Sybil Collas

We sat down for a chat with Sybil Collas, a writer and narrative designer with an interesting track record working in a bunch of roles!

QRM: Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do in the games industry?

Sybil: I'm a producer who switched gears to writing when I realized how fulfilling it was for me to create content.

Video games are my main industry but I also work for tv, print and web – and got published in a couple of fiction anthologies. I'm a fervent defender of the importance of narrative design in games, and teach on the subject.

QRM: How long have you been involved in the game industry, and what projects have you worked on? What are you working on currently?

Sybil: I started out as a QA tester for Vivendi Mobile in 2008, where I worked on Crash Bandicoot Nitrokart 3D and Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc. I had nothing to do with their actual design and production, yet I hid cryptic suggestions about game and level design changes in my bug reports. Since then, I've worked on smaller but lore-heavy IPs like Duelyst, Prodigy, or the soon-to-be-released Vampyr.

Right now, I'm working on an interactive documentary with Arte, a French tv channel that explores multiple platforms for multiple types of storytelling – and does it quite well. I'm also writing my first interactive fiction.

QRM: What inspired you to get started in the games industry?

Sybil: Ok, slice of life incoming. When I was a teenager, my dad and I got our papers stolen while on a trip to Florence, Italy. We had just barely gotten back in touch after years of estrangement and were stuck together in the hotel, with no money to enjoy the super pricey city and not enough knowledge of each other to suggest outdoor activities we would both enjoy. So we relied on the only sure interest we shared: games. He used to sneak past my video games-allergic mother to make me try stuff like Age of Empires II or Final Fantasy VII when I was a kid, and even after we got separated, I grew to immerse myself in board games and what few video games my friends owned.

So we spent our week in this small, stuffy, barely lit hotel room, gluing together the hotel's letter paper to create a map, cutting pens to create player tokens, using playing cards as variable generators and playtesting the hell out of this monster till it became a cooperative game we spent hours and hours playing. And I thought: 'Ok, that's what I want to do.'

QRM: In what ways do you feel your experiences as a queer person manifest in the games you work on, and influence the work you do?

Sybil: I always include queer characters in what I write. That's what I am, that's what I know, so that's what rings true. Most of the time though, I don't openly say, 'Hey, they're queer' – I just think it, and the characters might pass as straight or cisgendered for the rest of the team and the players/viewers.

Going freelance has allowed me to gain the freedom and assurance needed to write and design what I want. So, slowly, carefully, I'm starting to weave more and more of my identity into what I do. The more I write, the more my characters affirm their queerness. I guess it reflects my own acceptance and affirmation.

QRM: Do you have a favourite queer character—in games or media more generally? If so, what is it about them that makes them your favourite?
Question asked by @kamienw.

Sybil: In video games, not really. I like Athena from Borderlands because she has a sweet relationship with her girlfriend, lacks any queer cliché and is ultra badass, but at the same time her lack of honesty towards her companion makes me uneasy and I can't identify with her.

In media in general, Sense8 is my go-to queer show. My all-time favorite queer character is Lito Rodriguez from this series: his journey as a closeted gay is so relatable, and he's so lovely and sexy and weak and strong. He's perfectly imperfect. Nomi is also an excellent character and a legitimate representation of trans women, with super hacking powers. This show breaks all records in terms of representation: not just sexuality and gender, but also color and culture. Sense8's theme being about what it means to be human, they couldn't have made this any more on point. I believe it rings so true because the Wachowski sisters, who created the show, are transgender themselves.

What I'd love to see in video games is a main character, a true hero or heroine, who is openly queer. And not just in indie titles: I'm talking big budget, huge audience, blockbuster licence. I hope the time will come where the gender and sexuality of a queer main character can be explicit but their identity and struggles are what matters most.

QRM: Have you ever encountered roadblocks in trying to include queer characters in games? What do you think is preventing greater diversity within games?
Question asked by @dustinalex91.

Sybil: My first attempt at including an openly bi man in a game was crushed by a barrage of 'THE PLAYERS DO NOT WANT THIS'. It was violent and perturbing, and my suggestion generated a lot more hate than I had prepared myself for. The white cis man who directed the game and told me about what the players 'do not want' projected his own representation and desires into the game: female characters were very young, barely wore any clothes and their cinematics featured panty shots, while men were middle-aged, never showed an inch of skin below the neck, and starred in the most epic sequences and choreographies.

If this specific case was violent and obvious, I also encountered subtler barriers. One time I wrote a character backstory which included a line about how this woman flirted with both men and women, and that sentence was changed by our community managers to men only. When I confronted them about this, they dodged the question saying that this would be confusing for the players and could spark conflict. Once more, it wasn't them, it was 'the players'.

As long as our decision-makers do not realize that they do not represent everyone and as long as we keep hiding behind this fantasized vision of 'the players', we will be stuck in a cycle of guilt-free navel-gazing.

QRM: Why do you think it is important that queer audiences are able to see themselves represented in the games they play, and in the developers who make the games they see? What can we do to improve the industry for queer audiences and devs?

Sybil: Representation is vital. It's vital for those who are out and need to see they are considered as existing entities in this world, and it's vital for those who do not yet know or do not wish to know or do not wish to tell. Representation allows them to consider the possibility, to know that they can exist, to know that they do exist.

Video games are an extensive medium, with one of the widest audiences any media has ever seen. It's our jobs as game developers to understand the perspective of people who are not us, should they be players or fellow developers. Media teaches principles and shares ideas that help people build themselves. We have to allow all identities to exist and to be built.

Just working among different people, of different genders, sexuality, colors, cultures, can challenge your view of the all-domineering white cis male. We need more diversity in development and marketing teams and safer working spaces if we want greater diversity in our games. We need to allow and protect representation.

A parenthesis regarding bisexual characters. We are not confused, we are not stealing queer space, and we are not defined by the partner we currently have. Unicorns are unicorns, not horses looking for themselves.

QRM: Have you ever mentored somebody in your role in games, or been mentored? If so, what made these experiences worthwhile for you?
Question asked by @pepelanova.

Sybil: I did mentor wannabe designers but never went past the stage of, 'Ok, you're in the industry now, good luck surviving.' I'm working on it. In the future, I wish to become someone who can defend their views with enough empathy to take in the opinion of whoever I'm trying to convince and turn our combined beliefs into a third, new and powerful idea. For now I'm just a really stubborn person.

I received advice from several seniors which made me grow up as a designer, although we never nurtured long-term relationships and conversations never gravitated around the subject of representation. Perhaps if I got out of my cave more often, I'd be able to cultivate a connection strong enough that I could observe it and dissect it and get inspiration from it. Doesn't sound that sane when I say it aloud though.

QRM: In what ways can non-queer folk increase and support queer diversity present within games, as well as in the industry more broadly? How can we all work to support intersectional approaches to diversity, and why is this important?

Sybil: It is important for non-queer people to just, well, know and acknowledge that we exist. Queer folks tend to congregate in communities where we bathe in recognition of our existence, and more often than not we forget that this recognition is a speck of dust in the mass of those who ignore us, willingly or not. I'm not saying we need knights to defend us, we can do this just fine, but the video games industry is still so widely straight and masculinized that we need those who represent these archetypes to open their eyes to things that are not them. Queer people shouldn't be the only ones to acknowledge queer people. This means representation in our teams and titles, but also talking with our communities about these struggles, engaging in debates, spreading the word, and, more and most importantly, calling out bullshit when we see it. Fighting censorship and allowing developers to create queer characters is as important as fighting real-word phobia committed against our peers. Also we should stop killing off quota characters.

If media broadcasts a true-to-life vision of queer folk, we will finally be considered like the normal, common occurrence that we are. We should strive to normalize representation.

QRM: Is there a message that you would like to share with the queer game players, game studies researchers, and other interested folks who comprise the Queerly Represent Me community?

Sybil: Video games are still considered as a young and immature medium, but more and more outsiders are realizing that we are pioneers: in immersion, in technology, in design, in art, in storytelling. Let's keep astonishing them and become pioneers of representation as well.

On a smaller scale: just design stuff you like. Encourage others into doing the same. Speak out. And never, ever, stop questioning the content you create and the content you play.

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You can find Sybil on Twitter and check out their interactive fiction here.