These Bodies of Mine: What Gaming Teaches About Identity

How video game character creators helped me explore my own queerness

The man with the gun who I failed to make pretty. His job is to pretend to not want violence, and then to do it.

“Are you a boy? Or a girl?” Pokemon Diamond asked me as I sat on the floor of my grandmother’s living room, the light from my brand new Nintendo DS and those from the Christmas tree fighting for space on my face.

I sat there for a very long time.

This decision, as small as it may seem, required me to question, fundamentally, what I wanted from this character and from this game. On one hand, boys were cool, and on the other, girls were pretty. And never the twain should meet because, as we all know, these are entirely mutually exclusive, and gendered, concepts. So after much consideration I decided to play as a girl and began my Pokemon adventure and, despite the simplicity of the system, a lifetime love of character creators.

When I played Halo: Reach and, later, Halo 4, I had a habit of switching between the male and female Spartan models after every multiplayer match. I didn’t think much of this behavior at the time. It just felt like the natural thing to do. Years later, I recognize this as among my earliest experiments with gender and my presentation. If my digital body was to be an extension of myself, I was trying to define what an idealized me would look like.

Around 11 or 12 years old I picked up Mass Effect 2 from a local video rental store. I remember sitting in front of my grandmother’s bulky old television, curled up on the armchair, swaddled in blankets. This was the place where I felt most at home and I tried to bring that feeling of home into the game. I tried to make a Shepard who I saw myself in, but I couldn’t seem to manage it. I tweaked sliders, trying with increasing desperation to make someone I wanted to be. What I wanted to be, even though I didn’t have the language for it at the time, was pretty. And the men can never be pretty. I pushed the sliders to their limits and that was not enough. His jaw was still too hard and his chin too sharp. I wanted him to look soft and inviting: queer. What bothered me the most were his eyes. They were cutting, as if violence had seeped into the ocular tissue itself. These were eyes that said “aim,” wired to hands that said “shoot.” And they were not mine…