Imaginary Worlds - The Power of the Makeover Mage

Episode Date: February 7, 2019

In some video games, you can choose which character you want to play, and you can customize the look of those characters. For many transgender players, that option played a significant role in their lives. Reporter and podcaster Jaye McAuliffe co-hosts this episode, as she reflects on her own gender transition and the experience of others who discovered that they can use video game avatars to begin reimagining themselves in the real world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Malinsky. So in my last episode, I explored role-playing video games, and how the choices that you make as a character can reveal a lot of things about yourself. But there's another aspect of games that I hadn't really thought about. In some video games, you can choose what type of character you play. And for a lot of players, there's just kind of a larkark where you get to be somebody that's just very different than yourself. But for some people, choosing a video game avatar that doesn't look like how you look at the moment can be very significant, could even be life-changing. Jay McAuliffe is a reporter in Arizona,

and she has a podcast called We Must Ignite, which tells the story of women, non-binary people, and trans men. And she pitched us this really interesting idea for an episode because her journey into becoming transgender began with video games. I thought her story was really interesting, and so she is going to be our guide through this episode. Hey, Jay. Hey, Eric. So let's go back to the beginning. How did this whole journey start for you? It's really actually a little bit hard for me to determine sometimes, oh, what came first?

Was I questioning my gender and starting to play female characters? To clarify, I'm a trans woman. Sometimes it's hard to tell a person's gender just based off their voice. So I always used to, when I was very young, you know, I didn't have any other frame of reference. I would play male characters. And often, like there are so many games where by default, there's no choice. You are just a male character. But then, I don't know, something clicked and I started playing female characters when I could. And it really got going with The Sims. I played a ton of The Sims 3 and The Sims 4.

So if you haven't played The Sims, basically you can create any sort of person, avatar, you can create a whole family. You can create any sort of person, avatar. You can create a whole family and run them through a bunch of like just possible scenarios for like living life. I'd say it's like a realistic fiction game with a bunch of goofiness added on. Was there like an aha moment where you had where you're like, huh, I wonder if I could do this? Or like when you first decided to create a female avatar for yourself in The Sims what were you thinking in that moment? Looking back now it's hard to remember like what I was thinking at that moment but it's kind of weird the character that I ended up creating one of those like first avatars at the time I didn't really look how I look now. I was not presenting as a woman in any way. I didn't really know if that's what I wanted to do,

but I basically created what I thought was, oh, this could be the more feminine version of myself, the female character version of me. I was looking back through those characters, and it's a little weird how much they look like me now. Just, you can switch the character's gender. And I did that, added slightly longer hair, and, well, there I am.

Yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, as, I mean, I'm, probably you can tell from my, for anyone who's been listening to my podcast for the last couple of years, I'm a straight cis guy. And I've played female characters in video games and I did my episode about LARPing fairly recently. I talked about even playing female characters in LARPs. But it just never, it never occurred to me that somebody who's trans, that this could be a really formative

experience for them. Do you know, like, how common an experience this is? I came to this story because this is something that I've heard a lot of my other trans friends talk about or mention, like that, oh, that they played video games and realized through video games and changing the gender of their character that, oh, this might be a real thing. So I decided to talk to an expert named Bonnie Ruberg. I am Bonnie Ruberg. I go by Bo. I am a professor at UC Irvine in the Department of Informatics, and my specialty is queerness and video games. Bo literally wrote the book on this that's coming out in a few months called Video Games Have Always Been Queer. Video games can be a way to try out different identities, to explore your

own identity, to have a space where you can play with identity. And one of the things that's unique about video games is they're not just what you see on the surface. They're not just the images that you see on the screen. They're about the interactions and the experiences you have. So did that do that ring true for you? Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's this game that I played called Life is Strange, where I mean, you don't get to choose a character or anything like that you play as this girl, Max Caulfield. She's a high school senior, and you play through a week in her life. Yeah, and it's similar. I mean, it's very much along the lines of the games I talked about in my last episode, the cheese-you-are-an-adventure type role-playing games.

Yeah, yeah. It's very Telltale-esque. She gets this power in the game, though, to rewind time. I did it. I actually did it. I'm a human time machine, Max. Something there really spoke to me because I think we all have that sort of wishful thinking. What if I could go back to

that one moment and change it? Like what would happen then? And for me, I started thinking, what if I could just go back for a moment and have the clarity and the language to describe how I felt back in high school or earlier? Or what if I had been able to transition earlier? Yeah, because I think with video games, when you're playing a character, you will often have a much stronger identification with that character than if you're just watching a movie or reading a book

and you refer to the character as I, like I was just doing this. So it sounds like that you can, even before you can kind of change your gender at a game like The Sims, that you can even just have an experience in a video game that suddenly resonates with you in a different way. Absolutely. So like this feeling with Max Caulfield in Life is Strange, this idea that like, oh, I was just in high school and I was seen as a girl

and no one thinks twice in the game because that's how the game is written like that was an amazing experience and so like in real life we can't rewind time but i do think that yeah video games can give trans people and other people who just weren't privileged to have these kind of experiences it can just help us have those experiences. It can just be playing a character that you really, really identify with, even if it's really kind of fantastical and bizarre. I mean, that happened to Bo. For me personally, like as a queer person and as a non-binary person, I know that I'm most drawn to games that are not exactly representational. So like one of my favorite games is Octodad, which is a game about being an octopus who's trying to pass as a human dad. Hey, look, dad's up. Morning, daddy.

And if you think about it, it's really about gender and sexuality and normativity because he's just trying to be like a normal, butch, white suburban dad. But it's really hard to control this unruly octopus body. So it's those kind of experiences that connect the most with me. Have you seen my Salty Hearts novel anywhere? Oh, hush, you. That game is so funny. But aren't there video games where you can go through the whole game as sort of a male or female version of the main character, and it's basically the same game either way?

Yeah, so my friend Bryn Mawr Ruiz played Dragon Age a lot, and that's a game just like that. You can choose your character's gender, and that doesn't affect the choices you make in the game at all. I mean, well, it does affect the romance options, because not every character is straight, but the big overarching plot of saving the world, that doesn't change. Dragon Age was one of the major games for me. This is Bryn Mawr. It gave me that opportunity to explore the kind of decisions that I could make, not only as a person, but in terms of, you know, here is the person I'm presenting as, whether it's a gender identity or it's, of course, it's Dragon Age, so it's fantasy. So any of the races or appearances, It's Dragon Age, so it's fantasy.

So any of the races or appearances, all of that was up to me. And it was freeing in a way I don't think I would have originally anticipated. Because suddenly it was, you know, well, on this day I'm feeling like this, so I can be this person. Or I'm feeling, you know, more feminine on this day, so I can, you know, kind of present it as a more fantasy version of myself. It was my first taste of freedom, essentially. I know for this episode you talked with a bunch of friends beyond just Bryn Mawr. Did you find that they all had pretty similar experiences to the one that you had with The Sims? Yeah, they were pretty similar. There was a common thread that started emerging as I talked to my friends

and started talking to other trans people about this. There are so many games with character customization. Whether they actually meant to do this or not, a lot of those games actually kind of incorporate gender transitions into the gameplay. So there's this one game, Saints Row 4. It is a supernatural spy thriller with an alien invasion thrown in. It's a really bizarre game, but it has some really robust character customization. And my friend Julie Jollis really used to love that game. And in Saints Row, you play the leader of the Third Street Saints. And you generally play kind of an asshole who's an idiot regardless of gender so hashtag equality there's random places throughout the game that you can get I guess plastic digital plastic surgery where like you you custom you can recustomize your face it's also the only place you

can get a haircut oddly enough and you can also change your gender. And regardless of whether you're coming in for a buzz cut, or the combination of every transition surgery possible, it's $500. So it's either a stupidly expensive haircut, or the best gender transition plan ever. Sign me the f*** up. What she found really surprising was after she changed her character she gave this character an amazingly cheap transition. Other players who you know she talked with or glanced at her screen they didn't make a big deal out of it. I kind of laughed that no one said anything but at the same time it's if no one says anything, that's kind of cool. Someone's like, oh, new haircut. And that's like the best response ever. If you want to be a true

ally, when you meet someone, when you reunite with an old friend who's transitioned, just say, oh, new haircut. And you get all the ally points. You are the best ally. and you get all the ally points. You are the best ally. I hope someday in real life I get to actually use that. So were there other games like that where making a gender transition is actually part of the game mechanics? For me, before playing Saints Row 4,

I had not been able to do that in any games. But I also talked with another one of my friends, Anne Buzarnik, and she was telling me she had actually that same experience playing RuneScape. It's a game a lot of kids used to play in the early 2000s. It's kind of an online medieval fantasy version of The Sims. There is in the game a character called the Makeover Mage, who for 3,000 gold coins would change your character's gender and this actually i feel influenced a lot of my own personal inner conceptions of like uh the ability to change gender right i thought of it in this idea of like this swizzard or something like casting a spell

and and me uh you know having something be different suddenly you know in the same way as uh i did in the game right because you could just just go and switch your gender at any time. And I thought that was very, like, nice and pleasant idea. And I was like, oh, wouldn't it be just so wonderful if I could, you know, pay my 3000 gold coins and So actually, I have another question. Everybody you talked with, when they're having these experiences and exploring gender in the games, how old are they? The people I spoke to, it was often in adolescence, the teenage years, starting around like 10 years old, up to around 16. For me, I was around, I was probably around 18 when I really consciously started doing this. And you know, for a lot of kids, it's a really tough time to deal with all these complex feelings of gender. I mean, you know, for a lot of kids, it's a really tough time to deal with these complex

feelings of gender. I mean, it was hard for Anne. The way I grew up, it was very strictly gendered, right? It was behave as a male behaves, don't do anything vaguely feminine. Masculinity, specifically toxic masculinity, was very strictly enforced. And so I felt like a sort of shame interacting in physical spaces along these lines, right? So I wouldn't tell anyone about any of these things. But online, I had basically free reign to talk about these things without any of the fears of repercussions that I might have had in, you know, my actual everyday life. So it sounds like video games aren't just a place to experiment with your gender. They can also be a safe space or, I mean, sort of like a virtual safe space. Yeah, I mean, that's the hope. I mean,

safe space. Yeah, I mean, that's the hope. I mean, Anne was very afraid that her friends or family would like discover what she was doing in these games. A lot of the times I feel I was too, I was too shameful. And I was too paranoid to play a female character all of the time, right? So a lot of the time I would have a male character because I was worried if like someone like came in my room or something and like saw my screen, they'd be like, why are you playing a girl character? And then I have to have a really fumbling explanation of why, because I hadn't heard like the stock arguments for like why guys play girls in video games yet. So I didn't have anything to go off other than just like, oh, well, that's kind of how I want to be. But there's also another problem with creating safe spaces online, because a lot of games are multiplayer. Right, because you're you're playing against other people and you can interact with them. Yeah, you can talk to them. I mean, you can talk to them

over voice chat. And like I said, it's sometimes hard to tell a person's gender just based off their voice. And my friend Bryn Mawr, who was talking about Dragon Age earlier, also loved playing Overwatch. I'm back in the game. Overwatch, by the way, if people don't know, is a really, really popular game. It's very cartoonish and sort of steampunky, and you're kind of shooting at everybody on screen. But the characters also have these really, really interesting backstories. Yeah, Overwatch can be a lot of fun, but Bryn Mawr discovered that interactions between players,

it doesn't always have that same mood. To say that the community can be toxic would be an incredible understatement. And a lot of us who are trans or non-binary, if we have to play with other players, say in like competitive, we won't do voice chat because we don't want to take that risk of being like, oh, you're a girl. Like, no, actually I'm not. And then it's like, but you sound like a girl. And it's like, yeah, but I'm kind of not. And then it's too much to deal with almost. It's like, you know,

I'm only going to know this person for the five minutes that we're playing together and then I'm never going to have to talk to him ever again in my life. But I would just rather like, yeah, we're just going to go and play the game. You can tell me I'm bad at whoever I'm playing, but please don't ask me about my gender. Well, I know that, I mean, toxic fandom is a huge issue. And of course, I mean, it's, of course, particularly bad in video games. Gamergate, you know, being a notorious example. So were the people you talked with, were they able to find a community in the games?

Yeah, they definitely were. So as I said before, my friend Anne Buzarnik played RuneScape a lot. You know, it's a fantasy game. It does a lot of the things we've already talked about. You create your own avatar. You plop them into this virtual world and, I guess, make choices. And then she ended up starting to find people in it.

It's an online game. And she found those people at a fishing hole. Catching fish is actually a really big way to make money in the game. While it was mostly an inactive activity, you would just kind of sit there, click once every couple of minutes, wait for your inventory to fill up, and then go run to the bank to go drop off all your fish. It was very social because there were a bunch of people gathered around at these specific fishing spots and basically doing nothing, right? So it became a little, like, I don't know, mode of interaction

with other people gathered around clicking every few minutes and not really doing much beside that. All those interactions are happening through text chat. But you know, RuneScape is a game where there's really, I'd say, a lot of younger players. You know, they're kids trying to meet each other online. So with Anne's case, their parents were worried about, like, stalkers and personal information. But she did end up opening up to another player. This player was named Poseidon. I don't even remember how like our interactions started, but I remember that they were one of the first people that I had talked about any sort of

like gender related ideas to outside of myself, right? And you know, it was the first externalization of thoughts which had been private, I guess, in the space of discussing with this one weird 13 year old who I met, you know, when I was like 11. And Bryn Mawr, they played Final Fantasy 14 and they figured out a way to find a safe space by joining a guild. to find a safe space by joining a guild? Well, I know that Final Fantasy XIV is a big multiplayer online game that's set in a magical medieval world. And I know what a guild was in real historic medieval times,

but how exactly does a guild work in the game? I kind of describe it as a club, a club of players in a big multiplayer online game. You can band together and do some of the quests together. It's, yeah, really one big club and an easy way to meet new people. And this guild, extremely accepting and open for queer and trans people. It was, you know, we could say like, you know, oh, this is my name and this is how I

present and you can use like these pronouns for me. It's okay if you use my character pronouns, you know, that sort of thing. Eventually we would all just kind of open up to each other like, oh yeah, by the way, this is why I do this because, you know, like I can't be this way outside of this game. After everyone had all these really positive experiences in the games, did that actually help them come out in the real world? For a lot of people, yeah. And actually, after that point, those games just became games. I mean, I found that definitely for me personally, when I play The Sims, I play all sorts of characters now. But for a lot of people, I mean, games are still super important. I mean, Bryn Mawr now works in a video game store. They wear LGBTQ pins so that people know, like, that the shop is queer friendly. And a man started coming into Bryn Mawr's store with his son, who's trans. who's trans. He was just saying that he was thankful that he could see, you know, someone who was, you know, happy at their job and happy in their position and that I was confident enough

in who I am and my identity that I could, you know, wear those pins in an environment that is genuinely not friendly towards the LGBT community and that, yeah, that I felt confident enough in myself that I could do that. And that is what he wants for his son. Well, that's really nice. So it actually helps them be kind of kind of help mentor the next generation. Yeah. I asked Julie Jollis if she had any advice for young people who are closeted right now and, you know, too afraid to

express that even in a video game? I would tell them to, to try not to be afraid to be yourself. Like, obviously, sometimes it's not safe to be yourself. But if you're alone in your room, that's your space, you can be you there. If you're still living with your parents or if you have a conservative roommate or something like that, then, you know, maybe your room isn't your space all the time. But, you know, if you can play a video game like at midnight when you're just having your headphones and, you know, don't be afraid to play as characters you more closely identify with. And if you're not sure, experiment.

So what about, like, video game companies? I mean, if, you know, people are listening who work at video game companies, is there anything they can learn from all this? Studios are really trying hard for more representation of queer and trans people, but they do have a lot of catching up to do. You see, historically, like the video game industry is pretty homophobic. And unfortunately, some of the attempts to have a trans character in a game

have been a bit of a mess, like in Mass Effect Andromeda. In this big epic sci-fi game, you meet this character and she immediately deadnames herself. Could you also explain what deadnaming is? Yeah, for trans people, your deadname is just your name assigned at birth. It's your name before you transitioned. It is not something that a trans person is going to bring up in casual conversation. It's definitely not polite to ask trans people what their dead name was. And the writers who created this trans character for Mass Effect

Andromeda really should have known that. What brought you out here to Andromeda? Back home, I was filling test tubes in some dead-end lab. People knew me as Stefan, but that was never who I was. I knew what I could do, and I knew who I wanted to do it as. Hanley Abrams, Andromeda Explorer. That's me. Feels good. Feels right.

Funny enough, that studio three years before with the game Dragon Age Inquisition did have a pretty positive representation of a trans character. But, as I said, it's all over the place. But do you think things are getting better? Well, Bonnie Ruberg is pretty optimistic. She says there's more representation behind the scenes these days. And there are even more queer gaming events too. You know, when you when you go to a conference where people are talking about making games and you see other queer and trans people, you're like, oh my gosh, like there is a place for me in this

industry, right? And she's excited about the possibility indie games have. They have a lot more leeway compared to big studio games and can appeal directly to trans and queer players. For example, there's a game that I love called Realistic Kissing Simulator. And it's a game where two people play, they stand at the same keyboard, they just have two faces on either side of a screen, and each face has a long floppy tongue.

And they kind of intertwine their tongues. There's no goal to the game, there are no rules to the game. And I interviewed the people who made it recently who are queer game makers and trans game makers. And they said that the way that you play that game is really designed to speak to their experiences as trans people,

because it's about like having a body that feels like it doesn't quite fit you, but you're still trying to find a new form of closeness with people. I've actually seen that game because it's really funny. It's very cartoonish. There are actually videos on YouTube of people trying to play it and they're all just cracking up.

There's so many games like that. Realistic something simulator. Yeah. So what about you? Now that you've talked with your friends about all this and talked with Beau about this, did any parts of their story kind of resonate with you the most? my femininity or I had to be very feminine and or in in real life too now you know to be seen as a woman but now I mean in the characters that I play they still reflect me a bit and in how I exist in the real world I'm a lot more comfortable with dressing masculine and feminine because that's honestly how we all are,

a combination of masculinity and femininity. So now my characters are all sorts of, you know, like I play guys and girls, and I feel free and comfortable with that. And it's funny. I mean, how does that reflect you back onto video games and the idea of customization, you know, the idea that you can customize yourself?

You know, last night I was playing The Sims 4, and I pulled out that character of customization, you know, the idea that you can customize yourself. You know, last night I was playing The Sims 4 and I pulled out that character of myself and I changed her a bit. I ended up doing things that I wouldn't do in the real world and I don't really want to necessarily. And it was still really fun to do that, to potentially see those choices play out in front of me. All right, well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Jay McAuliffe. And who else are we thanking? Yeah, I want to thank Bonnie Ruberg and Bzarnik, Julie Chalas and Bryn Mawr-Ruiz for talking to me for this story. It was really great hearing all your experiences. Cool. And also, where can people follow you? Yeah, you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter at Jay McAuliffe. And my podcast is can people follow you? Yeah, you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter at jmccullough.

And my podcast is called We Must Ignite. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and Imagine Worlds Pod. And the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.