Gender Hope re: Video Games

[eredien]

I don't play Dragon Age 2, but the gist of it is this: your player character can get hit on in-game by male or female NPCs. You, as a PC, can choose to turn down their advances and advance the plot some other way, or continue talking to them and advance the plot that way.

A straight white male gamer wrote to Bioware about how this made him cry.

A BioWare writer wrote back, basically saying, "check your privilege. Straight white guys aren't our only market and aren't the only gamers we care about, and homophobes definitely aren't."

Then there was a comments thread. A comments thread where people said sensible things like (paraphrased): "just turn them down politely if you aren't interested, just like you'd do in real life," or "I can't believe this is 2011 and we're still having this discussion," or "straight white guys see gay people in their games and get uncomfortable; gay people see straight white guys in real life and get killed. You're really lucky, straight white guys," or even, "so, you're homophobic. You recognize gay people make you uncomfortable. That's what that word means. Deal with it. Accept that people are going to call you that until such time as you're not uncomfortable anymore, because that's what you are. Deal with the consequences of having the fears you admit to having."

For the most part, it's a really inspiring comments thread. It makes me feel like anti-racism work and anti-homophobia work is really, actually, affecting real life.

Video gaming fans--just regular people who like to play games!--are talking about stuff like privilege and gender identity and joking about adding options for Kinsey scale sliders during character creation, then pointing out that wouldn't help anyway since it's not like your PC is walking around with a big sign over their head telling NPCs that they're straight. People were thanking each other for mounting eloquent defenses of multiple types of queer visibility in mass media platforms in the face of heterosexual normativity. It was pretty inspirational.

Comments

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

My general feeling is that anyone already using an eight syllable word like "heteronormativity" isn't going to have any difficulty using a slightly longer two word phrase instead, and if anything, it's easier to understand on first encounter when broken down into simpler chunks (though I suspect that most people who don't commonly discuss critical and gender theory aren't really going to be familiar with "normativity" at all).