When you spend your whole life being told that your identity is a flaw or a deviance or an abomination by bigots, and a huge swath of people who try to distance themselves from the overt bigotry but still maintain that certain identities are "default", it hurts.

Queer people crave positive representation. We need it. Not just for us, but so others can see that we exist in a positive way. And it is disingenuous to claim that it isn't anti-queerness. There are straight romance storylines in games all the time and never ever ever do people rage about them. But the second a queer character exists people pop up out of the woodwork to claim we are pushing it down people's throats.

@brug :(

No disagreement. just :(

Yeah, I feel the same.

I won't even get into the fact that I literally had cisheteronormativity forced on me.

One thing that's interesting - the games industry is disproportionately queer. Numbers I've seen from our internal surveys as well as reports out of the UK suggest something like 20% of folks working in games identify as non-cis/het.

So, I'm optimistic that the recent gestures toward inclusion aren't just a fad, but the start of more inclusive games and game-making practices for the future.

That is encouraging. Sometimes I ask myself what I have gotten myself into by pursuing programming. With its notoriety as an old boys club

But there seem to be some genuine spaces for us if we can just find them.

I think so. And I think that's the only way we break down the old boys club.

true.

those pockets would never have existed for me if not for those who preceded me and forged a space.

Yeah. I look at the things being done by folks like Anna Anthropy and Christine Love and Maddy Thorson and think how much better the industry can be for the next wave of developers growing up on their games. 😊

@DMGregory What is the “old boys” club?

Sorry, I don’t get into culture stuff a lot. Gets messy.

It's an expression meaning a situation where men who are established in an industry or community become gatekeepers, making it almost exclusively a space for people similar to them.

Usually with a significant thread of misogyny involved.