Nintendo Snags A GLAAD Award Nomination For Fixing A 20-Year Old Problem
GLAAD honors the best LGBTQ games of 2024.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Dragon Age: The Veilguard are among the nominees being honored for their LGBTQ representation at the 36th GLAAD Media Awards. GLAAD has honored video games at its awards since 2019, and this year’s selection includes a mix of blockbuster games and smaller titles, all of which are nominated for their outstanding handling of queer characters and storylines.
This year’s nominees for GLAAD’s Outstanding Video Game award are Caravan SandWitch, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Dread Delusion, Dustborn, Fear the Spotlight, Life is Strange: Double Exposure, Minds Beneath Us, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Sorry We’re Closed, and Until Then.
The Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remakes restores Vivian’s status as a trans woman.
Among a selection of mostly indie games, one name does stand out as particularly odd — Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. While plenty of third-party games on Switch have great queer stories, Nintendo isn’t exactly known for LGBTQ representation in its own releases. The original English release of The Thousand-Year Door famously even removed references to a character, Vivian, being transgender — references that were present in the Japanese release and other translations. Depending on the translation, Vivian expresses pride over her transition and says that her family’s transphobia is one of the reasons she decides to join Mario.
In the nominated 2024 remake, Vivian’s status as a trans woman is stated explicitly, and it’s arguably the most affirming version of her storyline. The Thousand-Year Door may not have the strongest LGBTQ storyline of the nominees, but the sheer fact that it appears in a major Nintendo title — and represents a course correction from Nintendo’s earlier dismissal of Vivian — is worth noting.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard lets players define their character’s relationship to their gender.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the biggest mainstream game nominated aside from The Thousand-Year Door, and in many ways it’s a better example of how major studios can do right by LGBTQ players. While the story of Taasch, a non-binary party member is hit-or-miss and has gotten plenty of criticism, it’s the player character that stands out. The Veilguard includes options to define your character’s body, gender, and pronouns separately from each other, but what happens after character creation is more notable. Early in the game, players can declare that their character is transgender and also define their feelings about their gender and their transition, whether they’re out and proud or still struggling to define themselves. The character’s trans identity can then play into dialogue later in the game — even if it doesn’t have as much of an impact as some might like.
GLAAD’s nominations don’t stop with blockbuster games, though. While it’s easy to focus attention only on the year’s biggest titles, the truth is indie games tend to have better LGBTQ storylines — and are more likely to be made by actual members of the community — than their better-known peers. Spend five minutes clicking around indie game storefront Itch.io if you don’t believe me.
Indie games like Until Then offer much more for LGBTQ players than mainstream hits.
GLAAD doesn’t dig particularly deep into the indie scene for its nominations, but the wide indie selection does suggest the organization did its homework. Games like Sorry We’re Closed and Dread Delusion venture into darker territory than most mainstream games trying to get representation “right” might allow, filling their horror-tinged stories with queer characters. The excellent sci-fi adventures Minds Beneath Us and Until Then go farther than just including LGBTQ characters by making their gender and sexuality key elements for their stories to explore. And as GLAAD points out, Until Then’s setting in the Philippines helps it offer a story that’s often overlooked due to popular media’s bias toward only recognizing white Westerners even in queer stories.
The winner of the Outstanding Video Game award will be announced at the GLAAD Media Awards on March 27. Regardless of the winner, this year’s list of nominees represent a good swath of how LGBTQ representation differs from studio to studio — and makes a great primer for where to start if you’re wondering where to find good queer stories in games.
