Representation tends to be a touchy subject no matter what form of media you are talking about. People in online communities are especially vocal about this, especially when it comes to video games. This is probably because playing a video game requires you to have a higher immersion and level of empathy for the character you are playing as than a TV show, film, or book would require. To many, controlling a character in a game is either an extension of your own self, or it is like experiencing an adventure with a longtime friend. Whether a person is for or against inclusion in video games, that idea rests on whether or not that person wants to partake in an adventure in which they interact with someone who is part of that minority group.

In the How to Play Video Games chapter of Leisure Suit Larry; LGBTQ Representation, writer Adrienne Shaw points out the abundance of queer representation in the Leisure Suit Larry game series. Overall, the series seems to have an abundance of queer representation for a series of video games made in the eighties and nineties. Instead of not mentioning the LGBT community at all, there are many different identities represented over the series, including gay men, lesbian women, and transgender women. The problem with Leisure Suit Larry is that these depictions were all cruel, making the characters very existence a joke, or a spectacle of disgust. In one of the games, if the player decided to try the option to romance a gay man, it would result in a ‘game over’ sequence, in which the player’s own masculinity is taken into question and joked about. Larry’s wife, Kalalu, divorces him to become a ‘cannibal, bike riding lesbian’, and an encounter with a transgender woman, Shablee, in another game suggests a rape scene, with dialogue from the main character expressing disgust towards Shablee. The message this type of representation might send to a viewer is one of queer people being unlovable. A woman coming out as a lesbian labels her as a cannibal, a trait that is disgusting and inhumane for any person. Even if Larry is shown to be attracted towards Shablee, his repulsed and horrified reactions after he knows that she is transgender marks her as unlovable and unpleasant, despite Larry being the one to pursue her. When Larry decides to pursue the gay man, Gary, the game over text you receive upon flirting with him implies that being gay is bad, that you are inherently less masculine if you choose this option. And even then, the game over only comes after Larry laments “Oh no, what have I done?!” out loud, showing his remorse over the mistake of whistling at Gary. It is very clearly a mistake as well, as it is the same type of game over you get if you enter the sauna by mistake and melt to death, or if you jump into the pool and are pulled under and drowned by the weight of your clothes. And that’s really all the LGBT people mean to the creators of games, shows, and movies that make these jokes at the expense of any actual human beings that they pertain to.  It reinforces thoughts that queer people are disgusting, are unlovable, are inhumane, are mistakes. And leaving cheap jokes like these as viable forms of queer representation in media only reinforces terrible stereotypes and allows people who are uninvolved or ignorant to LGBT problems to disregard these representations as legitimate. The cheap joke and vitriol version of representation in video games borders on being needlessly cruel, as people who identify as any of the people being made fun of and who are being openly and viciously insulted are going to have to be subjected to the immersion and having empathy towards a character and a world that either hates them or wants to ignore their existence entirely.

Works Cited

Shaw, Adrienne. “Leisure Suit Larry; LGBTQ Representation.” How to Play Video Games, by Matthew Thomas Payne and Nina Huntemann, New York University Press, 2019, pp. 110–117.