Cyberpunk and Trans Representation at The Red Strings Club
A cyberpunk game with a controversial trans character? Nope, it’s not Cyberpunk 2077.
The Red Strings Club, from Spanish developer Deconstructeam, was initially released in January 2018 but has just arrived on the Switch. It’s a narrative game with a mixture of gameplay elements, all drawn together in a cyberpunk setting full of neon lights, androids, evil corporations, and an ambient electronic score.
Yet while cyberpunk games are often used to explore dark themes, The Red Strings Club is particularly bold. It asks some serious ethical questions about suicide, depression, and rape; about free will and controlling emotions; about how far we’ll go to suppress negative feeling. And it’s particularly open about sexuality and horniness, presenting a world of gender and sexual fluidity without judgement.
“It wasn’t something that we put a lot of thought into,” writer Jordi de Paco tells us. “We created these types of characters because that is our surroundings.”
The Deconstructeam identify as queer and The Red Strings Club grew into a personal tale. “We didn’t really engineer the representation, it came out naturally,” says de Paco.
Much of the game developed from reverse engineering. The key gameplay elements of sculpting implants, bartending and impersonating others on the phone were all created individually. The team soon realised their central theme – manipulation – which suited a cyberpunk setting.
From there, the narrative took shape, with its mega-corporation manipulating society and the characters fighting back with their own forms of rebellious manipulation.
Exploring Identities
Cyberpunk proved ideal for the team’s inherent LGBT subject matter. “I think [cyberpunk] is interesting to explore identity in general, not just LGBT identities but also our relationship with technology and us as a society,” says de Paco. “It’s a great way to analyse what place we will take in the future as LGBT people.”
The dark themes and focus on mental health were also born from personal experience. Close friends taking anti-depressants had the team questioning their effect on identity, which certainly fit the cyberpunk setting. Creating a link between queer representation and mental health may not have been initially intentional but ended up a natural fit. “I think they can be related because our experience that we face in society can be really stressing for us,” notes de Paco.
That was especially true for Paula Ruiz, the game’s composer who came out as trans during the course of development. This had a major impact on the rest of the team, and their collective experiences informed much of the game’s narrative – having consulted with Ruiz. This mostly appears in the character Larissa, a trans woman who’s hyper-sexualised – though she’s not immediately identified as such.
Says de Paco: “We deliberately wanted to put Larissa in there and not specify she is a transgender character because I think that if you specify it right off the bat people will have a different attitude towards the character and I wanted people to engage with the character.”
Larissa became a conduit for de Paco’s sexual liberation. “I was never brave enough to write sex into my scripts because it feels like you are exposing yourself,” he says. “But with this game I tried just to break that stigma that I carry. I put all of that into the character of Larissa, who is really open about sex and expresses sexuality in a really open manner.
“I want to explore more about sex in my stories, because it’s something really important and something really hard to talk about. It is not cool to talk openly about sex in most contexts in life, so I want to get rid of that and try to get more people to be open about sexuality.”
Controversy
One particular puzzle in the game has caused some controversy. It revolves around Larissa’s deadname, which is used as a computer password as the solution to a puzzle – it’s only through this that she’s revealed to be transgender. For some trans people, the use of their deadname is considered hugely offensive.
“[Through Paula’s experience] deadnaming was something really present in our reality…and we wanted to add a bit of that into the game,” says de Paco. “She had a lot of emails and passwords that surrounded her old identity. We had this character Edgar and he had the deadname as a trophy for him because he’s really an arsehole!”
De Paco admits it could have been handled more sensitively. “I understand that for some people it can be triggering,” he says. “I don’t want people to have negative feelings when playing the game, I didn’t want to create trauma.
“With The Red Strings Club we didn’t take any time into just letting people know there are sensitive topics about suicide and operations and if I had to do it again I would make it extra clear that you are going to find this.”
The game also features two gay male protagonists, which, having researched, the team realised was a rarity – where their sexuality is just a normal aspect of them.
“It’s important that we have one game [with gay heroes], but there needs to be a lot more because it doesn’t make sense that there’s so little representation right now,” says de Paco.
“I think that stories will get richer. I know friends that are tired of playing the same characters over and over in games, I think it’s something good for everyone to have more diversity in storytelling”
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