Quarantine Circular is a game with multiple narrators. Throughout its story, players swap roles between Gabriel, the first alien to arrive on Earth, and several human members of a multinational organization attempting to establish communication with Gabriel.
Like the recent Arrival, Quarantine Circular is hard science fiction, interested in exploring what first contact with an alien might realistically look like. Unlike Arrival, Quarantine Circular is hardly concerned with linguistics. The game's first scene quickly establishes the alien's ability to communicate with its human captors through advanced technology, and the alien is given the name Gabriel.
About a third of the way through Quarantine Circular, players take on the perspective of Gabriel. At this point, the majority of Gabriel's human captors express hostility, fear, and resentment toward Gabriel, and I, as the player, had yet to connect with Gabriel. A remarkable shift in tone occurs when one particularly aggressive human refers to Gabriel as 'it'. An epidemiologist named Professor Alla Zima quickly rises to Gabriel's defense and asks Gabriel's preferred pronouns. This moment was remarkable for a number of reasons.
My initial reaction was that this was a silly question. Because of the game's hard science fiction nature, I wondered why this alien would even understand the concept of gender, let alone have a preferred pronoun. Then I realized that the question was not silly but very important because Quarantine Circular is a game created by humans for humans, and gender is a critical component of our lives. Evidence of that fact: I'd already subconsciously gendered Gabriel. Its hulking figure and, more significantly, its name had intuitively read as masculine to me. When I pressed the button to select 'she' as Gabriel's pronoun, her character completely changed.
Narratively, Alla asking Gabriel for her preferred pronoun is crucial. Alla is the character that most empathizes with Gabriel throughout the story, so it's fitting that Alla is the one who stands up for Gabriel. Alla becomes the first human to give Gabriel agency, allowing Gabriel to circumvent the masculine-sounding name the humans thrust upon her and identify as she wishes. When I chose Gabriel's preferred pronoun as 'she,' it informed her burgeoning friendship with Alla. Their shared femininity acted as another dimension with which they could relate to one another. Because of this small choice, this small variance, I was intensely invested in their relationship and enjoyed it all the more when the two goofed off and played word games to pass the time.
Today, more games than ever ask players for their preferred pronouns; just in the last month, I reviewed two indie games, Solo and Monster Prom, that gave players this choice. Games can affect change in the person behind the controller. For years, I was closeted in games, just as I was in real life. I only romanced women. About a year before I came out in real life, I romanced a man in a video game, and it allowed me to quietly, privately, take the first step in acknowledging that I was gay. I hope that Solo and Monster Prom and Quarantine Circular can provide that same opportunity to players struggling with their gender identity. While Quarantine Circular is a particularly fine example because it made the pronoun question narratively influential, all of these games are important. If even one person is emboldened or made to feel accepted by playing these games, it's worth it. Media, especially interactive media, holds immense power to change lives; I am the proof.