On July 19th a group that bills itself as one of the largest organizations of queer gamers on the Net brought elves, cat-people, and magic-wielding halflings out in rainbow-dyed outfits to parade through the streets of the fantasy world of Eorzea.
I’ll understand if your reactions to this fall under the categories of ‘why do I care?’ and ‘that’s kinda weird’. Stick with me – all will be explained.
These gamers are playing a game called Final Fantasy XIV, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game – a persistent world, populated by as many people as feel like logging in on a given day. Each player controls an avatar, representative of themselves. When your avatar walks down an Eorzean street, it mimics an average stroll down a goblin-populated, magically-illuminated street in Calgary.
These games are undeniably popular. What was crude and obtuse when the progenitor of the genre launched in 1997 is now smooth, slick and, if not exactly user-friendly, at least welcoming and rewarding to those willing to invest the effort. When you consider that tens of millions of people play these games the world over, and that those people form communities and genuine relationships through them, it would seem safe to upgrade them from game to the realm of a genuine hobby.
No one, then, should be surprised that the members of the Rough Trade Gaming Community would marshal themselves, (adorably coordinate their outfits), and put on an event that they called Pixel Pride – a virtual parade not unlike the one we are gearing up for at the end of the month here in Calgary. And let it not be said that the relationships formed in digital spaces are necessarily lesser than those formed in reality. Though the individual wasn’t named, RTGC stated that one of its members – who went by the handle Erotes – was one of the five victims of the tragic stabbings in Brentwood this past June. The Pixel Pride event was, at least in part, intended to honour their memory.
Perhaps we’re all at least passingly familiar with the experience of watching a TV show, or reading a book, or playing a game, and amassing a mental stockpile of evidence that one of these characters is just like us. Maybe your experience is being represented. Maybe you can look at this piece of the culture in which you live and not have to concede that it is, like so much of the rest, not for me.
This is one area where MMOs could be said to have an advantage: the capacity for personalized participation. Unlike most other video games that involve playing a specific character, whose look and personality are defined by the game’s developers, players of an MMO are uniquely able to represent themselves in the media they consume. They can design their characters, express their personalities, and be as queer as they damned well please.
Let’s face it – until very recently, that has been one of the only ways to get any gay in your games.
Arguably the most venerable member of the MMO species, World of Warcraft, is well-enough known to earn dedicated episodes of South Park, the Big Bang Theory, and mentions in popular media from Zombieland to Orange is the New Black. It has reached cultural saturation, yet it remains a bastion of performative masculinity and heteronormativity. It’s almost as though Terry Crews’s character from his run as Old Spice’s mascot has been shouting advice to the design team through a bullhorn: "MUSCLES! SPIKES! EXPLOSIOOOOONS!" One has to look incredibly hard to find even a little bit of queer representation in World of Warcraft, and this is a game that, at one point, had 12 million people dropping 15 bucks a month for the privilege of slaying dragons while pretending to be an orc.
Here’s a snapshot of the state of queer representation in World of Warcraft:
1. Two non-player characters stand facing each other, animated as though they’re speaking, though they have no actual lines. They are both women, and labelled with the same surname, and since one is a human, and one is a dwarf, it can be read that they are married.
2. In a forthcoming expansion, players will find a woman dead of cold exposure, clutching a letter intended for her lover. From the context of the message, it is clear that the lover is also a woman.
That is the extent to which you are represented in the most successful MMO of all time. Is it any wonder that players feel the need to take matters into their own hands?
More modern games are handling things better. Guild Wars 2 has two high-profile romantic relationships between women among its major characters. One of the political leaders of Wildstar’s factions is both bisexual and polyamorous. Elder Scrolls Online has numerous voiced and developed characters in gay and lesbian relationships. In fact, this doesn’t even seem to be noteworthy, as far as the game’s other characters are concerned. The Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, though not MMOs, offer the option for players to form romantic relationships with characters of the same gender. Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy XIV even offer a means for players to marry one another in-game, regardless of the gender of the characters or the players behind them.
These signs of progress are doubtlessly attributable to the noise that queer gamers have been making in these digital spaces. Events like Pixel Pride serve exactly the same purpose as any other Pride event: to celebrate, to normalize, and to take up the space that we’re entitled to. To make ourselves known and heard as members of our broader communities. The fact that some developers are listening to – and representing – their queer player base is evidence of how society’s attitudes toward queer people are shifting, both online and off. Perhaps the next generation of gamers won’t have to go scrabbling about in subtext and innuendo to find heroes they can identify with.
