GaymerX2 branded itself consistently with “#everyonegames,” and please believe me when I say: That’s the most concise and accurate label the event could ask for.
This past weekend, Midboss—the people behind the upcoming game Read Only Memories and producers of the recently-released documentary Gaming in Color—put on their second yearly queer gaming convention at the San Francisco InterContinental Hotel. There was a clear sense of growth from the inaugural event last year. It offered more days, more people, more events and offerings, and a bigger venue in the heart of the city. At the core, though, GaymerX2 held to the same guiding principle that led Matt Conn, and the other volunteers and workers behind the event, to start it in the first place: creating a safe space for gamers of all kinds to come together.
It worked, too. Having attended quite a few fan and gaming events over the past twenty years plus, I’ve never seen as diverse an audience as that of GaymerX. The range of gender identities/presentations, ethnicities, sexualities, body types, and more was incredibly wide. During the closing ceremony, con president Toni Rocca thanked the many attendees who dealt with disabilities, physical and social/psychological, in order to be there (a sentiment the crowd supported with wild applause). At the Different Games conference earlier this year, Rocca spoke about the considerable effort the GaymerX team expended to make that “safe space” feeling a reality, both for the previous year’s con and for this one. Speaking as someone who attended: it showed.
The three-day schedule was packed with events just as diverse as the attendees. A quick look at this year’s schedule shows everything from workshops on writing trans characters, to discussions of queer furry fandom, to LGBTQ game industry pros discussing their experiences coming and being out in the workplace. Guests of honor David Gaider, Mattie Brice, and Colleen Macklin delivered engaging and often hilarious keynote speeches about the intersection of queerness and games. In my opinion, Macklin’s story of how her teen girl crush on her high school gym teacher caused her to get in trouble just so she could run laps and stare at said teacher the entire class took the cake. The first WWE wrestler to be out and currently performing, Fred Rosser (who wrestles as “Darren Young”) was on hand to sign autographs and talk to attendees, and publisher 2K Games was on hand to promote both Take Two’s upcoming WWE 2015 and Gearbox’s Borderlands: the Pre-Sequel.
Speaking of: part of the Gearbox creative team was on hand to discuss their efforts to make their games more inclusive in a first-day panel. It was refreshing to hear series writer Anthony Burch talk about the move toward inclusivity as a process of “becoming less shitty.” Discussions about how devs can increase the diversity of their titles so rarely seem to involve the idea of iteration, or of being able to make and then correct mistakes, but that is exactly the situation Burch described. Elizabeth Zelle of Volition, the makers of the Saints Row franchise, also discussed something similar during a panel on designing inclusive games. In talking about the evolution of content in the Saints Row games, she said simply, “We made mistakes, but we didn’t run from that. We embraced it.” Viewing mistakes as a chance to take ownership and move toward positive change was a common message from devs that I heard speak at the event, and was an incredibly refreshing change from the industry’s current and all-too-common party line of “we’ll do better next time” with no acknowledgment of what had gone wrong. The devs I heard speak at GaymerX took that extra step of not just ownership, but understanding what went wrong, that I think the more common empty promises typically lack.
Discussions of designing for inclusivity factored into many sessions over the course of the convention. In the aforementioned panel, Zelle discussed the pervasive notion in gaming right now that straight white cis men won’t play games that aren’t “about them.” Developer Christine Love put it best, saying of her own work, “It turns out making games for gay girls doesn’t alienate people. Who knew?” Shawn Alexander Allen, designer of the recently successfully kickstarted Treachery in Beatdown City, spoke eloquently on the final day of the conference on empowering diverse people to create their own games, and the influence that black and Latino urban culture has both had on media creation for many decades, and could bring to game design as well. One of his closing remarks was one of my favorite lines of the entire convention: “You can’t assume apathy means people don’t want to do things. It means they’re told they can’t, so they don’t.” In both his keynote and in a later panel about designing in-game romances, BioWare’s David Gaider discussed the need for inclusive characters to feel organic. “It’s not like I bust into the room and shout ‘WE’RE GOING GAY!’,” he noted at one point. The idea is that a character’s sexuality needs to be an aspect of a whole character, a part of a whole that fits smoothly into the story and world of the game, a theme that many panelists and speakers reinforced over three days.