Kulturkampf

[benji]

I clicked through.

According to GLAAD's recent study, more players than ever identify as gay, bisexual, queer, or transgender, and yet, only 2 percent of games on major consoles and PCs include queer characters.

GLAAD claims absurd things:

GLAAD’s finding that 17% of active gamers are LGBTQ, and the growth from 10% of active gamers being LGBTQ from Nielsen’s Games360 study in 2020, proves their tremendous influence on the gaming industry.

...

the percentage of LGBTQ gamers is even higher among younger age groups, with 23 to 28% of gamers under 35 identifying as LGBTQ

...

Counter to stereotypes, LGBTQ gamers make up 19% of heavy/core gamers (defined as playing 10+ hours per week on PCs or consoles).

What's the stereotype?

Kenney, who started her career as a journalist, has written for some of the industry's most popular video games. From Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Batman: The Enemy Within to The Walking Dead: The Final Season and the upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine. Kenney has helped construct some of gaming's most diverse characters, like Clementine and Violet from Telltale's The Walking Dead, but freely admits that more needs to be done in game development to make LGBTQ people feel like they are an important part of video game structure now and also its future.

Wonderful, a journalist.

In a moment of reflection, Kenney credits the late great Danielle Bunten Berry, a trans woman and pioneer game developer who created one of the first successful multiplayer games on the Atari platform, M.U.L.E., Kenney says that Berry's influence on the game industry was a powerful presence as she often "spoke about video games as a means to create connection" due to her unwavering advocacy for online community spirit. "In the decades since, this has proven true in fan communities, conventions, and multiplayer games," says Kenney.

Oh, hey, we should listen to Danielle Bunten Berry?

Don't do it! That's my advice. This is the most awful, most expensive, most painful, most disruptive thing you could ever do. Don't do it unless there is no other alternative. You may think your life is tough but unless it's a choice between suicide and a sex-change it will only get worse. And the costs keep coming. You lose control over most aspects of your life, become a second class citizen and all so you can wear women's clothes and feel cuter than you do now. Don't do it is all I've got to say.

That's advice I wish someone had given me. I had the sex change, I "pass" fine, my career is good but you can't imagine the number of times I've wished I could go back and see if there was another way. Despite following the rules and being as honest as I could with the medical folks at each stage, nobody stopped me and said "Are you honest to God absolutely sure this is the ONLY path for you?!" To the contrary, the voices were all cheerfully supportive of my decision. I was fortunate that the web didn't exist then - there are too damn many cheerleaders ready to reassure themselves of their own decision by parading their "successful" surgeries and encouraging others.

I can speak the transgender party line that I was a female trapped in a male body and I remember feeling this way since I was 4. But, it's never that easy if you look at it sincerely and without preconception. There's little question that a mid-life crisis, a divorce and a cancer scare were involved in at least the timing of my sex-change decision. To be completely honest at this point (3 yrs post-op) is not easy, however, I'm not sure I would do it again. I'm now concerned that much of what I took as a gender dysfunction might have been nothing more than a neurotic sexual obsession. I was a cross-dresser for all of my sexual life and had always fantasized going fem as an ultimate turn-on. Ironically, when I began hormone treatment my libido went away. However, I mistook that relief from sexual obsession for validation of my gender change. Then in the final bit of irony, after surgery my new genitals were non-orgasmic (like 80% of my TG sisters).

So, needless to say, my life as a woman is not an ultimate turn-on. And what did it all cost? Over $30,000 and the loss of most of my relationships to family and friends. And the costs don't end. Every relationship I make now and in the future has to come to terms with the sex-change. And I'm not the only one who suffers. I hate the impact this will have on my kids and their future.

Anyway, I'm making it sound awful and it's not. There are some perks but the important things like being comfortable with myself and having a true love in my life don't seem like they were contingent on the change. Being my "real self" could have included having a penis and including more femininity in whatever forms made sense. I didn't know that until too late and now I have to make the best of the life I've stumbled into. I just wish I would have tried more options before I jumped off the precipice. I miss my easy access to my kids (unlike many TS's I didn't completely lose access to them though), I miss my family and old friends (I know they "shouldn't" have abandoned me but lots of folks aren't as open minded as they "should" be ... I still miss them) and finally, I hate the disconnect with my past (there's just no way to integrate the two unrelated lives). There's any number of ways to express your gender and sexuality and the only one I tried was the big one. I'll never know if I could have found a compromise that might have worked a lot better than the "one size fits all" sex-change. Please, check it out yourself before you do likewise.

But anyway back to games:

"The GLAAD report tells us something key - games are a way for LGBTQ people to socialize. But it also tells us something heartbreaking: that LGBTQ gamers don't feel that developers are thinking of them when they design games."

Thankfully, there hasn't been a shortage of LGBTQ developers over the years. We have seen incredible talents coming from the minds of people like Maddy Thorson, who created the transgender character, Madeline, in the game Celeste, Cathryn Mataga, a transgender programmer and founder of the independent video game company Junglevision, who worked on X-Men: Reign of Apocalypse as well as Spider-Man 2 and also D.E. Chaudron from Larian Studios, a queer and nonbinary video game developer who worked on Baldur’s Gate 3 - to name only a few.

Okay, sure, but were they thinking of me when they designed those games?

"We need to pull every lever we have," Kenney says. "Characters, community support, mechanics, to make it so. It's a subject she's clearly passionate about, and her insights are thought-provoking.

What are the mechanics that speak to LGBT?

Even though the gaming industry is touted as the modern entertainment giant and is worth more than film and music combined, it has a long way to go in terms of queer representation. Only 2% of games feature an openly LGBTQ+ character, in comparison with 28% of films released in 2022, and 11% of primetime TV characters in 2022 and 2023. Surely it makes better sense for gaming studios to want to include the queer community into their games due to 1–5 players identifying as LGBTQ+, since, at the very least, the financial pull is there, so what is the issue here?

Again, poor proofreading but also, don't make financial decisions based on clearly absurd data points.

Although just throwing queer characters into games isn't what the LGBTQ+ want either. Representing these characters in a meaningful and authentic way through deeply woven stories to really feel understood is what will always be needed, and more than anything, allowing LGBTQ+ people to feel truly seen in the process.

wow thx, I'll get right on that obvious thing that's not as vague and useless as the rest of this!