something for the weekend

Some Initial Thoughts on LGBT Gamers

Last week I gave a talk at St Andrews LGBT student society. It was my first attempt at talking about some work I have just started on Gay Gamers, and perhaps more broadly LGBT gamers. I am greatly endebted to Fruit Brute – the creator of gaygamer.net and his posts regarding the “Top 20 Gayest Video Game Characters”, during July 2006. This gave me an excellent jumping off point.

The motivations for engaging with this area and how I am doing this are multiple:

• As I have already discussed, during my ethonographic work on SingStar gameplay, the SingStar Anthems title was released with the strapline “Unleash Your Inner Diva!”. It has also been retitled by Fruit Brute as “SingStar Queer Edition“.
• Beyond that prompt, my later work on Gaydar (and my recent post here), highlights issues surrounding the commodification of difference viz social media. So I wondered how are LGBT people configured in digital games?
• In addition, I am aware of those digital games researchers who argue that: “There is little in the way of understanding elements of the gaming experience that are not limited to the actual playing of the game itself (Crawford and Rutter 2007: 273).  So how are LGBT players engaging with games beyond the screen?

Thus, given this context, my talk was concerned with the LGBT gaming experience in terms of such things as character representation, forum participation and how LGBT gamers/characters are dealt with by those in the digital games industry. In short, I discussed LGBT gaming on and beyond the screen. What I will quickly do now is run through the things I discussed - LGBT characters, heteronormativity in games, and LGBT gaming controversies.

Below I list some of the characters I discussed and give brief explanation of why they were included:

Character/s	Why included
	Dance Summit 2001: These characters are simultaneously labelled by Fruit Brute as drag queens and trannies. A forum comment points out that there is a difference between the drag queens and trannies.
	Soul Calibur IV: Voldor is ‘thrown out there’ as potentially gay.  But it’s also made clear he could just be into S&M. A response argues that he’s probably ‘just out there’. It is clear that some characters’ sexualities are contested
	Zelda Series: Tingle is introduced with much humour by Fruit Brute and configured as high camp. This spoke to me of a recognition of the resonance of gay stereotypes. Frute Brute also talks of Tingle as a reminder of a ‘Chicken Hawk’ who pounced on him the first time he went to a gay bar thus highlighting the intertexuality of gaming
	Resident Evil: This post made clear the presence of transvestitism in gaming.  Alfred Ashford dresses as his sister. Of course, I acknowledge there is no link between transvestitism and sexuality, but transvestites are included within the trans group of LGBT.
	Street Fighter: Again Zangief’s sexuality is contested but he is also drawn upon to highlight hypermasculine discourses viz Bears in the gay community.  Frute Brute also make clear the contradictions surrouding some Bears – they are hypermasculine, yet also have the potential to be highly camp and effeminate.  Zangief sits in a bath during a game with two women and it is suggested that he is merely discussing hand bags with them.
	Super Mario Bros 2 (and beyond): Birdo/Birdetta is highlighted as a male to female trans character.  It is also the case that in later printings of the game’s guide booklet and later releases of the game Nintendo ‘corrected’ the error and discussed Birdo only as a female character.
	Streets of Rage 3: I included Ash as his playable character in the Japanese version of the game is highly camp (he has ’slap combo’s, giggles girlishly and cries when he looses – oh yes, and there’s the outfit).  However, beyond that, it’s interesting again that in the release of the game in the US and Europe, his character was not automatically playable (it’s possible to unlock him if you know how to).
	Fear Effect 2: This game includes two openly lesbian characters who were reportedly included by the games designer to hook in young boys.
	The Temple of Elemental Evil: In contrast to Fear Effect 2, this game included gay men and gay marriage on par with other relationships in the game.  A serious attempt at social inclusion was made.
	GTA IV: This game’s storyline required a character to ‘pretend’ to be gay, and post a profile on an internet dating site in order to entrap another character.  Further, later in the game, gay bashing occurs, but there is also the potential for the ‘gay basher’ to be killed for this.
	Bully: Scholarship Edition: This game allows for fluid (Bi) sexuality.  Moreover, points can be gained for kissing other boys.

Following this discussion, I moved on to run through my experience of playing the online version of the MB board game – the game of Life. The premise of the game is to travel through life dealing with its ups and downs. I had found a story on the internet in which the game had been raised as problematic because it allowed a player to choose a spouse of the same sex. This was seen as a problem because it was a game for kids and it was felt that such a possibility with thus not appropriate. I thus decided to download and play the game. Sure enough, it was possible (as in the orginal board game) to choose a same sex spouse. However, from that point on the game was heteronormative. When I got married, an image of a man and woman appeared, when I became a grandparent, I was pictured with a woman. Only in the car was a pictured with a man and in the ‘photograph’ (as shown here) at the end of the game.  Funnily enough we only had boys!

Finally, I moved on to discuss other aspects of homophbia as related to gay gamers.  I discussed two recent cases of profile blocking in the Microsoft XBOX live gaming community. In the first case (May 2008), a gay gamer who had chosen the gamertag theGAYERgamer was blocked due to complaints by others in the XBOX live gaming community – Microsoft felt the tag broke their rules viz offensive tags.   In the second case (February 2009) a lesbian gammer was barred because she had stated that she was a lesbian in her profile. Microsoft reportedly said that other gamers were offended by this.

 So what can we make of this…  Well of course, my thoughts on this aren’t very well formed just yet, but a number of things do seem to be emerging. What personally surprised me the most was the extent to which LGBT issues/characters are engaged with in digital games, however superfically, seriously or instrumentally. Even given there is a large amount of guessing and labelling of characters (leading to the status of certain characters being contested), it is also clear that the full gambit of LGB and T are included.

It is also clear that LGBT characters are included in periferal ways and as integral to the game.  They can have ludic and narrataive value. Moreover, as with other aspects of digital gaming we see intertextuality – comparisons are made between Tingle and Chicken Hawks, hidden characters in games are equated with the hidden nature of the LGBT community at particular points in time and in particular spaces. We also see that gay gamers experiences of gaming spaces beyond game play can be ‘safe’, considered and humourous (as in gaygamer.net) but also subject to homophobia – as in the XBOX live community (I have thought about this and despite Microsoft’s attempts at explaining themselves, I do see the recent activity as homophobic. Even though I understand somewhat their attempt at crafting a policy to facilitate the enjoyment of everyone – it clearly uninformed and discriminates against gay and lesbian players).

Although my thoughts are only preliminary, it seems to me this is a fruitful area requiring more research, even though for those who identify as LGBT (including me), sexuality does not necessarily figure in gameplay and our experiences on or beyond the screen. 

As an aside, for those interested Jenny Sundén at the Royal Institute of Technology is undertaking work on the queering of world of warcraft, there is a good LGBT gamer entry in Wikipedia and the Humplex site has some interesting flash games with borrow from mainstream games such as resident evil (note this site contains material which could be categorised as pornograhpic and which some might find offensive).  If you know of anyone working in this area, please do let me know.

The Pink Pound Lives On….

This post is an extension to a stream of papers I’ve written about Gaydar.co.uk along with Gordon Fletcher and Alison Adam (see: Light 2007, Fletcher and Light 2007 and Light, Fletcher and Adam 2008). Based on my ethnograhic work within Gaydar, I/we have looked at how Gaydar works and is made to work by a number of different groups with different interest. More specfically as part of this, we’ve looked at the commodification of difference, in terms of how gay men specifically (although one might also consider the LGBT community more broadly) are ‘kept in their place’ for commercial purposes. The best exposition of this argument is probably in the paper published in Information Technology and People.

I have a couple more papers in progress about Gaydar, but I’m looking to move into other areas now and I’ve really not engaged with Gayar as much as I was a few years ago as a result (there’s only so many spaces you can engage with in any meaningful way I think!). Anyway, that said, I logged in this weekend and was invited to partipate in a survey described to me as looking at the lives of the LGBT community – it’s named Outright and is to being done in conjunction with Channel 4, Hitwise and Global Park. This survey was done a few years ago and somehow I’d missed the invite that time round – moreover, it had been quoted back at me by Qsoft (the owners of Gaydar) as a response to a press release which had been taken up by pink news (story here). Thus, I thought I’d take up the survey to see exactly what kind of data they might have collected and thus what they were basing their counter arguments upon (of course, the previous survey may well have been structured differently, but I thought it was worth a look).

Despite the invite saying the survey was about the lives of the LGBT community, it really was just market research and did nothing that I could see to illicit from resondents any thoughts about the potential for stereotyping or marginalisation within the Gaydar.co.uk  Yet, In the response to my press release, QSoft cited the previous study:

There is no need for us to change the way in which we offer categorisations to our members. They are based upon extensive research into what our users say they want us to provide. If users felt marginalised by the system, rest assured they would be the first to tell us so. We are constantly researching the views and requirements of our community of users via focus groups and research programmes such as Outright 2006.”

Of course, the 2006 survey might have asked different questions to the current one…   Whatever, it is clear that the 2009 survey is very much about market research. It asked me questions about: alcohol consumption, grooming products and cosmetics, expenditure on clothing, clothing brand preferences, mobile phones/providers, internet usage/purchasing practices, music and film preferences/consumption habits, car/home ownership, grocery shopping/eating habits, gym membership/vitamin & supplements consumption, income and expenditure habits, media consumption and advertising preferences and how I viewed technology – and people viewed me as a technology user (see picture below).

Above and beyond, the clear evidence for interest in the so called Pink Pound, what the survey also made clear to me is a continuing theme of the ‘LGBT lot’ being seen as opinion leaders, a market that will draw in those around them – as evidenced by the questions configured as ‘do people seek your opinion’. This resonates with QSoft’s prior research:

[Why Target the Gay Market?] Because you want the Mainstream Market. The gay consumers friends and family are part of the wider community. Who better to target as an ambassador [f]or your product than the person in the group with the money to purchase and the inclination to innovate?[4] (Light, et. al. 2008)

What I find interesting is that the 2006 survey was based on only 18,000 responses. To set things in context, at the time there were around 2 million worldwide/670K UK members of Gaydar alone. Yet, from the 2006 survey it was clear that data was then being used to say ‘this is what the LGBT community is like’ – they were homogenized. Even if survey participants for 2006 were recruited from beyond Gaydar and more are recruited in 2009 it is going to be difficult to get away from that homogenization process – it’s impossible to get everyone to participate. Of course it’s a perennial problem with survey work.  However, there seems to be little moderation in the way the results of the 2006 survey was reported – glitzy marketing packs and presentations are prepared which transform the data into truth. In doing this, as we have said before, this keeps a market in their place (Light, et. al. 2008) and it configures those who identifty as LGB or T in particular ways. From the survey, I found the link to Outright…

On the Outright site, I found downloads of exerpts from the research (see here - if the link is removed I have copies).  I also found video clips of representatives of Madame Tussauds and the Hilton group  talking about their approach to the LGBT market – they’re worth downloading/taking a look at (see here - again, if the link is removed I have copies).  I was going to write about these, but this post is long enough and I think they speak for themselves – whether it’s the guy from the Hilton saying they were ‘feared’ the Gay Community (what will we do – criticise their décor!) or the PDF slides which state that coming out is probably going to be easier now because the UK has civil partnerships and essentially that we don’t mind being in debt – that’s it, of course, the LGBT lot are responsible for the credit crunch!

References

Light, B. Fletcher, G. and Adam, A. (2008) Gay Men, Gaydar and the Commodification of Difference, Information Technology and People, 21(3), 300-314. PDF

Fletcher, G. and Light, B. (2007) Going Offline: An Exploratory Cultural Artifact Analysis of an Internet Dating Site’s Development Trajectories, International Journal of Information Management, 27(6), 422-431.  PDF

Light, B. (2007) Introducing Masculinity Studies to Information Systems Research: the Case of Gaydar, European Journal of Information Systems, 16(5), 658-665.