Now is the perfect time to play 2020’s story-driven adventure game Tell Me Why: in honour of Pride month, it’s currently free to download. Developer Don’t Nod’s tale follows a trans man returning to his childhood home and confronting his family’s past. A major video game that centres any trans character is a rarity to celebrate, but Tyler Ronan doesn’t feel tokenistic; he is part of a mature and complex story. Tell Me Why feels like a necessary counterbalance to a wider climate that seems desperate to make gender-diverse people feel marginalised and forgotten.
Tyler, a trans man, and his twin cisgender sister, Alyson, spend much of the game exploring the mysteries behind their mother’s death. Mental health and the fallibility of memory take equal weight, as the game explores transphobia and belonging. As a trans woman, I found the narrative compelling, challenging and deeply affecting. I was drawn in by its representation of trans people, but my attention was held by its musings on the universal concerns we all have. In other words, I was moved by its confidence in showing that trans lives are as complex as anyone else’s.
Don’t Nod was clearly at the height of its powers with this tale. Time-travelling coming-of-age story Life is Strange originally brought the developer to everyone’s attention, a rare video game about the highs and lows involved in being a high-school girl. Its hook was a dramatic power to rewind time and the threat of a town-destroying storm, but the supernatural elements and the stakes are all toned down in Tell Me Why; instead, telepathy and visible memories bring the game to a much more personal level. It makes for much subtler storytelling, and it’s more likely to connect with the realities of its players’ lives.
Tell Me Why feels so authentic because the developers made an effort to learn from the communities it was representing on-screen, consulting with Glaad and casting a trans actor as Tyler. This is a story about a trans man, but it also involves other minority groups, most notably the indigenous Tlingit community within Tell Me Why’s rural Alaskan town. Thankfully, mistakes that other games have made in the past were not repeated here: you never get a clunky info dump on anyone’s backstory, and actors from queer and Native backgrounds were cast in all those roles.
There is an argument that Tell Me Why doesn’t feel much like a game, but it’s for the best that the traditions of the adventure-game genre don’t turn up here. Puzzling is a staple of old school adventures, often blocking the progress of players for hours at a time, but here most of the brainteasers are solvable within minutes, integrating smoothly with the story’s pacing. Its most compelling gamelike element is the emphasis on its characters’ choices, how small decisions impact the course of their lives. Fundamentally, the choices players make determine Tyler and Alison’s path to overcoming trauma – because that is, crucially, the ultimate journey of the game. It’s inspiring and necessary for LGBTQ+ players to be reminded that they can carve out their future.
2023 has been a traumatic year for too many LGBTQ+ people across the world. Our possibilities are being threatened in a way that harks back to the 1980s, but with the added cruelties of the internet age. Trans people are unfortunately at the centre of this regression, and attacks on their rights and dignity in the media and in courtrooms are hard to ignore. Various US states and the UK government are fomenting hostility, working at ways to roll back access to healthcare and the spaces that fit their gender. Discussions such as altering the UK’s Gender Recognition Act to delegitimise gender are particularly damaging, acting to demonise the real, varied and too frequently challenging experiences of being trans. Queer art such as Tell Me Why is a much needed counterpoint to this barrage of abuse.
Outside of Don’t Nod’s efforts here, the video game industry isn’t giving as much support to trans people as it could. Trans characters have appeared more than ever in recent years, but often in tokenistic ways: the best examples, such as Lev in The Last of Us Part II, are still barely connected to the realities of existing while trans today, and often they are defined by their experience of transphobia.
Video games present a unique opportunity to put players in the shoes of underrepresented characters and foster empathy, especially given that it’s now the most widely enjoyed entertainment medium on the planet. As threats to trans people escalate day by day – this month alone Twitter CEO Elon Musk proclaimed the descriptive factual term “cisgender” to be a slur and the UK Prime Minister’s school guidance threatened to out trans kids – game developers should look to Don’t Nod for inspiration on how to show up for their queer players.
