A new June passes and the whole world begins to appreciate what was left of LGBTQIA + Pride Month.
The space of the year in which the sexodiverse community in full celebrates, commemorates and makes an act of defiance in the face of social invisibility, is also a moment where many participants look for a bit of the rainbow cake.
As mentioned in the past, corporate presence at Pride is a topic of debate that reaches multiple levels. Discussions about its value or its sincerity remain at the table, and gaming in general is not exempt from them.
Whether it’s titled “Pink Capitalism” or “Rainbow Washing,” or it’s a sincere effort to support the community, we review the best and worst of LGBTQIA Pride Month + 2021.
The Good: Game Packs for Everyone
If something is capable of manifesting diversity, it is the fact of appreciating the options and being able to choose between what we like.
To celebrate the pride we were able to see how more and more distribution platforms presented notable amounts of LGBTQIA + themed and authorship games.
With a strong number of independent creations, the Itch.io platform presented its Queer Games Bundle 2021, with more than 200 games developed by community creatives, at a low price of $ 10.
In the same vein Humble Bundle It presented its special sale for the whole month, with titles such as 2064: Read Only Memories, Gone Home or Monster Prom in a pack of almost 40 games.
If you are not for indies, Steam featured options including titles that include sexually diverse themes, where Life is Strange and Tacoma top the charts. In addition to presenting Tell Me Why completely free throughout the month.
For consoles, the offer was very similar. With Sony embodying a large number of rainbows on its interface and presenting its most portentous work with LGBTQIA + content, The Last of Us at the forefront of its promotions.
Xbox, for its part, focused its efforts on giving the community a voice within its communication channels on social networks. An effort that for many is somewhat cynical, but that can undoubtedly serve to give notoriety to creators of sexodiverse content on the internet.
The Bad: Rainbow Washing and Toxic Communities
The notoriety of Pride came, as always, with hordes of people without real criteria to seek to offend and be noticed as “contrary to the forced theme” that this celebration represents.
It’s the same old story. “Straight pride”, “we have to put up with gays”, “I have nothing against them, but …”, with the always convenient ability of social networks to throw the stone and hide the hand.
Twitch broadcast chats were a good example of this, where strong homophobic attacks were revealed during the broadcast of competitive games of Rocket League. In this tournament, Pride was used as an aesthetic theme, with licensed music by Lil Nas X and Kim Petras to spice up the atmosphere.
The trolls went out of their way to contaminate the chat and damage the user experience, in one more page of the gamer world’s book of shame.
At the corporate level we also saw a similar vision of this type of moment, with the not very pleasant presentation of WB Games and the case of Injustice 2 for mobile. Choosing as a Pride Month event to take down one of the few prominent characters in the DC universe to be openly sexually diverse, Poison Ivy.
Apparently, beating up an LGBTQIA + person as an event to celebrate Pride was a good idea for the company, as there were no obstacles for the event to take place and it was only when it had a bad reception that they decided to eliminate it and give a standard apology .
Although it is a company like Warner, which is not above giving money and space to people like JK Rowling or Amber Heard, it exposes the fact that Pride is for these types of companies an event of colors and clichés.
While they offer inclusive events, they do not have people from the community to coordinate them optimally, despite the fact that they do not lack fans and supporters more than willing to collaborate.
We also had our share of secondary representation in League of Legends, with the champions Leona and Diana coming out of the closet and confirming a romantic relationship. All this within the supplemental material that is published apart from the game itself.
As seen in titles like Overwatch, having this type of representation is a vision that ends up being merely cosmetic, easily discarded to continue presenting the title in markets that are not friendly to LGBTQIA + content.
Representations of this type are superfluous and if there is one thing the community should take into account, it is that it is no longer worthwhile to continue to settle for the crumbs on the table.
