I'm just bored of games that look the same and star
characters who look the same and act the same and don't really have any depth to them.
I obviously quite liked playing as a woman because I'm a woman and I can
kind of relate more to that character but I don't mind playing as male
characters either. I'm just looking for breadth really.
I'm looking for games that have different kinds of characters in them.
I just want anyone who isn't a cisgender straight white man.
I don't necessarily need it to be a woman but the fact that there are more women just
reflects a change that I'm excited to see.
I think video games are great at giving players the tools to embody characters who are very different from
themselves and at guiding them into that experience so that they can really see
the perspective of someone whose lived experience might be very different from their own.
I think games are one of the best mediums for embodiment of any
because of the performative quality of game mechanics.
I feel like a lot of people say this to one degree or another that games made me who I am.
In my case that is quite literally true. By involving myself in online role-playing
for example in titles like Neverwinter Nights and World of Warcraft, I actually
came to understand my own... better understand my own feminist politics, my
own queerness, my own womanhood. I fully embraced what it meant to be a strong
woman because I've been sort of mousey in the physical world. Online I found the
confidence and self possession to stand up for I believed in, to make arguments
and hold fast to them.
I started writing about video games in 2012, which is the same year as Anita Sarkeesian launched her Kickstarter campaign of her
video series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, which looks at how female
characters are represented in games and since then there's been kind of a huge
response to her videos and also kind of more general conversation around that
topic that means that developers and publishers have started paying attention
in a way that I don't think they were quite as much before. Obviously this
conversation has been happening for years, probably since the industry
started but I think that the amount of awareness raised by Tropes vs. Women in
Video Games and the conversation around that just meant that it became such a
huge thing that it couldn't be ignored anymore.
Well it's not so much that I can't just jump into the body of a white male character because I've had to
do that for the last thirty years but it's realizing that there are stories
beside the grizzled white dude who gets the girl
and saves the universe or saves you know saves the kingdom, it's realizing that
our stories have value and that it's important to tell them.
For a long time the game industry was dominated by a particular paradigm that most games fit
into which was the big-budget, AAA, console or PC game and that was the
standard model for how things were made. That landscape has really fragmented
over the past few years and now there are many many different distribution
methods, many different audiences, many different revenue models and there is a
profusion of work that's happening in the margins and in the edges, underground
work, low-budget, small-scale, independent, experimental – just the way you would see
it in music, right, but it wasn't happening in games for a variety of
reasons and now it's happening.
If there is anything that is incredibly hopeful to me in this medium
it is that the amount of voices around the world that are making games is increasing exponentially every day and with every
voice that comes, there might be a new type of game, a new type of mechanic, a
new type of playing that we haven't seen before.
We need to be telling really interesting stories from all sorts of perspectives because art sits in the
world and if games are art, they need to
reflect that world.