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The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time’s Sheik Is Nothing Without Their Androgyny

The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time’s Sheik Is Nothing Without Their Androgyny https://ift.tt/gJ9SmwY As a transgender woman and someone who doesn’t conform to their birth gender, there are a handful of characters throughout video games who I treat with a certain level of reverence.  During my "firmly still in the closet" teen years, I found myself fascinated with Guilty Gear’s Bridget , as they blurred the lines between masculine and feminine long before their queer identity would be cemented into canon. Vivian from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door proved equally impactful thanks to a personal arc that reinforced the woman she wanted to be and always had been. Though neither explicitly stated their queer narrative intentions, my growing mind subconsciously read between the lines, regardless: Both offered quiet forms of queer representation that, decades later, still rings true. The same compelling allure can be attributed to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time...

How Borderlands Ensures Character-Driven Storytelling Remains A Focus 14 Years Later

How Borderlands Ensures Character-Driven Storytelling Remains A Focus 14 Years Later https://ift.tt/GvgXNM4

The Borderlands franchise holds a peculiar place within the history of the gaming industry, kickstarting a genre that has gone on to become a different kind of beast. After all, though the concept of combining both RPG and first-person shooter mechanics was first seen in 2007's Hellgate: London, the loot-shooter genre owes its popularity to 2009's Borderlands. And yet, today, many of the most popular loot-shooters are also live-service games (like Destiny 2 and Warframe). Borderlands is not, having never adopted that format. It instead has multiple sequels--some of which diverge from the original game and don't feature any looting or shooting.

Like these other live-service game franchises, however, character-driven storytelling has been one of the main unifying pillars of Borderlands, which has been supported by a writer's room. "Gearbox is casually unique in the sense that we maintain a writer's room," Gearbox Entertainment associate director of narrative properties April Johnson told me. "So we don't just plunk you to work on a project and say, 'Okay, enjoy the two of you doing this--we have multiple things that we are working on, so we won't Voltron up as a full unit until later.'"

Having a constant writer's room is a strategy you usually see in story-driven live-service games where maintaining a narrative vision over multiple years--over a decade in the case of some games like Destiny--is important. It's not often seen in AAA franchises that feature several sequels and recruit a new set of writers from project to project. Gearbox Entertainment is not wholly unique in this strategy within the gaming industry, but it is a rare exception and the team points to this as one of the reasons for how the studio has managed to curate a specific narrative voice across all its projects.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

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