Handle With Care: Gamer Homophobia

We've covered art mod series Radiator before, both first part Polaris and the second Handle With Care. Because we are all about the art-wank. Or wanking generally, in my case. However, some people are less into splendid art-ejaculate, and Robert Yang writes about their responses over in this week's Escapist. Of course, their problem isn't pretension or even iffy Half-life-two-level design. It's because you were "tricked" into playing a gay protagonist...

You might have, as some players did, invented a female persona for your player character and assumed it was the same young "lady" dating Dylan from my previous mod, "Polaris." And then you would find out, whether from seeing the name "James" so often or from reading forum posts - that I had managed to "trick" you into playing as a homosexual male.

Perhaps that made you angry enough to go to my website and, with the proud honor of being the first to post a comment on my work, you may have hastily written the following post: "Re relese [sic] the game without the GAY!"

His response, quite reasonably, is to tell them to sling their hook. There's lots more in the article, which is an interesting examination of how even negligible homosexual content creates a disproportionately homophobic response.

Separate from the main topic, I admit one bit really disturbed me...

It is two months ago, when an editor at The Escapist suggested that readers might not fully appreciate my game design analysis of OkCupid in "Grinding the Dating Scene" if references to my preference for dudes stayed in the article. I agreed and changed it.

I mean, I understand the reasoning, but I'm deeply saddened by it.

Not much more to say than that, really.

Pah.