Inclusive? I think not

There are a great number of people who love Saint’s Row 4.  I’ll admit, before writing another word of this article, that I am not one of them.

Just to get all of my bias out there before I begin the real meat of this article: I think it’s a fun game, but I think it’s poorly designed and I don’t think it really deserves most of the praise it’s receiving.

Many and more persons with better reputations and more readers than myself have specifically praised Saint’s Row 4 for being “an inclusive power fantasy” (emphasis mine).  Because I have a tendency to be long-winded and I have a great deal to say here, I’ll be brief and get my central premise out there right at the start.  In boldface for the sake of clarity.

Saint’s Row 4 is not an inclusive game in the sense that most people seem to intend the term.

Before my readers explode at me in the comments, let me say what I will grant the game.

1. It is not exclusive.
2. It is kinder to females than most games are and has a more even portrayal of them than most games do.
3. It is does not ridicule homosexuals, transsexuals, transgendered persons or persons of various and vocabulary-confusing non-binary gender expression.  Although, now that I think of it carefully, I don’t know that I can think of any mainstream, AAA games that have done that, ever.

That being said, I’d like to review a number of praises given to the game that, supposedly, specifically credit it as inclusive.

1. Male and female characters are portrayed in essentially the same way, with no limitations or objectifications peculiar to either gender.
2. You can romance characters of both genders, no matter what gender your character belongs to.
3. You can play as a transgendered/transsexual character.
4. You can play as a cisgendered adonis, a bearded lady, a giant muscleman in heels and a deep-v dress, or more or less any other combination of gender, facial hair and clothing, and none of these decisions affect anything other than the way you look and (if you want them to) your voice and accent.

I will address (and, I think, refute) these in order.

1.Male and female characters are portrayed in essentially the same way, with no limitations or objectifications peculiar to either gender.

This is technically true, and I can’t think of any instances in which a female character played differently than a male character.  But speaking frankly, I can remember several games in which that was the case.  I don’t remember Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Halo 3, Soul Calibur IV, or the grand gem of inclusive games, the Mass Effect series, being praised as inclusive because they made the protagonist’s gender irrelevant to every function of gameplay.  In all of the aforementioned games (although Halo 3 only had the option in multiplayer) playing as a male or female character made no fundamental difference in the way the game was played, just like Saint’s Row 4, but suddenly SR4 does the exact same thing that dozens of other games have done and it’s inclusive.

This seems like as good a time as any to point out that the gender neutral main character is quite possibly the least admirable character in all fiction.  I realize that the point here is that the game is a parodied, over-the-top version of your average GTA crime drama.  But I don’t see why acknowledging that something aims to have no taste is somehow automatically an excuse for that thing not having any taste.  The protagonist and hir cronies openly and often brag and joke about murder and mindless mass destruction being their primary hobbies.  One particularly important character seems to brag every time he’s given the chance how he’s “about to get (his) murder on.”

I understand the nature of parody full well enough, but an equal representation of male or female character who can be summarily evaluated as quite possibly the most morally destitute individual in modern gaming isn’t really positive in the long run.

If I make a game where you can play as Jeffrey Dahmer or his alternate universe female counterpart, and you’re treated the same based on whichever choice you make, I find it hard to believe that in that equation you’re doing one-up for women or for men when playing as either gender is inconsequential.

And just to further the illustration, Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 people and later expressed a deep regret for his crimes and depravities.  The protagonist of this game easily kills and otherwise harms in terrible ways hundreds more sentient beings throughout the course of the game, and never, at any point in the entire experience, expresses any emotion other than “hell yeah!” over mass genocide.  Yes, it’s a gameplay mechanic inherent to the open-world-3rd-person-shooter-crime-drama, but that doesn’t make it okay.

2.  You can romance characters of both genders, no matter what gender your character belongs to.

You can romance and have implied sex with every character on your ship, male or female, human or robot (except Keith David.)

...okay.

This is supposedly inclusive because, well, it’s a gay relationship in a video game.

But the “romancing” entails only a 15 or 20 second scene.  And while being able to fuck every person on your ship seems to be inclusive, the stereotypical nature of every fucking character on the ship is more of an objectification than Soul Calibur’s famous Ivy character.  Let’s run down just three of the characters to make my point.

1.  Kinzie, a classic example of the archetypal, gee-i-wish-i-had-her geek girl/hacker girl with a secret desire to fuck everything in sight and be really kinky

2.  Matt Miller, a classic example of the archetypal, gee-isn’t-he-pathetic obsessed nerd guy/computer dude who has an unhealthy obsession with a franchise that he loves and makes fan fiction which the protagonist ridicules

3.  Ben King, a classic example of the archetypal, gee-isn’t-the-black-guy-cool black, come-from-nothing business mogul with a mean streak and enough bravado to skip a whole game and land a position on the cabinet.

You can romance all of these people as a man or a woman, but none of it means anything.  There’s no progression, there’s no story.  You just hit the “romance” button and everything follows from there.

Never mind Mass Effect (1, 2, and 3) in which lesbian and gay relationships are not only possible, but meaningful and long-term, exploring the real nature of the characters and the relationships they have, or Dragon Age and Skyrim in which gay and lesbian relationships were similarly possible and similarly narratively significant.

But Saint’s Row 4 is praised as inclusive, and the aforementioned games are not.

I guess my final point here is that having a “romance” button that everyone can access all the time isn’t inclusive, it’s lazy storytelling and lazy character development.  A better question, I think, is why everyone on the ship (besides Keith David) is so conveniently and readily bisexual.

3.  You can play as a transgendered/transsexual character.

I’ve heard a couple of people, most specifically Jim Sterling, say this about Saint’s Row 4, and I’m sorry but it’s plainly false.

You can play as a bearded lady, or you can throw a bra and a g-string onto either a musclebound adonis or a super-leaping fat man, but the character models adhere to a strict gender binary.  This wouldn’t, I think, be so notable if Saint’s Row 2 hadn’t given the player a slider between gender binary options.

I don’t think this is a huge deal, but I’m fan of credit where credit is due, a real part of which is not giving credit where it’s not due.  And Saint’s Row 4 does not, in its player creation, allow for the creation of transgendered characters.

Furthermore, the same character design engine’s “sex appeal” facet which controls either specifically the size of a female character’s breasts or the size of a male character’s genitalia has, I think, some problematic and some disturbing implications.  Why call it “Sex appeal” instead of perhaps acknowledging what you’re doing and calling the meter “breast size” and “package size”?  And isn’t it a little presumptuous to say that a woman with gigantic breasts or a man with a gigantic package is the definition of sex appeal?  It’s reductionist, and it’s immature in a way that no amount of saying “yeah, but it’s ironic” can fix.

4.  You can play as a cisgendered adonis, a bearded lady, a giant muscleman in heels and a deep-v dress, or more or less any other combination of gender, facial hair and clothing, and none of these decisions affect anything other than the way you look and (if you want them to) your voice and accent.

Saint’s Row 4 features some fantastic costumes.  There are references to Minecraft, Star Wars, Star Trek, Game of Thrones, Marvel Comics, previous saints games and a plethora of video game, fantasy, and sci fi tropes.  Also, a werewolf suit.

You can dress up any character in any of these ridiculous costumes, or you can dress up any character in any amalgamation of incongruous elements.  Would you like to put your Pamela Anderson clone in an Uncle Sam suit?  Done.  Would you like to put your rendition of the Hulk into a cheerleader outfit?  That’s a little awkward, but consider it done.

This is a fun game mechanic.  It is entertaining.  I’ll even admit that it is, in the most vague and generalized sense possible, nondiscriminatory.

But let’s be frank about what it’s not.

It’s not original or groundbreaking.  What clothes you wear, whether you sport gigantic melon-tits, a beard or any combination of the two and the way you make all of these physical and representative elements come into play makes no difference on the character.  You know what that means?  

IT’S A SKIN!

There’s nothing innovative or exciting or new about a skin.  Even about funny ones or controversial ones.  Skins have been a funny and quirky feature of gaming for more or less as long as gaming has existed.  Hell, a game as innocuous as the video game adaptation of Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man film let you play Spider-Man as Mary Jane in an evening gown if you knew the right code, but no one raised a big hubabaloo about how that was an inclusive feature in Spider-Man because it was a skin and thereby meaningless.

Returning to SR4, if I walk into a room as our previous example of a bearded lady sporting a deep-throated cockney british man’s voice or the hulk in a cheerleader outfit, that’s only really funny if there’s a reaction to it.  As in the famous “Lumberjack” song, something zany and unorthodox can only draw on pure “that’s a man in a dress” humor value for about 2 seconds.  That kind of thing is really, genuinely funny when characters react to it.  

My point is that pointing out the incongruous possibilities of character customization is not ultimately a point for tolerance and openness on the point of SR4, if anything else because it’s meaningless.  I’m not saying that SR4 is bad because characters don’t react to a werewolf suit and horse mask, I’m just saying that the fact you can do those things doesn’t fundamentally make the game inclusive.

*deep breath*

Concluding Remarks

Saint’s Row 4 is fun, and it lets you do all kinds of crazy things.  But the way in which it lets you do those things renders those things ultimately meaningless.  There are many who are saying that this lack of restraint in player choice and a lack of negativity in reaction to those choices makes the game inclusive, but I disagree.  It makes the game tolerant.

The difference here, between inclusiveness and tolerance is the difference between “see, this character shares the same basic humanity as all sentient creatures” and “yeah, whatever, do whatever you want”.

In this sense, it shocks me that I never really heard the Mass Effect series being praised as inclusive.  There, you can play as either a strong male character or a strong female character and variously romance beings of both genders as a straight male, a straight female, a lesbian female or a gay man.  The relationships therein were between real, developed characters that had long arcs which carried actual meaning for the characters and their developments.

A gay person, for instance, could feel included in Mass Effect 3 because it was really, fundamentally acknowledged that the characters who were gay were gay and that all the other inter-character relationships remained just as fraternal and loving as if the characters were not gay.  By way of contrast, Saint’s Row 4’s laissez-faire approach to sexuality and clothing does retain the same lack of consequence, but it makes the choice itself and the nature of the character meaningless by making the act itself just that meaningless.