Thoughts on E3 (Part 4): And Another Thing

So I took a much-merited break and I’ve had a chance to reflect a little more on E3. I’ve decided there’s a couple of other thoughts I want to share, even though they didn’t really fit into any of my earlier categories:

The Last of Us 2, and why Ellie’s sexuality matters

I start this section with the disclaimer that I’ve not played The Last of Us and, to be honest, it’s not high on my list of games to seek out in the future. Even the most dedicated gamer can’t play everything and, for whatever reason, The Last of Us has never particularly appealed to me.

That being said, I get that it was very well received and has a huge fanbase who are quite rightly excited for the sequel. (I’m not one of those people who has to call for the cancellation of a series just because they don’t follow it themselves.) I am very pro the existence of The Last of Us 2.

I’m also very much not one of those people who “couldn’t care less” that Ellie, one of the series protagonists, has been shown to have a romantic interest in women. This is important to me for so many reasons.

It is important because a well-received, well-written character can represent the LGBT community - and video games are still about a decade behind movies, which are themselves about two decades behind TV, which are themselves about three decades behind books in that regard. LGBT people exist. We play games. We make games. We deserve to be acknowledged as a part of the human race. Fiction that aims for emotional realism is incomplete without us.

(Side note: It is also important because Shannon Woodward, who plays Ellie’s girlfriend in the new trailer - and whose character in Westworld is another badass queer lady - is awesome.)

It is important because Ellie’s sexuality was established in the DLC for the first game (seriously, I haven’t even played it and I knew this already, I have no idea why so many fans were shocked at the new trailer) and continuity in storytelling matters to me, dammit.

It is important because it is going to prevent one of the cringiest, laziest tropes in fiction writing from killing The Last of Us. I have seen it happen so many times: older man takes younger woman under his wing in a stressful, high-stakes situation. He feels paternal towards her, but as she grows older she begins to view him romantically - he’s probably been one of the few male presences in her life as an outcast/damaged-yet-strong survivor/post-apocalyptic babe in the woods. He’s shocked at first because he never thought of her as anything but his daughter, but gradually her youth and loveliness win him over. They get together. It is gross. I’m not saying this has ever been the intention among the writers of The Last of Us, but there’s a lot that can happen in media development - changeover of the writing team, executive meddling, the list goes on. By establishing Ellie and Joel as incompatible romantically even now that she’s all grown up, the writers have ensured that the focus stays on their relationship the way it was meant to be received, and prevents a BioShock Infinite style misunderstanding among fans (many of whom imagined romantic tension between Booker and Elizabeth because they were so used to seeing this exact older man/younger woman trope in fiction.)

I don’t mean to imply that a plot demand is somehow needed to justify the presence of LGBT characters in fiction (see my comments above). The plot might require Ellie to have a love interest in order to develop some aspects of her character, but the gender of that love interest is probably not going to have an impact on how the story plays out; so if you’re not acting on the deeply flawed assumption that every character should default to straight then her partner could be a woman, a man, or someone with another gender identity entirely depending on the feelings of the writer. But at the same time, every fictional world has a writer or writers in control of it, and you can make your themes richer with the way you choose to tell the story; and if Ellie having a girlfriend can keep the relationship between Joel and Ellie more firmly on track than Ellie having a boyfriend would, then surely that is an advancement of the plot?

Red Dead Redemption 2 and Rockstar no-shows

I was surprised that Red Dead Redemption 2 wasn’t represented at E3, considering that it’s one of the most hotly anticipated games of this year (and last year, if we’re being honest). I later learned that Rockstar almost never attend E3, and the chatter had it that some new RDR2 screenshots would be released by the end of June in lieu of an E3 presentation. Rockstar, I was told (by an admittedly biased fan board), are too cool to attend the biggest trade expo in their industry.

Now, please, do not misunderstand me here. Rockstar are very cool; I love their games and I have a great deal of respect for the way they’ve built their brand and produced some excellent entertainment out of it. But honestly: not showing up to the biggest trade expo in your industry because you’re too cool; and instead promising to give your fans a far less in-depth look, at a later date, at a game that’s already been delayed for almost a year? To me, this seems less like a mark of cool and more a sign of disorganisation.

Admittedly I myself am nowhere near being a rock star. My studio would be called something like "Deeply Geeky Games", and there would be grovelling, apologetic updates every time we inevitably had to delay our releases. But we would show up to conventions with whatever we had to show so far, and interact with our fans, and respect their time and investment; even if that did make us seem less cool to some of them.

But you do you Rockstar - I respect that you're the professionals here. Especially if the real reason you missed E3 was not to play off your cool image, but to channel your energies into getting RDR2 to hit that next release date, because I know several people who are going to curl up and weep if you don't.