I don’t write on my blog nearly enough. This is mostly just due to having all my writing energy dedicated to schoolwork. For today I am sharing two posts I was required to write for a school assignment. Many hours were put into these, and I don’t want to lose them. They also go together.
Discussion: Current Issues: Post 1
For this assignment, I was torn between “Gender Equality in Gaming” and “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Games”. However, I finally realized that Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Games covered more kinds of people than just Gender Equality itself.
Moreover, I am interested in how well video games and the companies who make them represent the LGBTQIA community because I am transgender, and I found that my preferences in gaming tended to be toward games that don’t include human characters at all. Part of this is because, most of the time, there are no characters in video games that I can connect with personally.
Because the assignment instructions suggested Nexis Uni as a good source for current news, I decided to use it, and I searched for “diversity and inclusion in video games”. I was pleased to find 11 results in the news category, although I expected there would be a lot more.
The article I first read was by CE Noticias Financieras. They mentioned how Grand Theft Auto 6 was the first in the series to allow playing as a female main character. I don’t know anything about the series, but it greatly surprised me that it took until the 6th game before they considered this. But then I remembered that it was not until Pokemon Crystal came out that people could play as a girl in the Pokemon series.
But that was only the first thing that caught me by surprise. The second thing was that there was an actual petition with over 50,000 signatures protesting against the game Animal Crossing for not including afro hairstyles in the options for hairstyles when customizing game characters. Nintendo corrected this and later added this hair type into their games. I never considered before reading this just how important it can be to some people for the characters they are playing in video games to have their characters look like them. I also would never have guessed that the afro hairstyle would be so important because I am white, and my hair can’t do what the hair of black people can!
Because I remembered from my days of playing Pokemon that the Crystal version allowed playing as a girl, I decided to search for a source with information on females in Pokemon games. I found a good article that not only mentioned what I remembered about Pokemon Crystal but also information about games in the series that I haven’t even played, where female characters took on roles for the first time as part of the non-playable characters.
I only needed to do two searches to find my sources. The first was on Nexis Uni, as described above. The second was a Bing search for “Pokemon first game to allow female player”. The important thing is that I knew exactly what I was looking for, and I had no problem using these tools to find and read the information that I thought was most relevant!
(December 5, 2023 Tuesday). Inclusive videogames, with more feminism and diversity, are in the eye of some studios. CE Noticias Financieras English. https://advance-lexis-com.oclc.fullsail.edu/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:69T8-XNK1-DYY9-02FY-00000-00&context=1516831.
Schutze, K. (2024, April 1). Pokémon’s most impressive female characters, ranked. CBR. https://www.cbr.com/pokemon-best-female-characters/
—
Discussion: Current Issues: Post 2
After writing my previous post, I was very curious to see what other sources are saying about LGBTQIA inclusion in video games. I repeated the same searches I had before, but I read from different sources. However, I remembered that there was a specific incident that happened in Runescape years ago. I used Pink News as one of my sources because they had an article with the best information covering the Pride controversy of 2017.
In a Newstex blog, Rachel Kaser cited a report by GLAAD that 17% of surveyed gamers identify as LGBTQ. In spite of this, only 2% of video games contain characters that are LGBTQ.
Blair Durkee, GLAAD’s associate director of gaming, stated their opinion that people are more likely to express themselves in single-player games to avoid the harassment that they might receive if they were playing online multiplayer games. This is only an opinion, but it is certainly one that matches my own experience of being someone who played single-player games. The few online experiences I had in my teen years were not always positive because of online bullying of other people more than myself.
I will defend video game companies for their decision not to include LGBQIA characters. Although many players, myself included, would enjoy seeing more characters who are like us, I also can see the other side of the coin. If someone is a video game developer or publisher, they risk losing a lot of income if people accuse them of being too “woke” or “political”. The hatred of gay and transgender characters is a real thing happening both inside and outside the gaming world. Therefore, it is extremely risky for any company to take the chance of boycotts or lawsuits against them.
However, in spite of this risk, some companies are including LGBTQIA representation the best they know how, even though they are criticized for it. For example, Jagex, the company behind Runescape, has had Pride Month events in Old School Runescape since 2017.
A user on Reddit accused the developers of “shoving your opinions about stuff down my throat.”. Others decided to state their disagreement with Jagex in the game by walking around and typing “We Pay No Gay”.
I cannot say I am surprised because I have seen anti-gay messages on Runescape back when I played in my teen years. What I didn’t know is that Jagex would turn out to be such a supportive company.
Jagex responded to these negative criticisms with a statement:
“Pride is about bringing communities together and celebrating love and understanding: sentiment that’s close to RuneScape’s heart.
There’s no political statement here. Our only aim is to acknowledge and honour an event that promotes empathy, acceptance and love.
We are disappointed to see some hateful and abusive comments targeting individual members of staff and players from a small sub-section of the community.
We stand side by side with those targeted, in support of them, and in support of this cause. There is absolutely no place for hateful behaviour in our community and we will not tolerate abuse or harassment.
Pride 2017 is something we wholeheartedly agree with and are proud to support.
We know the community stand with us in support of the cause. If you want to show your support, all you have to do is take part in the event when it launches!” (Duffy, 2021)
Although I am very connected with the LGBTQIA population (who I like to call the Rainbow people) and am very aware of the need for representation in video games and other media, I also think that it is difficult to represent these characters in many video games unless they are heavily story oriented as RuneScape is. For many games, such advanced and complex topics would not even have a context to be present.
As a player and advocate of LGBTQIA inclusion, I would suggest that developers include such content in their games when it is relevant and that they are financially well-off enough to survive the blow when they are attacked for doing so.
As a final note, I would like to say that I had little to no trouble finding the information I needed for this post. What I did have trouble with was keeping myself going as I became very sad at some of the hateful things I read while doing my research.
But don’t be sad for me, for I have a secret weapon against this wave of hatred and discrimination! I will go and play Tetris, the most inclusive of all video games, because it has all the colors of the rainbow. Thank you for reading my post.
“Be excellent to each other, and party on dudes!” (Bill and Ted, 1989)
Rachel Kaser. (February 13, 2024 Tuesday). Nearly 1 in 5 gamers are LGBTQ according to GLAAD. Newstex Blogs VentureBeat. https://advance-lexis-com.oclc.fullsail.edu/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:6BB1-PGK1-JCMN-Y3G1-00000-00&context=1516831.
Duffy, N. (2021, September 20). This is what happened when RuneScape announced an in-game pride event. PinkNews. https://www.thepinknews.com/2017/06/06/this-is-what-happened-when-runescape-announced-an-in-game-pride-event/
Chastity White Rose 