Being hassled by arseholes for playing vidya gamez?
Iām not even sure what a āgamerā is. If it is just someone who plays games, then it is almost certainly includes the vast majority of humanity.
I get the feeling though that there are some people who believe there is some kind of single shared culture that goes along with playing games too.
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āAre You a Girl Gamer? Take This Quiz To Find Out!ā
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Exactly. Wasnāt there an article somewhere about that history recently?
Yes! It is. I wonder if @MURKA is Germaine Greer?
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That last one is the one weāre going with.
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At least one. I think itās also documented in several books, whatever those are.
Why canāt I chose a character who is in a wheelchair?
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I think itās rather self-evident. What weirds me out is - What is the significance of being a āgirl gamerā?
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Whenever I hear lady doctor I think ob.gyn.
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A guy who uses a girl skin online.
See, the thing here is, that I actually canāt tell if youāre trying to make a joke of this or not, but I think that is a very valid question. (If you were being serious, then I apologize - you already know this song.)
For many games it simply comes down to the developers not seeing this as a high enough priority ā which is somewhat valid, but brings up the question of why ā¦ well, I hesitate to say āno games have this as an option,ā but I sure canāt think of any. (Iām leaving out table top games here. The options there are a lot less limited.)
āIf you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.ā - Junot DĆaz.
Does not having your particular subset not represented in a given game deny you this reflection? No, probably not. Does not having it in most games? Well, itās starting to look a lot more likely. No games at all ā¦? See where Iām going here?
Iāve hit on this theme many times when this topic comes up. Oddly enough, it keeps coming up because it hasnāt gotten much better, but considering one of the excuses for developers not doing anything about it is that they claim to not hear about it ā¦ lather, rinse, repeat. At least until things actually do get better.
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I am making a joke but Iām also being serious.
Some rough googling tells me that there are about as many gay people in the US as there are wheelchair bound people, vegetarians, or blind people. In the US being transgendered is about as common as being an amputee. There are lots and lots and lots of marginalized or minority groups which are not represented in gaming or media. Just imagine how someone over 30 feels when they look for a game or movie or TV show which is about their identity.
What I always wonder in these arguments is āWhatās the null model?ā Is the gender spectrum absent from gaming due to bigotry or is it just that people who fall outside the spectrum to the point where they identify otherwise are incredibly rare people? They should be acknowledged or course, but its a lot to ask of a game developer to consider how their game represents the player given that there are lots of āidentitiesā in the US which constitute dramatically small fractions of the user-base.
I also wonder how far the current state of identity politics in the US (and elsewhere) can continue. Itās always terribly important that someone know what race/gender/sexual orientation they are and other people are. People demand that their identities be acknowledged, respected, and disclosed (some of which is reasonable!). However it seems that the information age has increased the rate of identity generation beyond the ability of any society to absorb. For example, āgamerā or āgirl gamerā is an identity. These people fight/ponder over who is included in the group and they want respect and acknowledgement. Some people see ākinkā as their identity and think it should be taken as seriously as sexual orientation. The same goes for being polyamorous. Some people think this is a bit much, but who can say? The trans/gender-spectrum/gay community are themselves currently in a Cambrian explosion of identities (asexual, pansexual, agender, genderfluid, bigender, genderflux, graygender, neutrois, pangender, enby, epicene, intergender, pos, etc.) which come with their own ever-changing demands on language and etiquette. This is pretty normal I think and I would bet (hope) that eventually a consensus will emerge which wonāt require an extra-year of primary-school to learn.
When I read articles about this though I feel like the implication is that we just have a few more to go before we are a perfect society. Once we accept the non-binary gendered, once we accept the disabled, once we accept the transhuman, once we accept the objectophilesā¦but its endless. Identities today form faster than anyone can keep track of.
What I mostly hope will happen is that we will finally have the self-confidence give up this identity-politics game; time will tell. Or maybe our augmented-reality implants will just adapt the narrative vectors of computable media to satisfy our own personally unique identity.
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Iāve mentioned it here before, but Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse pokes a lot of fun at various Barbie tropes, and is actually one of the things that my 3 year old wants to watch that doesnāt make me want to jump off the roof (oh man, was I ever excited when Dora got pulled from Canadian Netflix). Thereās still some reliance on the old fashion tropes (that is, tropes that the girls are all crazy into fashion, etc, not āold fashionedā. Though it is), etc, but it tends to be a bit more tongue in cheek. A lot of winking and nodding to parents, there. But thatās a bit off topic.
Back to the OP: I thank the sky muppet that Iām a straight white gamer when I play online. As it is, I still tend to mute the rest of the ding dongs and just join a party chat with my friends, because sweet mamma jamma is that an awful subset of humanity. Iād hate to be a woman playing with those animals.
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Books? Never heard of themā¦ some sort of old-skool kind of website, I guess? Probably something the OLDS useā¦ 
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Or maybe, we can work to treat everyone - gay, straight, male, female, gender queer, disabled, skinny, fat, short, tall, etc - as, you know, human beings. Do you really think that the reason we have āidentity politicsā was because people are just into being disruptive for no real reason? Do you think that there was some magical point in the past where we all were equal, and itās only because of identity politics that now weāre not? Do you not realize that our society has elevated some over others for a long ass time, and pushing for recognition is actually about making space for people who arenāt white men to be able to just be treated AS EQUAL HUMAN BEINGS?
And yes, Iād be all for games that embrace characters with disabilities too. This is not hard. Itās not taking anything away from anyone when you are more inclusive - unless you truly think that having nothing but white, straight, christian men represented is how the world of popular culture should be? If you think that - we canāt really help you here.
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I think part of this limitation in characters is inherent to the creation process and a side effect of limited time and budget for QA, rather than a deliberate attempt on the part of developers to inhibit the free expression of identity, or a side effect of prevailing cisgender norms.
Creating a recognisably human model in a video game and ensuring that it interacts believably with the world around it requires a non-insignificant investment of programming and qa time. Creating two genders of characters requires more time; accurately reflecting the near-infinite gender spectrum and ensuring that all gender identities can, for example, wear the clothes of any other gender without clipping issues is exponentially greater problem that runs into diminishing returns extremely quickly.
This also applies to protagonists whose character models differ in ways that a designer cannot animate with broadly āhumanoidā stock character animations; the aforementioned wheelchair users and amputees would require a significant allocation of resources to create convincingly, that a project lead will see as wasted unless they are being specifically included as part of the narrative of the game or to make a wider political point. My guess is you will never see a wheelchair in a character creation menu as an optional extra in a game like skyrim as it needs too many resources and there is a perceived lack of demand to justify their use.
This doesnāt mean I think that designers shouldnāt try to avoid this sort of lowest-common-denominator approach; they should absolutely deliberately incorporate more diverse characters in their games. I just think that the lack of diversity has more to do with budget allocation and less to do with perpetuation of the white, cisgendered patriarchy, deliberate or otherwise.
Thatās kind of what I said.
I think we have identities and thus identity politics because people are competing for resources. Resources they want their group to have and other groups not to have. People have fought over this forever.
What annoys me is that people not only claim identities, they seek identities. Liking to play games is a new identity. Gamers want their needs and desires to be respected. Polyamorous people want their needs and desires to be respected. Some people who identify as ākinkā say they should get the same legal protections LGBT people have fought so hard for. Some LGBT people decry this as absurd, their identity is ārealā and the other is not. I myself have no opinion on the matter.
This same argument has gone on and on and on. Who can decide what identities are legitimate and deserve accommodation and who can decide which are absurd? When will it end? Is this the ideal scenario? Is this sustainable?
I have no idea, but I suspect not.
