Nearly one in five American gamers identify as LGBTQ+, according to a new study from GLAAD. However, LGBTQ+ gamers often face harassment in gaming communities and in games that feature voice chat that anyone can join. This is common in multiplayer team-based games.
According to the study, 52% of LGBTQ+ gamers have faced harassment while playing online, and 42% have avoided a game because they expected harassment.
“If you’re transgender, it’s hard to jump into voice chat with random people,” said Veronica Ripley, aka Nikatin, a full-time Twitch streamer and founder of the Discord community Transmission. A game for trans gamers.
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Ripley says that when she performs live, she faces criticism and harassment because she is transgender. Her moderators now quickly delete her hateful comments and ban violators on an almost daily basis. She says things have gotten better over time, but one incident stands out for her when she first started streaming in 2016.
“Someone showed up one day like a hate raid with like 1,000 people and they all said the worst things they could think of,” Ripley told NPR. morning paper.
So she started teasing them a little bit and some of them stuck around and became viewers.
“The purpose of streaming in the first place is to show the world that there’s more to transgender people than our identities. We’re human beings… and I think a lot of people can lose sight of that. ” she said.
Despite these challenges, video games are important to her because they have been essential to her understanding of gender. As a child, she was drawn to games that didn’t require her to play as the “same grumpy male protagonist” that video games tend to have.
“The Sims was a big hit when I was a kid, and it’s still a big game for queer people. I love how it’s great to create an avatar and try out different genders for a while. “Games that allow people to participate in things that allow them to explore that are some of the best games for queer people.” Ripley said.
“A lot of people in our community turn to video games to see that representation, and they want to see themselves in the characters,” said Qweerty Gamers president, streamer, and former video gamer. said Ray Lancione, Game Community Manager. “Our community [uses] It’s about finding each other… finding like-minded people, or people of a similar sexuality, gender. ”
American gamers are actually diverse.
For decades, the idea in the video game industry was that gamers were made up of a core group of white, straight, teenage boys. But that wasn’t true for long.
According to a 2022 Entertainment Software Association study, 48% of American gamers were female and 52% were male. The same report notes that 71% of American gamers are white and 29% are people of color.
Until recently, there was little data tracking the number of gamers who identified as LGBTQ+. In 2020 Nielsen published a report showing that 10% of gamers identify as such. Adrian Shaw, an experienced video game researcher and associate professor of media studies and production at Temple University, said there is no better data point than that. And there’s not a lot of data analyzing what the LGBTQ+ audience is and what kind of games they play.
Shaw worked with GLAAD, with support from Nielsen, to survey more than 1,500 American gamers. The results revealed that 17% of people who play games for more than 1 hour a week and 19% of people who play games for more than 10 hours a week identify as LGBTQ+. Ta.
“We’ve had data that we’ve shared over the years, but nothing really to this extent,” said Stacey de Armas, Nielsen’s senior vice president of diverse insights and innovation.
Younger generations are more open about their identities
De Armas says this rise from 10 percent to 17 percent represents an evolution in society. According to a recent study, nearly 30% of Gen Z adults in the United States identify as LGBTQ+.
“There is now a younger generation of gamers…data and research shows [they] I am more inclusive about my personal identity. They’re probably in an environment where they can be more open,” de Armas said.
Tristan Marra, head of research at GLAAD, said the 17% figure shows how much the LGBTQ+ gaming community has grown in just three years.
“70% growth in three years should be taken very seriously by game developers and the gaming industry as a whole,” she said.
It’s still difficult to find realistic representation in games
GLAAD research reveals that even though LGBTQ+ gamers make up a significant portion of the American gaming audience, less than 2% of games feature LGBTQ+ characters or storylines . They arrived at this number by investigating games tagged with his LGBTQ+ content on PC and console stores such as Steam, PlayStation Store, and Xbox Store (stores where the public usually finds games). Reached.
Only a small percentage of that 2% have LGBTQ+ main or playable characters, and some games have no romance or human characters at all. In recent years, there have been some examples from major studios. For example, Ellie in The Last of Us plays a lesbian protagonist, and the game became her award-winning flagship show on HBO.
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The Life is Strange series features several LGBTQ+ protagonists, including Max, who ends up with his best friend Chloe if the player chooses to do so. Baldur’s Gate 3, which won Game of the Year at The Game Awards, includes his LGBTQ+ characters and offers great flexibility in character creation, allowing you to be anyone you want.
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But Shaw says the majority of LGBTQ+ representation takes the form of voluntary romance. This means that the protagonist player character can have relationships with non-player characters of different genders, such as teammates, villagers, and merchants.
GLAAD researchers also collected data on people’s attitudes toward LGBTQ+ content in games, which they said was not available before. They found that at least 70% of non-LGBTQ+ gamers were indifferent to, or more likely to play or buy, games with LGBTQ+ representation.
Why game studios are hesitant to include LGBTQ+ characters
Shaw said there is a lot of LGBTQ+ representation in video games from independent companies. “But giving a big company a chance on a title that reaches billions of people is completely different,” she says.
Concerns about backlash, including negative reviews and social media uproar, further complicate matters. Studios may have a hard time justifying improved presentation, or may not know how.
Developed by Dontnod Entertainment and published by Square Enix, Life is Strange benefited from Dontnod’s origins as an independent game studio. This gave them creative freedom to craft the story and characters they wanted, as co-creator and art director Michel Koch explained in his NPR interview.
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“Every time we start a new story or a new game, it feels like we’re really trying to find and write the best characters for this story. Who they are matches the theme of the story. “We want to make sure that we’re doing the right thing,” Koch said. .
As development progressed, funding began to be needed. So they started meeting with publishers.
“We received feedback from some publishers that said, ‘Oh, this won’t sell. Even if it looks cool, we can’t publish this game,'” Koch said. “And then we found Square Enix, who liked the project as it was. They didn’t ask us to change anything…I can say that we were very lucky.”
Koch said he hasn’t seen data like the one released by GLAAD and is only aware of the response Don’t Nod got after Life is Strange was released. He had some players who liked it and others who hated it.
“We know that our core audience is very positive about the games we’re making. But we’re aware that there are some very vocal voices who say very strongly that this game is too woke. “There’s always a minority,” he said. “We need to make sure we don’t listen too much to vocal minorities.”
Koch said he also knows that video games are a business and that there is a risk that a game will be banned in certain international markets, especially if it contains certain scenes.
“For example, if we were to release this game in Russia, we wouldn’t have been able to include this romance or this arc. And Square Enix accepted that we wouldn’t be releasing the game in Russia at all. So , we were able to continue the game as we wanted [it] That will happen,” Koch said.
But Koch said there could be bigger games and other companies that don’t want to miss out on markets like Russia. And you might end up removing those stories and characters because they’re not allowed to be published in that country.
How can game studios improve presentation?
Mara says it’s important to bet on the status quo and be able to measure how much representation is currently available in all forms of media so we can start to bring that number up to where it should be.
Shaw said the report makes a “very strong case that you can take to management and teams and say, ‘We have good numbers and we have good reasons to increase this representation.'” I believe.
The GLAAD report revealed that LGBTQ+ gamers prefer games with LGBTQ+ content and provided recommendations for the industry and developers. They support proportional representation of her LGBTQ+ characters in games, making gaming communities more inclusive, consulting with LGBTQ+ media experts like GLAAD, and leading gaming industry leaders. Suggests that she hire LGBTQ+ individuals for the role.
Phil Harrell edited the audio story and Majid Al Waheidi edited it for digital.contributed to this story
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