Brave New Worlds: Exploring Gender and Sexuality through Social Multiplayer Games
It’s 2004. Two young women meet up in the town square, and exchange greetings. They’re both painfully shy and awkward – they’ve been flirting with each other for a while, but this is their first proper date. They find a place with a little more privacy, and begin whispering to each other. They weave a fantasy of playing in a swimming pool together, of gentle touches, sweet kisses… and more. Except this is all taking place in an imagined world within a video game. It’s 2004, I’m playing the MMORPG City of Heroes, and I’m sexting with another player. At this point in my life, I’m still deeply in the closet, afraid to be my true self in the real world.
Read more »Where is our Non-binary Representation?
Hello! I’d like to announce a new initiative to boost the voices of non-binary game developers. I’ll tell you how at the end of this article. But first, why?! Men are represented everywhere across our industry, both in the games we make and the people making them. While women are gaining headway with fantastic initiatives, there is still someone missing. According to a survey published by IGEA, non-binary people make up about 1% of the industry. Though that’s not entirely clear.
Read more »Avoiding the avoidable: Why 'optional' queer content isn't solving the diversity problem (and how to fix this)
September is Bi Visibility Month, making it the perfect time to write about bisexuality in games. Superficially, bisexuality is the most common representation of queerness in videogames, according to statistics we’ve been analysing. However, this is only the case if we conflate representations of ‘playersexuality’ with explicit representations of bisexuality (or other plurisexual* identities).
Read more »Reflections on 'Game Changers' (with thoughts from Dan Golding and Leena van Deventer)
Game Changers is a powerful, emotionally moving non-fiction book that made me cry on more than one occasion. After the release of Game Changers, I spoke with both Dan Golding and Leena van Deventer about the book and their experiences writing it, as well as how they have been feeling since its release.
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When you create something and release it into the world—no matter the medium—it can be terrifying. You let a product that you worked on tirelessly enter the world, and suddenly you do not have any control over it anymore. I am very familiar with this fear, particularly in relation to my writing of stories and articles; last year—for the first time—I felt this anxiety in relation to a game.
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