be diplomatic in my public responses, since I was representing the laboratory and the university, but in hindsight, things like “A Closed Mind” and accusations that my squad didn’t truly realize the issues at all feel not only misplaced but highly petty. For the members of my squad who identified as somewhere in the vastness of the queer spectrum, accusations from queer devs that the squad wasn’t queer enough, or didn’t realize queer experiences, were profoundly hurtful (and to be honest, they hurt me too). It’s 1 thing to dislike what we did; that’s natural, and putting art in the planet means needing to be prepared for people to dislike it. This felt like something else entirely.

That experience is what made me frightened for Taash’s and Veilguard’s reception. Was it going to get the “not queer enough!” description due to the fact that it had, admittedly, tackled things at a more basic and beginner level than any might like? Would people usage things like the “Taash Notes” codex entry to claim that the writer(s) didn’t realize the issues?

Criticism of queerness — or, indeed, a focus on any marginalized identity category — in an artistic work is fraught from the jump. You want to support creators who make attempts to be inclusive, who actively work to bring in these types of characters and themes, but at the same time, it feels so easy for even the most well-intentioned effort at inclusivity to head somewhat off the rails anyway — something that’s happened to BioWare before. Thus, it’s essential that specified criticism be able to call “queer work” into account for its mistakes too. It’s specified a careful line to walk.

The problem is that I think we as both critics and fans have, over the past decade plus, created an environment where creators experience tremendous fears about getting it wrong, and producing something that isn’t pitch-perfect on the issues in all way is immediately painted as so harmful or detrimental the work needs to be thrown out entirely. The anxiety is real, but the concrete steps devs can take to address concerns can besides lead to affirmative outcomes. The emergence in sensitivity readers, diversity consultants, and another specified steps devs can take to head off mistakes before games scope the shelves are an unalloyed good, and they have roots in a akin place.

Are our only 2 options “getting it right” and “getting it harmfully wrong,” though? Things aren’t, if you’ll excuse the sorta-pun, binary in that way. I don’t necessarily think the presentation of Taash’s sex journey is as artful as it could be, for sure; I think it could have been smoother, more integrated into the setting and into their broader communicative about choosing who they want to be (Taash’s big, oft-repeated line is “You don’t get to tell me who I am”). Is it harmful, though? Or just not to any players’ tastes? With each fresh take and article and blog post I’ve read, I find it harder to justify excoriating the writing squad for Veilguard on this one, of accusing them of “getting queerness wrong.” That’s wild, and I am not gonna put myself in the place of people who told my team, back in 2011, that their earnest effort wasn’t queer enough.

I said this was a communicative about fear and anxiety, and that’s what it is now, although the pitch I made to Polygon about this communicative had a very different form at first. The first thought was little about Taash and more about how I felt the approach to “playersexual” companion communicative and romance designs in Veilguard was a step forward from Dragon Age 2 (spoilers: it is); Taash was more of a footnote in that story. As I wrote it, though, I was getting more and more blocked, and I realized it was due to the fact that I was cutting and rearranging and rewording and watering down what I was saying in the interest of not upsetting anyone. I didn’t want to criticize besides hard and have Trick Weekes (Taash’s primary writer) and the Veilguard squad feel I was attacking them unduly, but I was also afraid of drawing backlash from queer readers who felt I was besides forgiving or didn’t go hard enough.

I think this is why I have specified mounting frustration with accusations I’ve seen from critics and players saying that Taash is just a cardboard stand-in for the writers’ thoughts on gender, or that the writing surrounding it was besides “safe” or sanded down or not messy enough. Of course it’s not messy! Queer players and critics have been in comment sections, blogs, and social media posts for years tut-tutting everyone — even another queer devs and indie devs with nowhere close the resources at their disposal! — for not getting things pitch-perfect, for not utilizing the exact right terms, for being messy at all. It’s totally believable this situation is the result. Which do you want? Messiness, or infallible politics? You cannot have both! They are antithetical!

Perhaps being besides safe, besides “polished,” is indeed the problem erstwhile it comes to Taash, or Veilguard’s handling of sex broadly, but I’d much alternatively have an earnest and too-safe effort based on an ethos of trying to do right by us queer players than something actively harmful to the community at large. besides safe is not actively harmful; besides safe is “room for improvement.” besides safe is simply a learning opportunity.