From Dys4ia, by Anna Anthropy

I’ve been playing games since I was 6, and since then, have spent a far larger portion of my life than is probably physically healthy clicking things on a screen. But I don’t identify as a gamer, and just hearing the word usually makes me cringe. It’s not because I don’t think I qualify or because I want to avoid the nerd connotations (although that term makes me cringe at least as much as gamer, I probably spend more time watching anime than I do talking to people I don’t live with). The main reason is because of all the baggage that’s attached to the word for me, and because of my experiences with gamers and gamer culture. Growing up as a white boy in crushingly straight, white suburbia, I developed a host of terrible ideas, not only about society and other people, but also about myself. I spent most of my free time playing games with a group of boys at my school, who thought it was cool and fun to constantly use slurs and ~ironic~ sexism/racism/homophobia. These were gamers, and I was a gamer.

Once I got to college and started learning that hey, maybe it’s actually really fucked up to be in a position of power and use oppressive rhetoric “ironically” because you think it’s funny. I started distancing myself from those guys, and started playing games less. I still played them quite a bit, but online games just aren’t as much fun if you don’t have someone to talk to and play with. Then a while after that I realized I wasn’t actually a boy, which made my relationship to games even more complicated. Even though for as long as I can remember I’d been choosing the girl option if a game gave it to me, there were still tons of games where I could only play as a boy. And like, it’s not exactly comfortable to play a role that you just worked so hard to get yourself out of. Never mind that authentic stories about women in games are practically nonexistent in games, the number of stories about cis women looks almost overwhelming if you compare it to the number of games about trans women. Nah, we’re just the sex workers provided for the player to murder in GTA (keep in mind that black trans women doing sex work on the streets make up a huge portion of the percentages of assaulted and murdered queer people) and the justification for hitting women (Poison from Final Fight was designated trans because devs were concerned about allowing the character to beat women in the game, and of course trans women don’t count).

The problems with games aren’t limited to representation. The industry has been stagnant for years, and thanks to capitalism loving AAA studios, it’s not going to change until there’s another crash. Stories are usually just tacked on, and if they’re not, they’re rarely engaging, interesting, or relatable. Gameplay has been standardized to the point where every FPS feels identical, except for maybe one or two gimmicks that get stale after a few hours. MOBAs sometimes have slightly different formats. Platformers have been rehashed to death. The mainstream games industry pumps out maybe a couple good, somewhat original games every year, but for the most part it’s just not worth the $60 for the latest big hit spending millions of dollars in advertising to try to convince you that it’s good. The indie scene isn’t too much better. Most indie devs still need huge amounts of money to make their unoriginal projects. What both of them also have in common is that pretty much everyone involved is a cishet white boy. But obviously it’s not just cishet white boys making games, PoC make games, queers make games, women make games. But marginalized people rarely have millions of dollars to develop a game (the going rate for a AAA is $20,000,000), never mind millions for advertising it. It’s also difficult to learn the prerequisite programming skills without higher education (although a seemingly disproportionate number of trans girls are programmers). There are tools like twine, an engine for creating dynamic text games, which has become very popular among marginalized people to create games in, because it allows them to create accurate representations and stories about people that are like them. More marginalized people are starting to create their own games, and just giving up completely on an industry that wants nothing to do with us and doesn’t seem to have any intention of changing. And that’s an incredibly powerful thing. It wears down on you when you can’t relate to anyone in any of the media you’re exposed to. Telling our stories and being able to shape our own narratives helps others see that it’s possible, and it gives everyone more variety.