Playing with Pride: When Game Culture and LGBTQ Culture Collide

[Music] well so welcome I'm Matt Baume welcome to playing with pride so this is a several years long project to kind of answer the question of what happens when queer culture and game culture collide and particularly what that collision means for game developers for the last three years I've been gathering video interviews with LGBTQ gamers along with my partner James and we're gonna share Some stories that we've collected today so just quick introduction about me I'm a writer and multimedia producer in Seattle I cover LGBT issues for Rolling Stone and Vice magazine and slate and

a whole bunch of others I have a podcast called the sewers of Paris where I interview queer people about entertainment that's changed their lives and along with James my partner we do a live show and podcast called queens of adventure featuring drag queens playing Dungeons & Dragons so intersection of queer in game is a big part of our lives so a couple of years ago we noticed that there was this rising interest in gaming events geared towards LGBT people and we were curious about that what do games have to do with sexuality this is a

question that a lot of people were asking not always in good faith so we wanted to answer that particularly when it comes to the games industry James is a longtime game designer I worked at Capcom and leapfrog and LucasArts and we noticed that there might be a need for games culture and queer culture to overlap in a way that wasn't currently being met so we decided to ask people about that we recorded interviews with over a hundred people in their homes occasionally at work asking them how games have helped them to come out fall in

love explore their sexuality feel less alone we also talked to Developers about how they've incorporated queer themes into their work a lot of the people that we spoke to were queer some more straight some more trans and we're non-binary we heard a lot of deeply personal stories about navigating between those queer worlds and gamer worlds particularly when it comes to love romance and dating we also heard from gamers about needs and wants that the industry isn't currently meeting and We talk to game developers about what they're doing to meet those needs what they're changing on

their end and changing out their practices so what we're gonna look at today what I'm sharing with you is some short video clips from those conversations highlighting some themes that came up again and again and again a couple of quick notes these are the stories from people that we talk to it's not the complete queer gamer experience there Are a lot of topics that we touched on in these interviews that we just are not gonna have time to talk about today and also some of the folks that we talked to spoke about their experience being

harassed they use some slurs to talk about what they experienced just to prepare you in case that's something that you don't want to hear so something that we heard from almost everybody is that when the people who spoke to were young Gaming was considered safe it was Fun it was something that brought people together and then for a lot of people that changed when they wanted to share their love of games with queer friends or when they wanted to talk about sexuality or sexual orientation or gender identity with gaming friends and these two worlds just

seemed incompatible you know I thought I was an outcast there was some kind of freak cuz I didn't know any gay people and there was nothing on the telly so it was like What's wrong with me when I was a kid all my friends were like the nerdy boys and the fact the very fact that I was also into the same nerdy stuff that they were into made them assume that I wasn't gay and if you talked about gay stuff it was not okay I'm sitting there like I have all these likes and loves and

like I didn't really have a place to really express and even then like the anime groups and whatnot it's kind of like you don't like it the Way I like you guys are staring at like all the big all the girls with big boobs in the anime and humps like who's that hot guy over there I mean before I was even a chocolate to anyone I was being called I just knew that it was bad and it was something that I should feel guilty about and I tried to not be so I guess I kind

of closed myself off for my parents and closed myself off from my peers so it made me you know I'm my parents often commented I was a Hermit I would just be up in my room all the time playing my video games but that was that was the way I coped though I didn't think of it as coping at the time my friend had completely abandoned role-playing games he no longer wanted anything to do with me and so I was completely completely baffled and I would be aesculus of what happened between you and your friend

it I don't know he just doesn't want to talk with Me because like you kind of feel like an outsider in both worlds because it's like oh well I'm not straight but like I'm not completely gay so like I'm not gay enough I have this like gaming aspect of my life and in a way I like I have the queer yeah aspect of my life and like you know never the twain shall meet sort of thing I can either be be black I could be gay or I could be a nerd and I did four

with a long time feel like that I kind of had to like Hide parts of myself games kind of started being a lot more about like bang bang and like much a chest beating and for like reasons that I can look back at now and understand right but at the time I couldn't I started just kind of being like well maybe I'm just not into games you know like we have PAX East here in Boston that when you go you sometimes are concerned about you know being out and you know sometimes some people are being

very immature some people being Homophobic other times if you just go you know to do other events like for example going to gay pride folks are mainly more focused so I'm kind of either have the more body conscious aspects of pride looking good or you know or we don't necessarily get to really talk about those interests beyond just being gay yeah the two never overlapped in the gay community there's just other things going on and so they don't know not always the best time to Pull out a board game and be like hey want to

play risk my biggest gamer friends were all were all as straight men which I mean not a bad thing there our people too and we should give them all the love they deserve but like there was nothing like we could only talk about video games but like won't talk about relationship stuff was a little like uh you're in the girls I'm into dudes like hmm I think I still feel like that Terra brantford character from Final Fantasy where that I don't feel like when I'm like at a gay bar that I fit in there because

everybody's excited about a Britney Spears video being on the monitor and I don't really care about that and if I talk about a game that just come out that I'm excited about they don't care about that so I never really feel like I fit in anywhere that's why I have animal friends so we by the way we could do like a Supercut of all the times that interviews have been interrupted by cats in this project it turns out that queer people have a lot of cats so the feeling that a lot of those people talked

about there of being unwelcome closed a lot of LGBTQ people that we spoke to it just closed them off to games in general it made them feel as though gaming simply wasn't for them that was even my blog personally that was my own experience for most of the my 20s in the 2000s I Just didn't see queer people in games and I felt like I was intruding whenever I talked to what I thought of as real gamers and you know something that we heard from a lot of these folks that it would alienate queer people

to talk about games and those feelings extended into dating as well we heard from a lot of the folks that we visited who felt as though they couldn't bring up games on dates for fear of alienating a potential partner Gaming was seen as a liability a Source of embarrassment like you're not a real queer if you play games you're not a real gamer if you're queer and then worse that didn't stop with rejection that also included harassment from other gamers because sometimes the gamer is just a little they don't really care for drag queens when

I started playing World of Warcraft I was in a rating guild right like I was in a serious hardcore 40 man three days a week spending spending time Raiding gilbright and I left them because they kept using the word in Guild chat and I was like you know I'm done I was in a guild on my son's server and that was any time we didn't win it was that so gay or you dumb and I was just done I played World of Warcraft for a short period of time this is a long time before my

transition so identifying as female at the time there's plenty of bullying when it comes To female gamers you know at the time I couldn't even fight that I just stopped playing I think I only played World of Warcraft maybe a week before I just completely stopped we also heard a lot of first-hand accounts from people working in the game industry and a common thread was a perception that their input wasn't valued or that bringing up LGBT topics relating to games could negatively impact their career and so this next Video features all people who work in

games and we asked them if they perceived obstacles to just doing their work and here's what they said if you go to GDC or you go to any convention that is gaming or tech focused you don't see people like you it can be very discouraging growing up CUDA games were always for children and homosexuality was not not proper to be exposed to children I just never I just even being in a Strategist assumed that there that was those were two things that were never going to be coming to connection to each other you know I

thought all right well the queer world is pride parades and all the bars and clubs and that sort of thing and then there's the game world where I have to be super serious you know get ready let's make this I didn't realize there was any overlap so I worked at Electronic Arts global Rookie of the Year and I designed the Game called Madden football so there was and before that I had been like a sports reporter in school and and there was no intersection of gay life and sports professional sports life in that time like

in the early 90s there was no it just wasn't like that I wouldn't bring any personal to it I just would just shut that down if anything got super close to person or what are you doing this weekend or whatever I'd like sports going to PACs For the first time really opened my eyes to this is the community where I feel most at home but then after I started you know participating in that community more I also then started to see how I wasn't fully at home there and that you know that the media for

in that community wasn't being made for me so we spoke to a lot of people about the problems that they've experienced as players or as makers and we also found a lot of optimism as well so despite all Those problems a lot of people spoke about how games could provide some measure of relief even though most games even to this day aren't made with queer players specifically in mind many of the folks that we interviewed either sought out titles that intentionally included queer people or they use their imagination to insert themselves into their favorite stories

and in creating and playing his characters who reflected their interests queer gamers were able To find a place where those two sides of their personalities could both coexist and for a lot of these players they spoke particularly intensely about the importance of character creators particularly about having a avatar that represents them in ways that they might not be ready to express in real life so that allowed for example transgender gamers to experiment with gender and sexuality before expressing themselves before basically affirming themselves in The real world there's a chance to really get into the story

get into why characters doing things hopefully their motivations and figure out kind of Who I am along with these characters we feel like our characters in Final Fantasy really represent what we would be in a fantasy world like complement each other because you're white magic I'm black magic you're healing of destruction yeah so I have to clean up this mess as well video Games were actually kind of the first way that I kind of became the bowl with expressing other genders my first kind of gender change happened when I was someone had bought me a

bootleg copy of Pokemon crystal for my birthday because it was bootleg halfway through with the game crashed and then when I reported my save I was a girl that was kind of an epiphany moment because I'm like oh I like this more than I should Peach is a big one growing up because back then she was just the princess I was never identified with her and always just like picking the girl characters what I could it's nice seeing yourself on the game screen and that's your avatar out there it's not actually you but it's nice

to kind of think it is you a little bit seem samus and knowing that was a girl going into that I think this is really cool and shaky pass I was actually really aware of what I was Doing like I'm picking her because I actually had gonna buy that way favorite characters um probably Wheatley from Portal I tend to kind of lean toward characters that aren't really specifically human because it's easier for me to relate to somebody who's not specifically set into a certain gender like robots they're robots Wheatley has a male voice but that

doesn't mean he's technically male myself being female to male transgender it's easier for me to Kind of relate to characters like that growing up I had always chose and my character just creation had always been male I think it was just oh click can do that one I mean it was really they really were character creators were like such a safe place where I could just gender could be whatever like the character creator would allow me to make it and I would always explore Oh in small boobs short hair women no boobs short hair big

I have a lot of favorite Game characters one of them is totally cheating which is femshep from from Mass Effect that's cheating because a lot of what you make that character is your choices you know she starts as a relatively blank slate there's definitely some information built in but she is very much what you make of her but she's she's so well done and she's she's so nuanced the writing in the presentation is so wonderfully done easily one of my favorite characters Well I guess you know Shepard from Mass Effect you know he was a

good character he's the hero and then just you know the fact on top of it that the game allowed you to play a you know a gay character so it could be the gay hero that I wanted to be I think I probably took a lot of my inspiration for myself when I was coming out from the characters like Bayonetta who are stronger and sexy the first time I went out as a woman and as my true self I was I think I remember Shaking him because I was just so nervous that people were gonna

be so mean to me I think that's why avatars are so important especially for like young trans kids because they can create that identity in the game and live is that identity especially if they're not ready to do it in you know in their actual reality so many of the people that we spoke to gravitated towards games that allowed them to explore objects of their affection and to Roleplay romance stories in contrast to real-life situations we're talking about gaming might cause a date's eyes to glaze over which is something that a lot of people spoke

about a lot of the gamers that we spoke to found games that let them safely explore sex and attraction and relationships in ways that might not have been available to them or that they might not have been comfortable exploring in real life and for those players the games were much More about much more than just having fun those games were providing a safe haven that folks might not otherwise have particularly for people who live outside of a major city or who live in a country that might be more conservative when it comes to dating and

might pose safety hazards to being openly queer or just to people who didn't have online support networks I definitely give into the sort of like typical male power fantasy except queer so like with Dragon Age and Mass Effect I build sort of you know like it's like you know build a boyfriend I think my fallout character was pretty hot when we play scene throws we run around with our characters naked so it's all about the beards and the muscles really in for me it's inspiring because I I do want to have that superhero body so

I work hard to like look like my characters I really love the shepherd Kaidan Alenko romance option that was there but I wish y'all Got to more than once and I also wish Alenko had a beard and I want to see Shepherd and Alenko on the rooftop looking at the stars in Vancouver where he's from he is such a sweetie in Fable you can flirt with male or female the storyline is amazing too but to have that option until you actually have it and do it you don't realize how much you missed not having that

I mentioned fable because I think that was the first game I played where you could actually play a Gay character it was common it was you know it it was something I could identify with like say Skyrim I you could totally marry a guy and you know it you know being a gay man like you know if you had the choice to marry a girl a guy course you're to marry the guy you know I'm playing Fallout 4 still right now and right now I am in a relationship with a feisty Irish lady a rugged

roguish girl man a synthetic woman and I'm currently working on Impressing a certain George Clooney looking paladin and that that really is my idea of a perfect lifestyle that was a revelation because I was so I guess just shocked but something that is part of my life was suddenly in this video game having a lot of fun with Irish roads and ghouls and paladins and robot women so I think that that's the cloves that's the video games gonna get to me I think so just as a kind of a measure of how much has changed

in the Last few years when we started this project probably about four four years ago ish you know when we would have a conversation about queer characters and games people would be like oh isn't this amazing that it was right before inquisition came out and you know people were like oh there's this game coming out that's gonna have you know isn't that amazing and then just last night I was having a conversation with a developer about a dating sim involving Monsters and you know I asked are there are there going to be can you have

relationships with characters of any gender and he gave me this look like of course he was like yeah of course like why wouldn't you so just to how like having that be the response instead of like isn't this amazing we're doing this for the first time just in the last few years a lot has changed so as the people that were that we interviewed felt more comfortable expressing those two sides Of their personality the queer side and the gamer aspect something big changed in their life going from virtual relationships into real life they found that

this is something that affected their dating and romance and relationships in real life when they talked about games on dates instead of being met with skepticism they were met with enthusiasm and so games really changed how people were able to form bonds with other people my I met my Boyfriend three Botha's gay ways to run this weed thread through in my life she was um in a friend's dorm room fitting for her Padme costume from Episode two we met we actually met online which we don't usually tell people usually we say we met at a

comic book shelf because there's still a lot of stigma around people who meet online I'm a ton grinder yeah I mean we didn't know we were like kind of geeks in that way at first like over texts it was like what are you Doing um you know playing some final fantasy oh yeah what's your favorite character and so we got into it into it that way and it was kind of cool right now he's still under underleveled so I'm helping him you know gain his bearings and not like the guy I'm seeing now is very

Canadian and I met him at a board game convention that a couple years ago so he's got it's really funny the first time we went to his house they flipped out because I saw An NES like right by his TV and they got really happy like even if he doesn't play it just knowing that it's there tells me something about him something that we already have in common I think finding somebody who was also a gamer was really important to me because having that agreement and just being like our space is not going to be

conventional and people are going to look at us and they're going to scream oh my god they're terrible nerds and We're going to laugh in their face about it and I needed that in my life we're both playing through Fire Emblem fates right now so we're each playing that honor and we're talking about like oh who who are repairing together to make that to make their kid and like to have like the best stats and all that stuff like he's made like a full-on like excel sheet of like all the pairings that he's going to

make for the game like he's super into it and I'm like you're a nerd And I'm like I love it like you are we getting married tomorrow where's my ring [Laughter] so it's actually been a while since I showed that particular clip and I just realized like a nice little coda to that story is that DJ is now engaged to his boyfriend so so he got his ring yay and that was actually like an experience that I had as well I met my partner James 15 years ago through Final Fantasy It was in college and

my suite had the nice TV and he had the PlayStation and so we kind of combined forces and that was like how we got talking to each other because we were both shy nerds and we wouldn't have been able to talk to each other otherwise and so you know it's just this common thing that like games bring couples together in a way that really it's it's a recent development it's something that we've heard from people in just the last Couple of years that was much rarer maybe like a decade or two ago and so that's

not the only personal change that people experienced through that blending of queer culture and game culture a lot of players experienced significant personal changes when they encountered queer content in games or queer characters or just games that lent themselves to headcanon so I mean for me Mario Cart like I queer every character in Mario Kart I have this like whole backstory about like Bowser competing with Donkey Kong I mean it's just my story but you know we hear the power of people kind of taking command of the of the content that they that is presented

to them and saying okay thank you for making this a Nintendo now I'm gonna take it from here so among those personal changes that people experience they're seeing that acknowledgment of their existence that invites queer players into games where They might have felt unwelcome it gave them an out it gives them an opportunity to identify as gamers where previously they would have been you know that we heard this common thing oh it's just not for me this is still something that I personally like deal with I you know I produced a show right now where

I'm DMing a D&D game and just even a year ago when I thought about Dungeons & Dragons I was like oh well that's not For me it turns out D&D is super queer yeah yeah I say also like having games as a practice space to express that you are queer can allow players to build confidence in other aspects of their lives so a lot of people that we talked to talked about how gameplay helped them assert themselves authentically even after they stepped away from the screen right after my sister passed away I got a kiefer

gone home and I went through gone home and there was this Moment of I don't know you could call them epiphany or aha moment I was I was reading one of the letters in the game and the characters you know was doing the voice-over and I kind of had a little bit of disconnect because what the character was voicing about her sister it really echoed some of the feelings and emotions and just experiences that I had with my sister and her sexuality and I remember I even like blurted it out on stream like whoa Like

I'm in my feelings right now I might need to take a minute this is really reminding me of the relationship that I had with my sister I guess you could say revealed to me some of how she might have been feeling it put it put me in her shoes in a way it was kind of like this might sound odd but it was kind of a way for me to get closure to like this is kind of reflecting me and my sister's life it really actually gave me some peace honestly gone home as A game

that was explicitly queer was extremely powerful it was a game that I didn't realize I've been waiting for my whole life until I played it why is this so rare why is it so unusual that a narrative that centers you know queer women is practically like unheard of confirmation that you exist is an amazingly powerful thing I think at some fundamental level that's a need that everybody comes to media and entertainment for so it's nice to see in Something that's so mainstream that you know it's okay to be gay because that means that everything else

in real life that is also mainstream makes it okay and seeing the the character and undertale you know portrayed with a it's validation it's it's realizing that somebody out there is willing to sing part of your song people said I you you help me they literally said you helped me realize I was gay you gay your characters gave me the courage to come Out as bisexual you're playing your game got me through a time where otherwise I was considering killing myself solidarity is a big important thing knowing that you're not alone it's that I think

it sounds like cliche right if you see like oh how do you feel when you see someone that's queer in a game or someone that you can't really - it's just like makes me feel like I'm not such a like I'm not so outside of the norm I know that we're a minority but It's great to feel like yes you're minority but you know you're accepted you are allowed to be like a human any light at the end of the tunnel even if it's far away like that is is so reassuring to me and to

my friends and people I know so we found in our interviews that games give players a cultural touchstone around which they can build some community particularly in the last decade we've seen a huge increase in Offline social groups built around queer gaming it's going to the point now where a lot of cities have multiple organizations all building queer community and support through games in my hometown of Seattle we've got two groups there's queer gamers which has been around for a couple of years there's gamers with a Y which is fairly new query no queer geek

queer geek has been around for a while and it tends to be a slightly like older demographic and A little more focused on board games gamers with the Y is a little bit younger and tends to focus more on like nightlife sort of events so gamer parties in LA there's a newish group that's more focused on community service so we're seeing like not not only are people organizing to meet each other in physical space but there's enough demand in large cities that they're doing it in multiple different organizations and for several years one of the

largest queer Gaming events was the annual convention gamer X that was based here in the Bay Area for a long time we heard from people all over the country that they attended that convention learned organizing techniques at gamer X from other people who were facilitating meetups and then return to their own hometowns to start new local gaming organizations wherever they happen to live and although they don't fit into there So I'm getting like Noble and also be bringing people together every little element and you have board games and horror games I hope you set it

up daniel-san and role or rating where I've got down the babies and then just have happily together long harrowing queer female queer women's everyday lives and then I go clear your woman's work in my comedy it's kind of away for all he's kind of mean up and you know Did he meet people that are greening up normally mean you look but you get so I'm just gonna pause it for a second that's like sounds like it has like a ton of reverb on it does it sound weird to everybody yeah let me just double check

because I have a feeling I might actually have that slide yeah okay that's why sorry I have the video on the slide twice so that's why I was doing that so just gonna resume that right there we go sorry about that you need What that you get to actually have the nerdy effect of like liking given the satisfaction playing games around people who are just like you and you know just it's great it's a great social outlet so something like gamer X is a place where people can go and and realize that they're not alone

that there are people like them out there so when I found a place that or like a con or a bunch people were gathering to kind of celebrate both aspects and bond as one Community like I had to be there I don't know I just just felt like a really big family and I'm not even gonna lie I'm really looking forward to seeing some storm drag queens I can be like yeah it's block I'm hoping that people who are straight go to the event just to see for themselves that as long as you're not a

jerk you're gonna belong there so that's most of those folks are talking about gamer X which really was a transfer Experience for a lot of people just show of hands like who's been to one of the game rx events yeah it's actually so not a ton of people here they're really lovely and midboss the company that did it still exists and they're making games now rather than doing events but it really it was the first time that there was an event like that where people could come from all over and meet at a specifically queer

focused gaming convention there was I Think it the first one there was a proposal that was done with musically musical accompaniment by Ellen McLain who was the voice of GLaDOS there was I think a proposal that the second one as well it was a really supportive positive and pretty unique space and they haven't done it for the last year or two in part I think because we've just seen this huge rise in people organizing both online and offline but it's really changed that like the Community in physical like small towns maybe not small towns but

in in in more cities has really expanded since where we were about five years ago and one of the byproducts of that is that we're seeing queer gamers organizing in ways that they didn't used to we heard a lot of people who are becoming basically self-taught at articulating what they want from games and so this presents a really beneficial opportunity for game developers now that queer gamers are Becoming increasingly prominent they can express what they want in more public spaces whether it's streaming or in physical spaces and it's easier for devs to listen and to

learn about how their games can appeal to that broader audience and incorporate more queer content so here's some people this next video is going to be some people talking about how basically how they found an audience and a community for expressing what is still missing from games seeing Someone out there in the world being gaming or anything I think person came out and is doing already the transition the crowd it's really cool we're just seeing a woman in a prominent position like identified it as a woman anyway so I'm like seeing someone out there in

position of power it's like yeah that's really cool I want to like there's more there's more people all the time like me I know I know I can be that person as well The whole reason I started my twitch channel in the first place was because of all the homophobia and the homophobic stuff that I was seeing from different gaming channels and different streamers and I was like I really need to get into this and there needs to be much more vocal LGBTQ identities on the twitch sphere I was hearing all these stories from my

LGBT youth hearing their coming-out stories or people that hadn't come out and it's now my job to help Create a safe space on that place for them to share those stories with each other now when you look at twitch some of the biggest streamers on their platform are LGBTQ or LG LGBTQ allies which is amazing but a lot of trans and gay people younger people they will come and ask me a lot of questions when I'm streaming because they don't have any outlets and I love that about twitch that it's not just me sitting down

to play a game it's more like let all of us Sit down and enjoy this title together so I think it's great because it opens up line of communication with people you might not have ever met before earlier this year I was looking for private funding to undergo some surgery stuff that was going on and we're years ago I'd have been afraid to even talk about the fact that I was trans in this example like lots and lots and lots of people online came to my support and I think it took maybe 10 days to

bring Together this huge amount of money I was trying to the surgery and it was just this moment of not only am I not having to hide that I'm trans but that there are people out there who are willing to step up and support me when I need it if you can talk to people about video games and get them interested in what you're saying because of games then introduce hey here's some of the struggles of being a queer person who's a content creator it certainly makes it easier to Get people who otherwise might not

listen to conversations about queer identity to say oh I will stop and listen because I care about you as a creator and want to see you happy and like this last couple of years I've had a lot of people come and say to me I didn't know anything about these issues that the lgbtq+ community face I know about them now because I listen to you talk about them in amongst silly discussions of gaming butts and Sometimes that's all you need to get people to listen is sandwich it inside a conversation that they're already looking for

a recent experience when I had my first panel at PAX East I went in there kind of thing like what am I doing here I'm surrounded by these amazing people and my turn came up and I've been out for years it's no secret but I just don't talk about it much so I went up there and Said just my promise how to how open to be about it I didn't realize how much I had bottled I had that bottled up inside I had to take a moment and catch myself I was like starting to have

tears ball out there just stopped and my friend patted my shoulder and like it's okay to give me a hug and that moment the entire crowd like hundreds of people started cheering and clapping applauding I'm like oh my god this is wow thank you so much and um I felt amazing that that was My contribution is kind of like reading myself as a trans person because afterwards if you go to panels a number of times afterwards people will start kind of rushing the stage they want to talk to the panelists ask them their questions I

look up and like there's people standing in front of me like what what and I will never forget this person I really wish I would have been all didn't catch their name and I let that man being I had their spiky hair and a Spread final shirt had the biggest smile on their face and I just said thank you thank you so much for being open and just being out there and I almost lost it right there again and they walked off I never got to learn who they were I really wish I could and

a number of other people came up and said the exact same thing and I was each time I almost are falling and Happiness and wow I never thought of myself as being that person for people but growing up I Always like seeing someone who kind of represented me and now all of a sudden I was put into that situation where I'm that representation for someone else so now it's easier than ever for queer for game developers to include queer gamers in the product that they're making there's no shortage of voices on streams at conferences and

conventions people who are doing diversity consulting and what we're seeing now is a lot of companies are Changing their practices to listen to those voices and incorporate the feedback into their production process so as part of this project we sought out some developers who are doing basically good work in that area who people are putting queer content into their games and so we ask them how they're doing that and how it's affected their work I own a video game studio now and that was actually my little childhood dream when I was six so I mean

like one of the Key things about indivisible is that it's about people from different viewpoints coming together and being better than like this monolithic thing and so I mean just diversity is kind of like built into that storyline it initially started out with like racial but then it's like okay let's expand this and see what we can do with it so we've got neuro diversity of that sexual diversity video games who I really love to make and they also pay my bills when I started my company it was like I either need to drop drugs

is too expensive or I need to make it work for me so I wanted to go against the grain made a game about love kitty powers in it there was another box I wanted to take was to make it very inclusive of the game and have a drag queen in it as well they're not queer in the game it's not a queer game but quiz are included and they're very visible having suffered for so so much so I was a kid I thought Well it all these young kids are going to be watching this video

this game being played then at least they're getting some kind of exposure I didn't get if kids can see that and see it being treated as if it's normal and that's good thing and we decided you know my producer pulled me aside and said hey I think I want to put a girl as an option in its game and I looked at him and I was like you picked the right person to be on your team buddy But it was how I was so nerve-wracking there were all these people around me who had years of

experience some of which who would have loved to have a lesbian route but were too nervous to try and I was I'm grateful that I had the backing of whether senior producers behind me to say like no let's do this we can do this and then let me take control of that content because they respected that I was a queer woman wanting to write this Queer woman our queer fans obviously are overjoyed um I've never I get teary-eyed when I look at some of their posts and their responses because they're so heartfelt in genuine and

saying you know thank you we've never had this sort of representation before thank you so much and it feels amazing to give them that I just want to give people content where they see themselves in content where they get a happy ending those are kind of my two big goals so people are being Quiet about it anymore and then that's a great thing but I can't just be the smaller indie Studios it can't just be you know the person making a twine game on their own time it needs to be aged to trickle up to

the triple a space I'm here and I get our you know I get our audience but I get that our audience is also people like me and I'm fortunate to work with a bunch of people who understand that and and we do try and look out beyond the what is Stereotypically thought of as as the target audience and with Twitter and and getting to go to conventions and talking to people we can just have a lot more conversations a lot more easily than we used to and we can say okay we're gonna make this kind

of character I'm not a trans person how do we make a character that is respectful of you that makes you feel like this is a good thing and then when it does okay that makes it sort of less scary for the next game oh okay Maybe and it cuz it rarely comes change rarely comes and giant leaps and bounds and it's okay let's I'm illumise this time we'll do that so the character of creme and Dragon Age Inquisition actually came pretty much out of a sort of a panel it ended up being more of a

discussion that we did at a Bioware base and PAX Prime and it was specifically geared towards the LGTB community and it was just what do you want to see more of what are we doing right what are we Doing wrong and that opportunity for feedback and trans gentleman got up to the microphone and said I would just love to see someone in a game like me who's not a monster and we all just went okay this is something we can do something about you know and and and that you know we went straight to somewhere

and got drinks and started talking about you know okay how okay this is important that this is just needs to happen and we Are in a place where if we do it right we could maybe make it happen and it was it was not wasn't easy there was a lot of discussion there's a lot of frank discussion and some hits and some misses and a lot of trial and a lot of error and a lot of talking to people but we Patrick and I got to go to Dragon Con last year and that some people

rocking some creme cosplay here just came up to us and gave us hugs and there's no it's hard to put into words that it it's it's Humbling and it still feels like it's not enough you know that a moment like that is so profound for someone is wonderful and also sad that it's rare and that it's something that stood out for them and it was wonderful to have happen and makes it really obvious we need to keep Jimmy someone said they said like it like we need to see a trans character in games and let's

be honest it's not going to happen until Bioware does it and we went ok well I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this and I'm really really worried about messing it up but if there are people who are telling us you know you saved our lives about gay stuff if we can do something that has some minor effect on the SE in the same way for trans people for non-binary people we owe it to them and to ourselves to try to make attempt and again we make entertainment we make you know we're not we're not curing

cancer but if something like that That was someone who did not have that in their lives and and if our if our entertainment product helps someone hit that and made their lives a little bit easier or gave them let them realize there were paths available to their lives that they saw only as dead ends until that point then it's worth us having uncomfortable conversations and making mistakes and messing stuff up so it's not a secret that the game industry has had a problem with potential gamers Feeling excluded or feeling unsafe either as consumers or as

people working on the games themselves and for a long time when queer identity collided with gamer identity that left people feeling left out of both worlds but a lot of the people that we interviewed found that those worlds don't have to collide so much as overlap and that overlap can form the basis of strong relationships provide shared meaning with partners feeling attraction falling in love and Forming relationships are all fundamental aspects of queer identity and games that incorporate those themes can help queer people understand their own sexuality can improve the romantic bonds that they form

with others it can turn people from being game avoidant into game obsessed and so rather than being in conflict what we found is that queer queer culture and game culture are a highly compatible pairing this presentation is just a small segment of These stories that we've gathered we've spoken to 125 people in 19 states four countries at this point we've got over a hundred hours of footage and a lots more topics to explore we're still gathering first-hand accounts and sharing our findings so what's next for this particular project is you can sign up for updates

you can see more of what we're doing at playing with pride dot-com we're still gathering more interviews and footage and we'd love to Get feedback there's some feedback form on what we're doing at playing with pride calm and we're also incorporating some of the things that we've discovered in doing these interviews - our D&D show queens of adventure that's the it's a live show and a podcast that features drag queens playing D&D and we've been very intentional with that show about crafting something that's responsive to what we learned in this project Something that builds community

and and makes people feel incorporated I feel included and helps people feel connected to you know a big wide world of LGBTQ heroes out there so you can find that at Queens of adventure comm and so we've got I think about 10 minutes left so we could do a Q&A if there's any questions thank you [Applause] so if there are questions there's the mic right there otherwise like a Question that I have just in general for the audience is if there are games that have including queer content or games that you kind of headcanon queer

content into like what are what are games that you found are doing it right oh yeah The Last of Us fantastic [Music] yeah oh yeah life is strange my goodness you know that and that's something really frequent that we've heard from other people is like oh it's just me I'm Just making this up it's all my own baggage that I'm bringing to the game and I think it's something that we're still like as queer gamers kind of dealing with of like this sort of internalized homophobia or maybe not homophobia but sort of like our own

queer erasure of saying like oh no no there's no there's no queer game there's no queer characters and games I just have to make it up and then when a game is like no no it's real you exist it's Ok you're real it's kind of the reverse of Emperor's New Clothes of being like no no this this thing that that you thought was pretend is actually a real thing if I may say one more thing one thing that really surprised me also about life is Strange's I started noticing like early on like I when I

was playing the game and making all these different choices I honestly thought it was gonna be one of those like joking things like I mean there's a lot of like I thought it was gonna be like oh haha this isn't real this is just me thinking it and I'm a high school teacher so I actually spoke to one of my students about this who is bisexual and I was telling him I thought it was just a troll thing so I started like making all these different choices to give myself a laugh and I'm just like

oh I'll just do this haha this isn't really gonna happen and then it did and I was shocked and again my heart exploded and I he I Mentioned this to my student and his response was well maybe they're doing that because they want people to realize that it's normal this is a normal thing it's normal I said when he said that it's just my heart just dropped and I was like that's absolutely he's right it was absolutely true a little bit shook because that whole thing was amazing and I was kind of tearing up for

most of it especially with the cram stuff because that helped me with my own coming to Terms with myself I just want to say with the social mobile gaming scene with a thinking ape and we have a pretty strong queer LGBT community in there that we've been really supportive of and it's been kind of fun working overtime to like just build more and more content that just is there and we're just up about let but I got the front about it and it's been really amazing to have that opportunity as a content creator so it's

been pretty cool Yeah I'm mostly just shook thank you for sharing well thanks for coming and there's a couple people at the microphone - hi there so I went to Muslim how to represent Muslims talk yesterday and one of the things he said was you know include us it doesn't you don't have to really talk about our religion but you can include the way we dress and people are still going to identify with it and we need that too so my question for you is are we at a place Or are we moving in a

direction where having someone who is gay queer how do I put this that it's at the forefront of the character and are we moving to a place where it's part of the character and that's acceptable too but it's not something that's played forward does that make sense I don't know if I don't know that I'm saying it correctly but are both of them equally important is there one that's more important right now we're moving towards something else Like that is a great question and you know I've been looking at games I've been a games journalist

and you know sort of making this documentary project for a long time and so I have to say it like it seems like games as a medium are maybe lagging tennis years behind TV and film and I if I'm understanding your question it sounds like the question is like there's there's two ways that queer can be represented one is this is a story about queer and also this is a Story about something else and queer is just an element of it and is one more important or where are we at with that and I have

to say well you know my impression from speaking to people is that there's kind of an equal need for both of those still it certainly reminds me of going back even further where were in the 1980s with TV and film where every show or movie that had a queer character was it was a huge crisis of Like mom I'm gay and it's tearing the family apart and so there was a need then for a lot of stories that were very much about like what is the queer experience because it was something that hadn't been spoken

about and I think my perception of the games of games media is that we are not entirely at a place where it's no big deal and I think there's a lot of value to explicitly addressing what is queer what does it Mean to be queer let's talk about it let's foreground that that having been said there is a huge relief when you can just play a game and have a gay character there and it's no big deal and so I'm gonna part of the game and it's just life because I think that's how a lot

of people want to live and not always be like you know I'm kind of as a reporter and a producer and all the different hats I wear I'm sort of a professional gay and there are times When I'm like oh man I just want to like you know go on a hike or like I just want a cat or something like that and like it doesn't always have to be about queer all the time so it's a real relief for example when I play stardew valley and I'm like okay I'm gonna be an a queer

couple in this playthrough and that's just how I'm gonna play it and you know stardew valley is certainly not about the queer experience so I would love for us to get to the point where It's just no big deal and you've got a gay character there and it's nothing that have you been said it feels to me as though games media is still sort of in a state that is is kind of pre Glee if that makes sense we're like Glee it was kind of a catalog the TV show was kind of a catalogue of

all the different ways somebody could come out of the closet and I don't know that games have had like their Glee moment where it's like gay gay gay gay gay and now we're Done are we done or we don't we're done okay good and now let's move on so you know I'm waiting for that point that that we could just like kind of move on and just have like gay characters and I don't know the next the next Dragon actually it's interesting that I that's the first one I thought of because Dragon Age is a

game where you've got gay like same-sex relationships and nobody comments on it it's no big deal and that's something that we've been Very deliberate about with Queens but sure is we've got queer characters in there and at no point are they like oh and I had this difficult coming out or oh and I had this you know my family rejected it because you know menteur you're like I just I don't want anymore like the angst of being queer stories I just want to go on an adventure and now that I think about it there is

a in Dragon Age Inquisition a whole storyline about the the onst of being queer with Spoilers sorry for with Dorian I mean he's got a whole storyline about his relationship with his family so I guess Dragon Age kind of straddles the line in a way that that is very nice because a lot of people talk about we don't have the clips in here but a lot of people talked about Dragon Age is an important game and I think that one splits that balance in a way that's really nice great thank you so much for expressing

all that absolutely yeah thanks for Coming hi my name is Darrell um from what I've mostly observed it seems like it takes that mature rating for these you know Ishii to be really tackled so transparently in a game and so I am know if anybody has any example where there is something that's more targeted younger audience that still is you know unapologetic about it well you know um so inner in this presentation we have some clips from Kitty powers Who's a drag queen she's based in the UK when we interviewed her initially I thought oh

this is great this game company hired a drag queen to be the face of you know that the mascot of their game no it turns out Katie Powers is the CEO of the company is a drag queen who started her own company which awesome and her game is extremely family friendly it's very kid friendly it's so she's got two games Kenny Powers love life and Kitty powers matchmaker and They're it's a dating sim and sort of a life sim and they're just super like pure and lovely and adorable and so there's like you know I

don't actually know what the games are rated but I can't imagine anybody having an objection to any of the content other than like if somebody wanted to make trouble about there being same-sex couple eggs in the game so I don't think it's necessary that games have that mature rating I do think that there is Still a lingering stigma you know that there's sort of people who put on red alert when they like same-sex couples or we're talking about trans identity sort of a stigma of like oh this isn't appropriate for children but I think that's

fading very fast faster I think in games then it then it took to fade in TV and film thank you yeah absolutely I just wanted to contribute to the list of games that I think handle it really Well night in the woods oh yeah the couple Greg and Angus they're like there's obviously a like a storyline with them or sort of a back story involving their situation and but they're not really the ones that I'm talking about it's actually at some at a point in the game may the player character hits on a girl and

you don't even really realize until like afterwards that that's what it was and it was just like oh sweet like it's so Not an issue and so you've got you're like this is the like the this sort of focal relationship we're like Greg and Angus are dealing with the the town's idea of them but then like you you get that extra identification in the the player character also yeah and it's very similar to what Laura was bringing up in her interview she was the person who had blue hair about how you can kind of like

sneak some queer content into game sometimes and catch people by surprise And say oh here's just something fun if she made a reference to a podcast that I actually don't know if she's doing anymore called gaming butts where she just talked about butts in games because it's so much of what you see a bigger character sometimes and so you know it's just a goofy little podcast that she was doing and then you know she's she's trans and she has a lot of colleagues that are trans and so they would incorporate that you know you're already

Friends with these people through the podcast as much as you can be friends with someone through a podcast and then you throw in some inclusive content and people like oh oh yeah yeah that's actually okay I don't know I I don't have a problem with that after all hey I also wanted to contribute a little to the list as Robert Yang's portfolio of games is just incredible I mean talk about going to the extreme like I really love that one comment in the video you Said where they're like it that representation was great but they

only got to like have sex once gonna have a lot of sex in Robert Yang's games which i think is like really important when we're talking about sort of reaching this point that you're talking about I mean it's a lot of like sis male gay stuff but from that perspective I think he's really doing incredible things and also confronting a lot of those like censorship and rating things Head-on I mean like one of the interesting things he did with the Tea Room is like they wouldn't let him have penises on steam so he replaced all

of them with guns which is allowed so just like really clever but yeah I just wanted a shout out to what he's doing because I think it's really amazing and also how he handles consent in one of his games actually if you it's like a kind of a BDSM sim and if you go too far with the NPC you literally are locked Out of the game so really exploring a lot of issues like I think within our own community in a way that like doesn't feel like oh I'm just checking some sort of like token

box or yeah I get to like hit on or like make out with this cute dude but like actually experiencing you know an element of life and in queer history that a lot of other games are too yeah yeah I love all like Roberts games they're fantastic Robert yeah I highly recommend checking those out They're freely challenging games and we're running up on time but I just want to get one more question from the from the microphone hi my name is Carter I'm actually a student a little while south of here for one thing this

was a great talk I'm actually working on creating my own VR experience right now and I was wondering if you would have any advice - I want my main character the player character to be non-binary and I was wondering how I would be able to explore That in a setting where it's a first-person game that's a really interesting question and I think that's something hmm I don't know that I have like great advice for that just off the top of my head but I bet like I know there's like an overflow room where there can

where we can do QA like after the panel and I bet like if folks have thoughts on that that would be a great place to pick that up do we just G see folks like where's That where's that room do you know where the overflow room is okay because I'd love to like give that like two or three more minutes of thought before I answer that just you know off the top of my head I think you know just having those moments where you look in a mirror or you see your hands or something like

that as an opportunity to you know inhabit a body that is not the body you're used to seeing or maybe reflects the body or affirms the body that that You that is more natural for you that's I guess where I'd start and you just like making people aware from the beginning this is this is an option I think dream daddy did a really interesting thing in there character creator where binders were an option like right from the start like when you're creating your character which like was I've never seen that in the game before it

was really profound so just like being clear like you can be Non-binary you can be any gender you can be any orientation but let me let me think about that for a few more minutes and then we're 2022 okay yeah so like wait back that way to to to to that's will do some like wrap up conversation thank you again everybody for coming please leave feedback right