Why do gamers call eachother gay

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If there is one thing that the COVID lockdowns have taught us, it is the value of entertainment media. Many people who are self-isolating, on furlough, or unable to attend school in person need things to occupy their time: and one such medium which many are turning to is video games.

Video games are an ever-growing industry — compare for example, the graphics between a game like Pong released in and Cyberpunk released in The difference is night and day; we have moved from clunky uni-directional pixels to almost movie-like graphics. Alongside the development of the graphics in video games, though, have also come developments in what stories we can tell.

But video games have always had a complicated relationship with gender and sexuality. Often criticised for over representations of white, cisgender, heterosexual men, many video games and the communities that play them have been the subject of much academic research from queer and feminist perspectives see, for example, the work of Adrienne ShawKishonna Grayand Matthew Wysockito name a few.

Video games are not homogenous: there are multiple different types of video games, including video games created by people from marginalised identities who specifically create certain characters to ensure representation e. However, the video games I mainly discuss and research are AAA rated mainstream video games, rather than, for example, video games which come from small indie developers.

On the one hand, such representation does exist — and it can be traced back to the s, when video games first really started having extended narratives. For example, in Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. This character believed he was in fact female and preferred to be known as Birdetta.

However, this information was only provided to players within the accompanying manual of the game — and how many average players read all of those? Regardless of the information only being shown in the manual, Nintendo quickly censored the manual, so what little confirmation there was of this was swiftly removed.

However, the representations were still problematic. Take, for example, a classic scene in one off the best-selling video games of all time — Final Fantasy VII In this brothel, you can end up in a hot tub with ten other men and get propositioned. The portrayal of the why do gamers call eachother gay who are queer coded clearly relied on problematic stereotypes of gay men muscle-bound, promiscuous, and hanging out in bathhouses.

While it was good to see that there was some representation of queerness, the kind of representation was not amazing. However, to do so you would have to be explicit in your decisions.