[GayGamer] Fear for the Flesh: Francis Bacon's Influence on Silent Hill

(As of recently I've become a writer over at GayGamer.net! My inaugural article is a piece reflecting on the painter Francis Bacon and his influence on the Silent Hill series).

The Silent Hill series draws upon a vast range of artists and media for the inspiration behind its macabre setting, its disturbing and suggestive monsters, and its unsettling stories; the work of David Lynch (especially Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive), Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, Stephen King’s “The Mist”, and many more. Of particular importance is Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992), a gay Irish/English figurative painter whose artwork frequently explores themes of dread, violence, sexuality and the human condition – there are strong parallels between Francis Bacon’s work and the monsters, environments and themes of Silent Hill – violence, punishment, redemption, sexuality, death and humanity.

Of course, that’s not to say that the art team behind Silent Hill deliberately and systematically created the world of Silent Hill in deference to Bacon; only that both creators explored similar themes using similar approaches. Takayoshi Sato, the CGI director and character artist for Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2, has stated in an interview with IGN that his team looked at Bacon’s body of work for inspiration for the game, and Masahiro Ito, background and creature designer and later creative director, allegedly counts Francis Bacon as his favourite artist – and it definitely shows.

(Click here to read the rest of the feature over at GayGamer.net, or click "Read more" below to read it right here!)

[SquareGo] Cognition Episode 1: The Hangman

Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller, is a game split into four “episodes”, and this review covers Episode 1: The Hangman, which introduces us to the main character of the series, Erica Reed.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo, or click below! >>

Erica is an FBI investigator living in Boston, gifted with what she calls “intuition”, a psychic power that allows her to gain clues by touching objects or people and seeing flashes of the past in her mind's eye. Using Erica's intuition, along with the traditional adventure-game mechanic of accumulating handy items and using them to solve puzzles in the environment, gives the player a wealth of tools to investigate a strange murder case. A number of plot threads aren't entirely resolved by the end of the game – giving space for the following three episodes to tie them together.

The game is fairly linear, taking Erica from one area of Boston to another, acquiring clues and solving puzzles. The game's puzzle system will be familiar to anyone who's played adventure games before, and there are a number of handy features to make the game more accessible, including the option to highlight objects you can interact with, and a tips system for each stage of the game.

At times, the puzzles can be utterly infuriating; several involve large leaps of logic that are difficult to reason or intuit, or require the player to get Erica to do things that, in the context of the gritty-real-world-crime-drama that is set up, seem out of character. Some of the puzzles are so difficult to intuit that, short of taking every object in the inventory and rubbing them against every object in every environment on the map until something works, it's inordinately difficult to work out. It can also take a lot of time just to get from one place to another, to tab through dialogue, and there are a number of occasions where the player will need to backtrack.

Erica herself is a fun character to play as; most of Cognition's other characters are either unremarkable or trope-laden; for example, Erica's partner in the FBI is an overweight man in a beige trenchcoat and a creased shirt – with no tie – whose maniacal love for donuts even factors into one of the game's puzzles at one point.

Cognition uses a lot of cel-shaded 3D models alongside painted backgrounds, and many of the game's cutscenes also use painted still images, which, accompanied by the stylized subtitle/dialogue balloons, lend a comic-book feel to the whole story.

The game's audio is great, with music that's very fitting, memorable, and gives the game a brooding, sombre tone - and a fast-paced, high-octane thrill during the notable and not-infrequent action sequences in the game. The voice acting is good as a whole; however, Erica seems to slip in and out of her Boston accent, which can be a little jarring at times. Rose, the Antique Shop owner, says the word “dear” so many times that it draws attention to how forced and artificial the dialogue that was written for her sounds when spoken.

Overall, Cognition is a decent adventure game that provides between six and eight hours worth of play: players of other point-and-click adventures will find something to enjoy in Cognition, and those new to the genre may find it a good jumping-on point, especially if they enjoy police-procedural drama mixed with supernatural elements.

[SquareGo] The Adventures of Rubberkid - Hands On

It can be difficult to create a game for children that successfully balances fun with education, and from what we've seen of The Adventures of Rubberkid, its creator Charles Jackson has made a great attempt.

The game stars our eponymous hero, Rubberkid, who decides to take a stand against bullies by creating a special suit made out of rubber-bands that he uses to bounce any insults thrown by bullies right back at them.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo, or hit 'Read More' below!

[myGameDev] Hypnagogue

Hypnagogue is a short interactive fiction game I made using Twine. In Hypnagogue, you awake to find that your bedroom has been transmogrified in the night, and you must venture through the "sleeping architecture" to find out more...

I made Hypnagogue with the intention of getting more familiar with Twine, HTML and CSS, and I discovered that it's a great way to make games quickly and requiring little to no specialist know-how - knowing HTML/CSS is a bonus, but it's not necessary in the least! And, best of all, it's completely free!

There's a lot of great resources for making games with Twine on the web, including Anna Anthropy's handy Twine tutorial, a Ashton Raze's guide to CSS in Twine, and of course the official Twine documentation.

If you'd like to see how I made Hypnagogue, you can download the source files here!

I Confess

There's been a lot of talk on the Interwebbosphere (as it's known) regarding the current state of games writing, and in particular of confessional games writing - a method of journalism where the author of the piece focuses on their own reaction to a particular game, how it may parallel or affect their life, and its influence on society at large. Some have questioned what (if anything) confessional games writing can actually bring to the table and what contribution it makes (if any) to our understanding of games.

From personal experience, I can state (confess?) that reading confessional writing pieces is enormously helpful in understanding the place and form videogames take in people's lives.

I've found reading confessional pieces great for considering new ideas that I either hadn't thought of before, or which I may well have dismissed out of hand had I read them in their own context. For example, Mattie Brice's article 'Would You Kindly' posits a lot of interesting points about the type of violence that's being shown in games like Spec Ops versus the systemic violence faced by minority groups; I hadn't even considered that for many people in the West, the violence of war is something that can seem like a "fantasy" because of how far separated we are from it - hell, I've never even physically seen a gun outside of movies and Youtube clips. And I managed to take this on board all from the fact that Mattie was speaking in terms of games - a language I understood.

When I was writing Gaymers and Gaymercon Counterarguments, I considered how important that "meta-lingual" glossolalia of games could be to opening folk up to something they may not have engaged with before, because it was not part of their daily experience; human sexual orientation/identity and the hobby of playing videogames may not be essentially linked, but using one zone (sexual orientation/identity) to establish meaningful common ground so you can also discuss the other zone (videogames) is a great way to forge connections between people - and it also invites the possibility for each zone to inform the other as well. I find it far easier to consider and take on board new concepts when folk are speaking in terms I already understand rather than introducing an entirely new lexicon and expecting me to be able to completely integrate it into my working knowledge by the end of the article. These allegories and analogies between games and other parts of people's lives - such as identity and quality of life - make it that much easier to find common ground and say, "You know, I may not have been where you have, but I understand it a little more."

There is, obviously, a danger to this, and it's a danger brought up in Joel Goodwin's "The Ethics of Selling Children" on ElectronDance - that confessional writing may be a way of commodifying and repackaging people's (often sensitive, sometimes traumatic) personal experiences into a product to be consumed. After all, I, a white cis man, have just consumed something by a trans* woman of colour, then went on to advocate her writing more, saying, "Confess, and I will listen."

"Prepare a Eucharist from your own flesh, and I will eat it."

But what has actually happened? I've read an article and understood a whole new perspective that was otherwise unknown to me beforehand, an illumination I may not have had, had the language of games not been used. Perhaps this is a good thing - it's one more insight that I can use to help understand the oppression and injustice people face. Perhaps this is a bad thing - I'm just some white guy using someone else's struggle to feed my own worldview. Perhaps it's both - my increased understanding may be offset by the problematic nature of my being a white cis ally saying "I support what you did!". Is the Eucharist wafer bread, or someone's flesh?

It's not about me, though. I am not the only person to have felt the benefit of what was written - hundreds, possibly thousands of others have also had a chance to understand something brand new that they may not have beforehand. The understanding we may have gotten about Spec Ops: The Line may only be marginal (if you want details, try a review? there's more than one type of games writing), but that is offset by a new understanding into the lived experiences of another human being. Confessional games writing does give us an insight into games - rather than focusing on the game, the "I", essence and entity of the game itself, it allows us to see the effects it has on our culture and on other people. Each confession is a little flickering God particle, allowing us to indirectly analyse an ephemeral, transitory thing by seeing how it affects its environment.

We should never, ever deny the importance of self-expression. I may not find a particular article all that helpful for me, but that in no way suggests that the article wasn't helpful for anyone. And, in the end, there is always one person who (hopefully) finds the article helpful - the writer themselves. Like the idea of God incarnating themselves as human to better understand their divine nature, confessional games writing can be a really useful way for writers to understand themselves more - and why should we denigrate that? It could be argued that it's putting the writer before the reader - I'd argue that we're all sitting in the same pew. You chose to come here for the sermon - bow your head and listen for two minutes, or get out of the church entirely.

Lastly, there's the oft-repeated mantra that confessional writing should not be confused with criticism - the confessional article focuses on the player, whereas criticism focuses on the game. That's fair enough. However, there does not need to be a false dichotomy where we have to pick confessional writing over critical analysis or vice versa - both forms of writing can co-exist together, both with their own merits and weaknesses.

I believe there is a place for confessional games writing. Writing is not a limited resource whereby we should always ensure that everyone identifying as a writer is working to the same manifesto, nor is writing a zero-sum game, where we have to ensure the "right" side wins the war. There is enough time and enough space for everyone to have their say, and given that the things that marginalised people want to say are drowned out by outdated sermons we're so tired of hearing, in oppressive churches we no longer want to attend, why would you not want to promote these other voices using a system that's so much more accessible - the confessional of confessional games writing?

Further reading:
The Ethics of Selling Children, by Joel Goodwin
After the Dust Settles: Ethics Revisited, by Joel Goodwin
Would You Kindly, by Mattie Brice
Would You Kindly Not, by Jonas Kyratzes
Can We Kindly?, by Samantha Allen
Decolonize Me, by Mattie Brice
Why We Talk About Ourselves, by Ella Guro
Snow Cats, by Leigh Alexander

[SquareGo] Review: Disaster Response Unit

Disaster Response Unit focuses on the work of the Technisches Hilfswerk, a German humanitarian relief agency. The THW provide assistance during emergency situations and disasters, and throughout the game, the player will have to deal with such varied missions as rescuing flood survivors in a speedboat, setting up building supports in the aftermath of a gas explosion, clearing highways of debris after a cyclone.

It's not really as dramatic as it sounds, though.

Read the full review over at SquareGo, or click below!

[SquareGo] Review: Bridge Project

Bridge Project is part of Excalibur Publishing's vast simulator series, and in this game, the player plays through 4 stages – Rural, Cities, Canyon, and Varied – each of which has 12 levels - to build a bridge, predictably enough.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo, or click below to read more!

[myGameDev] Shoogle!

Just a little heads-up - as part of a university project, I'm working with a team of designers, programmers, artists and audio students, on a game to raise awareness of the stresses students can face when entering college and university! Our team, Shoogle, needs your help!

Please take a moment to check out our Facebook page, Twitter account and Wordpress blog! We'll be updating regularly with sneaky peeks into the game, including interviews with team members, concept art and other goodies, so make sure to Follow us for more stuff!

[SquareGo] First Impressions: Pokémon X & Y

Nintendo recently teased that they'd be releasing some big news related to the popular Pokémon series on January 8th – speculation was tossed hither and thither that it may be anything from a console adaptation of the game for the Wii U, a remake of Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire, and even a possible iOS Pokémon game. January 8th arrived..

...and with it came the announcement of Pokémon X & Y, a brand new sixth generation of Pokémon games, exclusively for the 3DS.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo, or click below to read more!

myEXP: Dear Esther

I recently finished Dear Esther by thechineseroom after much deliberation and critical analysis (read: watching the first five minutes of a Youtube "Let's Play" and instantly signing on to Steam to buy it) and, over the course of about an hour and a half, finished it. And, since the narrator of the game saw fit to share his experience in a letter to his dear Esther, I thought it'd be good to share my own experience of this indie title.

Full discussion of Dear Esther is underneath the cut - but be warned, you might want to avoid reading if you aren't okay with seeing mild spoilers for:

• the series of levels in the game
• interesting scenes/scenery/models that can be found in the levels
• slight hints of the story as delivered by the narrator

[SquareGo] Feature: Easter Egg Apocrypha

Myths – in either religious or urban flavours - tend to conform to a particular structure. If the myth requires the person to undertake any “ritual actions”, these actions will often either be particularly difficult to perform (“It only works on a night where there's a second full moon in the same month....”), or it will be next to impossible to verify it the actions were even performed correctly (“If you draw the symbols even slightly wrong, it won't work at all...”)

Video game cheats follow a similar pattern, often requiring the player to perform a series of button-presses, finding secret codes (either written in levels themselves or worked out, usually through trial and error) or hunting down hidden objects, or even single pixels.

Read the rest of the feature over at SquareGo, or click below to read more!

[myGameDev] Apartmental: Stigmatised Property

Back in Summer, I wrote a post about a game I was working on called Apartmental - a horror/adventure game featuring a protagonist fighting against bizarre, surreal entities that were infesting their apartment, and trying to escape a nightmarish labyrinth that has manifested around their home. I also mentioned that there might be a playable prototype by the end of 2012.

Well, it's the start of 2013, so... what gives?

There's a real-estate term, "stigmatised property", that describes houses, homes and buildings that have some kind of unsavoury aspect to them: this can include things like being the scene of a murder, having been a doss-house or squat, or even being rumoured to be haunted. The legal status of stigmatised properties and whether elements of their history must be disclosed is a messy affair, but it ultimately comes down to the fact that the property has been marred in some physical, emotional or spiritual way.

For me, Apartmental is a stigmatised property.

I've mentioned elsewhere that, while I designed Apartmental so that it could be played as a straight supernatural-horror adventure game, there was also a hidden undercurrent to it: the game could also be perceived as though the protagonist was suffering from depression. All of the "enemies" in the game - the 'Infestation Entities' - were aspects of depression. Shattered Face, an entity that manifested in a smashed mirror, represents the shattering of the self-image, the inability to conceive of oneself as whole. Otherworld Window, a entity manifesting as a stained glass window replacing one of the walls of the apartment, represents religion and the hope (or fear) of an afterlife that overhangs suicide. Similarly, all of the Infestation Entities were split into five types, depending on the "zone" of the Disquiet Hallways they manifested in - Body, Sleep, Mood, Self and Death. These five zones correspond to five areas that depression significantly alters in one's life - and, by extension, how my life was affected when I was suffering from depression.

My depression reached a peak (or, well, a pit) after I had dropped out of university and started claiming Jobseeker's Allowance. There had been signs for a long time, even during university itself - the most blatant of which was feeling very uncomfortable during a Psychology tutorial where I had to give a five-minute presentation on the topic of DEPRESSION, but somehow I managed to not pick up on that painfully-obvious sign. It wasn't until I started hiding in my bedroom in my flat, out of university, out of work, out of a relationship, out of friends and out of my mind with focusing on what dire straits I was in but felt totally incapable of changing the course of my life to realise that actually, maybe, possibly, I might be a little bit completely depressed.

I did eventually manage to get a handle on all of it, but the experience stayed with me. The memory of the misery I felt remained, inactive and asleep, except in those times where I'd encounter people who didn't believe in depression, who thought that it was an excuse, a symptom, a punishment - whatever - and then the Black Dog woke up. Bit me hard enough to bring the pain back. There really were people who believed these things, all because they hadn't experienced it for themselves, they hadn't felt the crushing claustrophobia  or the abyssal loneliness that came with depression. So, I thought, why not do something about it? Why not express that feeling? Great artists have used their pain to fuel intense works of art, partially to give them reprieve and partially to reprieve others who may be suffering the same thing. I could do the same thing: I could banish the lingering spirits of my depression through an elaborate exorcism in videogame form.

The problem with that is that dealing with spirits opens you back up to their influence. The only times I could really work on Apartmental was during the summer, where I didn't have three other projects on the go for my current university course. However, for the past few summers in a row, I've ended up having an awful, awful time - combinations of money issues, work issues, health issues or just general issues in some form. In whatever way, I'm not in a safe, secure place - and you really need to be, if you're focusing so heavily on something so heavy as depression. I couldn't give the game the treatment it deserved, I couldn't focus on it, and I certainly couldn't keep a handle on how I felt about it: I love everything about the game, but dealing with the topic was causing me some amount of distress. Every summer, those spirits got summoned back into my life, and it began to feel like I was sinking back into the black hole of depression all over again.

So, after a lot of deliberation, after much consideration and weighing of pros-and-cons, I've decided to stop work on Apartmental for now. It's not out of a dislike of the game (I think it's a winner), and it's not out of neglect ('cause I've put some amount of work into that game) - it's out of a need for my own peace-of-mind.

There are spirits in that apartment, and sometimes the only way to deal with them is to lock the door and walk away. Unfinished business remains, but perhaps some way down the line, I'll see that locked door, then sneak in to wake up the spirits inside and set them free. Hopefully when that day comes, all of you will be there with me, like the crew of Most Haunted jumping at shadows and freaking out at orbs. 'Til then, Apartmental is stigmatised property - Apartmental has been condemned.

[SquareGo] First Impressions: Among the Sleep

Among the Sleep is an intriguing new survival horror game on its way in 2013 from Krillbite Studio. In it, the player plays as a two-year-old child exploring their home during the night, where strange events are taking place…

Read the full preview over at SquareGo, or click below to read more!

[SquareGo] Review: Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers

In Tiny & Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers, the player takes on the role of Tiny, an odd-looking chap with a wide range of gadgets, who’s hunting down Big, another odd-looking chap, who’s made off with a family heirloom passed down by Tiny’s grandfather – a pair of pants.

Fair enough.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo, or click below to read more!

[SquareGo] Review: Depth Hunter

If you're into the tranquility and mystery of being under the sea – either in real life or the “underwater levels” that are a mainstay of platformers the world over – Biart Company's Depth Hunter is for you.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo! >>

[SquareGo] Review: DeadEnd Cerebral Vortex

DeadEnd Cerebral Vortex is a first-person labyrinth exploration game by Membranos that tasks the player with venturing into the illusory world of their subconscious mind in order to recover fragments of their soul.

The player wanders through twenty levels, picking up “Soul Cubes” that represent part of their soul. Gathering enough Soul Cubes in one area and making it to the Exit unlocks the next level, and this is the player’s sole objective; there are no enemies to fight, no sidequests to undertake, just the maze to explore.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo! >>

[SquareGo] Review: SCP-087-B

SCP-087-B follows a recent trend of short indie horror games that are so focused on their primary goal – TERROR – that they easily rival titles from big-name studios trying to elicit the same reaction. SCP-087-B is no exception.

Read the full review over at SquareGo or click below to read more!

[SquareGo] Review: Slender: the Eight Pages

The unknown and the unexpected are the bread and butter of the horror genre – and an indie PC game quietly released in June 2012 fits the bill, coming as it did from the relatively unknown developer Mark J. Hadley of Parsec Productions, and unexpectedly becoming one of the most terrifying games of the year.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo or click below to read more!

Minecraft Monday #7: New Platform, New County!

Minecraft Monday is a feature on Hyp/Arc that documents playthroughs of the hit indie game Minecraft, as well as discussing news and updates regarding the game and the cult phenomenon surrounding it.

Previously on Minecraft Monday, we left behind the Little Town of Remedy in Alexander County and went on a summer hiatus. Now, Minecraft Monday is back - I'm here to show you guys around Kentigern County, my Minecraft world for the Xbox 360 platform!

Since May this year - when Mojang and 4J Studios released a version of the hit indie game Minecraft onto the Xbox 360 platform - I've been building a new Minecraft world called Kentigern County. Since it's on the console version of Minecraft rather than the PC, Kentigern County is a lot smaller than Alexander County, and it's lacking a lot of features since the Xbox 360 version is a fair few builds behind the PC version. One of the things I've been missing most is villages - as you might expect, given that my previous playthrough of Minecraft focused exclusively on my escapades building and living in a village called Remedy.

I adore the villages in Minecraft - any kind of structure, in fact, such as the abandoned mineshafts, strongholds, Nether Fortresses, Desert Temples and Jungle Temples that have been added into the recent PC updates. I play on single player a lot of the time, so for me, stumbling across a village in the middle of nowhere, or spotting the wooden arches of an abandoned mineshaft from the top of a ravine are little hints of a greater narrative - they suggest that I'm not the first person to have explored, and built, and destroyed, that there were people (if not whole societies, whole civilisations) before I appeared in the now-empty world. It infuses the world with so much more significance and storytelling potential when you're crafting your very first wood-and-earth hut on top of a vast underground network of railways, or when you're traversing a vast desert plateau and spot the silhouette of a temple offering shelter just before nightfall.

Of course, the idea that there were people before us in the Minecraft world isn't true: all of the structures in the game are pre-generated by the game itself. It doesn't need to be true, though: that's the beauty of fiction. We need only act like the stories we're telling are true, and a world of significance opens up to us. Narrative magick.

As I mentioned, villages don't appear in the Xbox version as of yet. However, since the appearance of villages is due in the next Minecraft update, I figured it was high time to show off my alternative before it was rendered obsolete:

Welcome to Western Rise, the first village of Kentigern County.

Gaymercon Counterarguments

I just wanted to collect together a list of answers (mostly from myself) to the most frequently used counter-arguments to Gaymercon and Gaymer culture in general. Some of these responses are from my blog, some are from my Tumblr, some I've just written up now. For more discussion about why I think Gaymercon is actually a fantastic idea, check my previous Hyp/Arc post, "Gaymers".

"Sexuality has nothing to do with gaming! Stop making it about your identity!"

This seems obvious, provided you don't actually think about it. Why would sex affect how we play games? The fact that some people would choose to have non-heterosexual sex should not negatively impact their experiences when gaming unless they choose to have it be so. However, sex is infused into so much of our culture - and our biology - that in many cases, it DOES affect other parts of our lives - this goes for everybody, heterosexuals and queer individuals alike.

The vast majority of games are created with a straight, white, male audience in mind. Soul Calibur V was not marketed based on the girth of Mitsurugi's package - it was marketed on the size of Ivy's breasts. Bayonetta was not a well-rounded, well-thought-out, highly developed female character - she was Hideki Kamiya's virtual sex fantasy with superpowers added on. The Dead or Alive series is not known for its inclusion of gay scantily clad men whose bulges wiggle in combat - it's known for its Breast Jiggle Engine. A large number of influential companies in the games industry continue to perpetuate the idea that Men Do Macho Stuff, and Women Look Pretty. Heterosexuality is infused into the vast majority of games. A close contender is asexuality - internet memes aside, Tetris and Bejeweled don't really include much in the way of cultural depictions of sex.

For better or worse, sexuality does have a lot to do with gaming - and pretty much everything else in our lives.

Now, queer folk don't exactly have a lot of representation in games. They're never main characters - unless you're allowed to craft your character, like Shepard from Mass Effect, or the Dragonborn from Skyrim. When they are represented, it's often as blatant stereotypes. Straight characters are freely represented doing any number of different things, with vast and varied personalities and quirks - but queer characters are of the order of fey tailors, overcompensating macho dudes, or freaks with mismatching sexes and genders. It continues to perpetuate the idea that queer folk are "weird" or distinctly "non-normal", when really all they are is non-heterosexual.

As for not making homosexuality part of your identity - why, when being a gamer is obviously part of people's identities as well? Why should we not take the more simple, compassionate and reasonable option of not attacking people because they identify as something different and aren't hurting anyone?

"Just be part of a bigger con like PAX! Get a panel, not a con!"

We already have a lot of great cons where lots of gamers come together to talk about games they dig. Sometimes, though, you might want to head to a con where you’re even more likely to bump into folk who share similar experiences to yours, where you can freely discuss topics with people who really care about them and are more informed about them. A lot of the time, you can’t do that with more general cons - and they also happen to include people who are eager to discuss the topic without knowing very much about the experience of under-represented or unprivileged groups right down to folk who are downright abusive. I’m not saying those people wouldn’t exist at Gaymercon, but there’s much less potential for them to show up and even less potential for them to be tolerated once they become abusive. Gaymercon allows folk to discuss how being gay and being a gamer intersect, and makes it likely that issues close to their hearts might be talked about (either at panels or amongst attendees), and means that they’ve got at least two things in common with the majority of people attending, so it makes it that much easier to make friends.

Lastly, getting a con rather than a panel doesn't actually take anything away from anyone. It creates one more meeting space. It's not a mandatory event, it's not going to put everyone out-of-pocket, it's being paid for by donations... I don't know what else I can say to qualify the fact that this is not taking up the time, money or effort of anyone who doesn't want to be part of it.

"Homophobia/Transphobia isn't THAT bad at other cons!"

Homophobia/transphobia isn't always immediately obvious, and isn't limited to violence, threats of violence or slurs based on someone's Queerness - it can be things like making assumptions on one's ability based on their gender, sex, or sexual identity, making jokes at their expense, or simply not giving them a voice at all. It's impossible to gauge how endemic homo/transphobia is at conventions without asking queer folk themselves how they have been treated - and obviously there's enough queer folk interested in having their own con that they've donated over $90,000 to the Gaymercon Kickstarter, which had an initial goal of only $25,000.

But that isn't the point. The point is to give Queer individuals a place where they can talk about their own stuff and how it relates to their identities as gamers. Every convention aside from Gaymercon is made with a heteronormative individual in mind, hence why there often aren’t many talks on polyamory in games, the representation of trans* individuals, how to deal with homophobia etc at major games conventions.

"Gaymercon Promotes Segregating Gays!"

It’s not segregation if people of an underprivileged minority want to create a safe space for themselves in which they can talk about and share stuff that they normally can’t in a space dominated by a majority that is largely apathetic towards, unaware of, or hostile towards that kind of stuff. It absolutely cannot be said that this somehow “reverse segregation” or “heterophobic” - especially considering that a) straight people are welcome and b) this is one con geared towards folk with queer interests out of several dozens of cons that are primarily geared towards folk with straight interests. Queer people want a space where they can meet other people like them: that’s all. If it was an Armenian Gamers convention, it wouldn’t be a convention to exclude everyone who wasn’t Armenian - it’s just that it’s geared specifically towards Armenian people, the issues they might face, and with services that primarily affect them.

"We don't have conventions for black gamers, or girl gamers, so we shouldn't have one for gay gamers!"

For a start, we already have at least one female-centric geek convention. GeekGirlCon lets women interact with people more like them, and lets them discuss things that affect them without having to endure anyone putting forward bullshit like "lol get back in the kitchen", or the more insidious suggestions like, "your gender and gaming should be TOTALLY SEPERATE!" - well, they're not. Because assholes don't treat them like they're seperate either. Female gamers are regularly picked on.

As for gaming cons for people of different groups - why not have these? That would give them a safe place to discuss topics important to them and how the intersect with gaming in a place where there’s less chance a straight white heterosexual man will pop in and claim that there’s no such thing as sexism, racism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, e.t.c., that they’re actually encouraging people to treat them badly simply for wanting to talk to other people like themselves, and that their meetup is pointless and they should do it in a group where there’s less chance that they’ll even find people they share these traits in common with who also identify with these traits and want to discuss them. However, one of the great things about Gaymercon is that it’s not exclusive: straight people who might be interested are also welcome to come along.

"Gaymercon means you're running away from tackling homophobia!"

This con is also not about avoiding the issue. Just because gay folk want a safe space for themselves does not in any way imply that they’re running away from anything - it’s that they want a space dedicated for them. If I were to run a Scottish gaming convention because an American gaming convention doesn’t cater to my needs, that’s not me running away from the issues I’d have got from being part of an American con. That’s me saying, “Well, I can create a space specifically for Scottish people, geared towards Scottish interests, without taking up part of a more general con where finding more Scottish people in attendance may be more difficult in the first place.” Similarly, the organisers at Gaymercon obviously thought they would be able to do a good job of organising events specifically for their chosen audience rather than trying to bend PAX or E3 to have more Queer culture (or at least elements of the Straight White Male culture that dominates much of Western folk’s lives, i.e., booth babes, games with rampant sexism, folk throwing around rape jokes, predominantly white creators, predominantly male creators, predominantly straight creators, etc etc etc).

Besides, dealing with such pervasive issues as homophobia can be immensely tiring, even if you're not doing it often or in any publicly-visible way. Tackling homophobia often isn't as simple as posting a Facebook status saying how bad it is that gay people run the risk of being stoned to death and then forgetting about it - many gay folk can't forget about it, because it affects them every day of their lives. The response to Gaymercon highlights another big part of the pervasiveness of homophobia - we're still having to write articles and comments defending the decision just to have queer individuals meet up and talk about games.

"Having Gaymercon Means Gays Get Special Privileges!"

Treating people equally doesn’t mean ignoring all the differences between everybody and adopting a one-size-fits-all approach for absolutely everyone (which, conveniently, often seems to be the way that straight white male westerners would choose to deal with everything, not what the underprivileged would choose). It’s about giving equal attention to the issues that folk face.

Regarding treating gay people the same as straight folk - the reason we don’t just lump everyone into the same category as “human beings” is because folk committing hate crime aren’t doing that when they bash your skull in with baseball bats for attending Pride or come into your home and beat up you and your family because you’re trans*. We’re all gamers, sure, but we all have vastly different experiences - not least of which includes folk who often get blown off because straight people don’t understand or care about their problems, or they get beaten up just because they’re not heterosexual. Not everybody receives equal treatment all the time, and if people refuse to acknowledge that by saying “Well, I treat everyone in exactly the same way”, you’re going to run into problems - especially if your treatment of people isn’t equal or helpful for folk, i.e., making rape jokes in front of people triggered by rape; booking group events for able-bodied people but failing to recognise or acknowledge the needs of a disabled friend; shouting homophobic slurs at the TV when you’re playing a game and hurting someone who’s been getting homophobic slurs throughout most of their lives. You’re right that there should be no barriers between folk being treated equally well, but they shouldn’t be treated in exactly the same way, because different folk have different needs.

"Gaymercon isn't the best way to eliminate homophobia!"

Gaymercon cannot be and is not an attempt to end homo/transphobia once and for all - it’s literally a meeting place for people with a vested interest in queer issues. It doesn’t have to be the best way to end homophobia, it doesn’t have to be practically perfect in every way to be considered a good thing - it, like every other convention ever, is just a meeting space, not a radical rights march. Sometimes queer folk don’t want to have another rights campaign, another politically-charged seminar, or a progressive rally that will change they world - sometimes queer folk just want a safe place to hang out and talk shit with other folk like them.

"Gaymercon only exists so that gays can hook up!"

Just because two gay people are in close proximity doesn't mean they're going to be attracted to each other at all - similarly, just because there's a lot of straight men and women going to a convention doesn't mean they're all going to partner up and have sex with each other indiscriminately.

"Gaymercon SHOULD only exist so that gays can hook up!"

Lots of people who want to attend Gaymercon want to meet people who have similar experiences to them, listen to/talk to people who have faced the same issues they face, and can more freely be who they want to be without having to worry about being lynched, being automatically disliked, or how they might "represent gay people" as a whole. A convention is just a meeting place. Those meetings can be anything from a gamer and developer meeting up to play game demos, attendees becoming friends, or, yes, even people becoming lovers. 

"There are no gay issues in gaming - people saying 'faggot' over Xbox Live aren't homophobes, they're just stupid!"

They're both. Just because someone uses the word "faggot" casually now doesn't mean that it's not offensive - it's still used against people who are gay, and it still hurts. The fact that people somehow believe that a word primarily used to discriminate against gay people is somehow no longer offensive to gay people should set alarm bells ringing.

No more perpetuating the myth that people "choose" to be offended, either. True, the world would be a happier place if none of us get offended - however, we do. Ignoring that fact and saying you're "treating everyone equally" - usually meaning that everyone gets treated equally badly - doesn't make for a better place for anyone but the person being offensive.

And enough of the  about reclaiming the word faggot. It's not for heterosexuals to choose when and why homosexuals should feel offended, after homosexuals have been routinely and systematically abused by heterosexuals for centuries. We should let bygones be bygones, yes - and when the vast majority of the world - including homosexuals - decides that this is to be the case, then we can say "faggot". Maybe then we can also ask black people about the n-word too! 

"I don't see the point in Gaymercon {followed by a paragraph about their feelings about Gaymercon}!"

That's cool. You don't have to weigh in on the issue if you're unaware of the issues queer folk face in the world today, how queer culture might intersect with gamer culture, the idea of inclusive vs exclusive spaces, heteronormativity, the W.A.S.P. demographic used in the games industry, the pervasiveness of homo- and transphobia, e.t.c., e.t.c.. Commenting for the sake of commenting when you haven't researched the issue aren't actually interested in it and don't have anything insightful or new to add just makes you (at worst) a bigot, or (at best) completely irrelevant.

As I've mentioned in a previous article, I think Gaymercon is brilliant. It allows for folk with a lot of similar interests to get to meet up and interact in a safe space that's geared towards them - no having to justify themselves to people, no having to hide the things that make up a big part of their identity, no having to deal with homophobia - except, of course, the dogged interference of the Westboro Baptist Church, who are protesting Gaymercon.

Further Reading:


Denis Farr: "Gotta Keep 'em Segregated?"
Jim Sterling: "The Importance of a Gay Gamer Convention"
Kyle Orland: "Gaymercon Wants to Provide a 'Safe Place' for LGBTQ Gamers"
cbrachyrhynchos: "Gaymercon: Another Thought"