Stay Classy

Okay, I try to keep this blog mostly about games and criticism and scholarship and sometimes games criticism scholarship but I don’t really have a personal blog anymore with the demise of Livejournal to our capitalist Russian overlords (now there’s a sentence you never expected to hear) and I find Tumblr to be… uh, the word I’d use is “annoying,” so.

Lately I’ve been reflecting a lot on my physicality, for all sorts of reasons… and more than a few of those reasons are related to what I perceive as my relationship with gay culture, an endeavor I have persistently referred to on Twitter as “That Thing I Did,” and my thinking on the broad story arc of a novel I have been wanting to write off and on for over a decade.

But really, I just wanted to tell a pair of stories about my school years. Apologies: this post is light on pictures, so don’t feel bad if you stop reading out of boredom.

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Tagged as Hero Summoner Doormat, La Vida Gorda, Serious For Five Seconds

So, a few things happened, and I wanted to bring them up.

First, game journo/critic/maven Patricia Hernandez gave my post a write-up on Kotaku which is humbling/gratifying. While I’m not normally a proponent of ignoring comment threads — I think that sort of sweeps them under the rug as “not real” somehow when I firmly believe they’re badges of the times — I would suggest skipping those if you agreed with me in any way, and rubbing them all over your body if you thought I was wide of the mark.

I did want to share one of the best, most Bingo card-iest of them, though hilariously, I think the last comment is actually spot on, just not for the reason this individual thinks:

Bingo!

The second thing I wanted to call attention to, however, is a blog post that a college friend of mine, Kristin Bezio, posted her own riff on this topic. In particular she discusses my argument that Taric being a powerful, good-at-his-job character was essential to create buy-in, and she agreed, expressing it thusly:

In short, the only way to eliminate the kind of bias and bigotry that generally accompanies the inclusion of gay, minority, and female heroes (player-characters or otherwise) – and the inevitable screaming we hear from the “probably straight white cismale gamer audience” about corrupting their precious male power-fantasy games – is to make them valuable. Basically, we need to see in videogames the same things that we want to see in the real world: if you’re good at your job, then it shouldn’t matter whatelse you are, whether female, gay, lesbian, African American, Asian, Hispanic, atheist, Muslim, or covered in purple and orange tattoos.

I don’t necessarily disagree; in fact I argued for the same principle. But I do want to point out something relevant to both Kristin’s and my stances on the matter, something that came up during the “Moving forward in queer game studies” panel I was part of at the AoIR conference this year: we need to be careful about the rhetoric of “we’re worth market share so you could include us.” We saw this a lot with TV in the late 90s/early 00s: “gays are a good target demo, they are faithful consumers of our material, so we need to include gay themes.” The problem is that the unspoken flip side of this is “once they are no longer an important demo, we will abandon them.” It moves the imperative for inclusivity from a moral or social imperative — “the right thing to do” — to a purely economic one. I don’t necessarily have a problem with economic imperatives, mind you, because they are terribly effective… but not always in the long term.

We need to make sure that we frame this desire for inclusivity along multiple dimensions. Be upfront, use the economics. Say “Hey, you’ve got an LGBTQ audience. Give them some love and they’ll support you in the short term.” But we ALSO need to argue that “Hey, you’re a media creator and like it or not, you have a role in (re)producing culture. Including a wide range of characters and themes in your work is a responsible thing to do, as well as being economically in your benefit.”

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Filed under Fan Culture, Gaming Reflections, Sexuality in gaming

Tagged as Behold Free Market Mass Media, Changing Representations, Don't Read The Comments (Except This One), Fanboy backlash, How About You Wear This Sandwich Board

Hi, guys. This is Taric.

Check out that hair.

(Yes, I used his Chinese artwork. Shut up.)

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Tagged as Ambiguously Gay Tank, Changing Representations, LGBT of Legends, We'll Call It Boyfriend Mode, World of Jewelcraft

So, a friend asked for me to consolidate, somewhere, links to the various podcasts I have been a guest of this past year.

For some reason I cannot fathom the folks at Gaymism – the Wonder Twins-style merger of Gayme Bar and Silly Frags — have taken a shine to me and so I have been blessed with the opportunity to chat with them on a number of occasions! If you’d like to listen to these, then here’s your chance:

GaymeBar Podcasts:

Function 45: “A Closed World” – The one that started it all. Jeremiah and Toups liked ACW and wanted to talk about it! So we did. For FOUR HOURS. The podcast was thankfully edited down to two.

Function 58: “A Blaze” – They brought me back to discuss GDC 2012! Fun times for all.

Function 63: “Dragon Ageless” – Bereft of a guest this week on short notice, I dropped in. As the running joke went, I was totally the last minute guest star Carol Channing to their Johnny Carson/Laurence Welk.

Function 65: “GaymeBar Goes to College” — Probably one of my favorites, because we actually had Jason and Jeremiah up to GAMBIT to talk about their podcast and to have them hang out in person! We went to IHOP! Yay!

Gayme Probe:

Rather than list these individually, I’m just going to link to all the Gayme Probe podcasts because except for #3 (“Value”) I’m in all of them. They’re the brainchild of Dean of Silly Frags, who wanted a podcast with a focused theme, breaking down individual issues in gaming. A valiant and often totally unaccomplished goal but these are still a fun listen.

So there you have it! It’s me, for your eardrums.

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Tagged as Podcasts, Special Guest Star Carol Channing, wanton self-promotion

Right. You knew it was coming, so let’s just get it over with. Obviously, spoilers for good old Mass Effect 3 and the Extended Cut endings, after the jump. Continue reading →

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Filed under Corporate Decision Silliness, Fan Culture, Gaming Reflections, Narrative in Games

Tagged as Ambiguity Offends Fanboys, En Masse Effect, I Love My Gay Cyborg Son, Oh God The Choices

So, I’m currently working on a bunch of different writing projects, attempting to get some articles out the door. While this one is a bit far off, I wanted to get some of my thoughts about it out there, especially since one of the games involved – Lollipop Chainsaw — is relatively new. Strike while the iron is hot, as I always say.

I’ve been playing Lollipop Chainsaw and let me tell you, there’s a lot of interest in knowing what the game’s all about but not, in the circles I travel in, commensurate interest in actually buying the bloody thing. So after I struck a deal with Mia Consalvo — I’d buy it for the both of us and if I hated it, she could buy it off me at cost — I got a copy, and played it for a week at work during my lunch. The GAMBIT crowd, as is their wont, found much to mock about it, and I’m inclined to agree. It’s a very mockable game. I got a lot of questions along the lines of “Is it good?” and my response, pretty universally, was “Well, it’s a campy 3D brawler, so if you like camp and you like brawling this will probably satisfy you.” All well and good.

But between you and me, Juliet Starling — the Lollipop with the Chainsaw — is no Bayonetta, and the differences between the two highlight some issues I have with gender representation in games… and specifically, the representation of sexiness.

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Tagged as Bayonetta, Duelling Fetish Banjos, Lolicontext, Lollipop Chainsaw, Shakespeare This Isn't, Vogue For Your Life

Right. So out of deference to a colleague, I’ve backburnered this because I didn’t want to interfere with his ability to attend and speak at this year’s Games for Change Festival. That said, if you’re reading this, then I’ve already watched him give his speech and now all bets are off.

This is the story of some serious mistreatment from the organizers of the Games for Change festival. For a number of reasons I won’t name names about what has gone down, but I feel like this story needs telling… after the break. Continue reading →

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Tagged as Communications breakdown, Egregious stupidity, How About You Wear This Sandwich Board, Sheer Fury, WTF

A very small post for you — a number of people at PCA who came to our gender and sexuality in Bioware games panel asked if I would send them the slides from my talk on same-sex romance options. (Those links will probably be broken in about a month! Enjoy them while you can!)

Anyhow, I thought the most expedient way to make the slides available was to PDF them and upload for your viewing pleasure, so click here to view said slides in PDF form. Read in good health!

Also, PDFs don’t involve video, so if you’re curious, on slide 15 I showed the first few moments of this:

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Filed under Gaming Reflections, Gendered gaming, Narrative in Games, Sexuality in gaming, Uncategorized

Tagged as Everyone's Gay for Hawke, Hot Elf on Dwarf Action, John Madden Shepard Sexiness Infographic, not narrated thus boring, wanton self-promotion

Okay so on reflection I had more thoughts to share on the ME3 ending. There are spoilers behind the cut. Also, it’s worth reading through a friend and colleague’s comments on my previous post which are also insightful (spoilers there too, natch).

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Tagged as Oh God The Choices, The Commander Is My Shepard I Shall Not Want, Why Do All RPGs Come Back To Religion

Okay. Blog posts are supposed to have pretty pictures because the internet hates text but I need to get my thoughts about the ME3 ending on ‘paper’ now while they’re fresh. So here they go. SORRY AMERICA.

[Ed. note: Also, because I wrote this last night at god knows how late, I went through this morning and cleaned up a couple wordings, which are noted]

It goes without saying: massive Mass Effect 3 spoilers below the cut.

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Tagged as Entitled Fans Like Whoa, Oh God The Choices, The Commander Is My Shepard I Shall Not Want, Why Do All RPGs Come Back To Religion