Games For Change: Robert Yang's 'Gay Rant'

Games for Change! It happened! Robert Yang was there! This link will take you to his blog post that has embedded video (I can't find the embed code, as it isn't apparent from that particular site, so go have a look). It's not much of a rant, so mch as it is making an argument for a more diverse setting in games. Name-checking some of my favorite designers, Anna Anthropy and Christine Love (as well as his own work), Yang offers such tidbits:

I think me and Anna Anthropy usually treat identity as the subject, as the pervasive context, as identity embodied within the world itself. Take a game about, I don't know, about zooming in and staring at crotch bulges -- saying that game is gay is like saying water is wet. It's the most redundant thing you can say. Instead, these games are more interested in HOW we express / perform gayness, and HOW we live as lesbians, not WHETHER you're closeted with this typical coming out story -- which is important, but we do need more types of narratives.

As a short presentation, it's to-the-point, humorous, and still manages to say quite a bit for a perhaps uninitiated audience. Originally it was meant to be a thirty-minute presentation with Todd Harper (a researcher at MIT-Gambit, which was responsible for A Closed World), but you can read about that chronicle and how the festival's logistics pared that down on Harper's blog post.

I make the assumption that most of our audience will be familiar with the games mentioned, but in case you are not, the following links will guide you to a path of queerness:

• Anna Anthropy's dys4ia, about her experience with taking hormones.
• Here's Anthropy's Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars, which is inspired by Wizard of Wor.
• Oh, and she's recently written a book to inspire anyone to make games, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. I've not yet read it, but it is on the to-read list.
• don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story was among my favorites last year. Many thanks to Christine Love for making it.
• Meanwhile, Analogue: A Hate Story is available on Steam or on Love's own site.
• Then there's MIT-Gambit's A Closed World.
• Here is Yang's Radiator, about a gay divorce (as he says, gay marriage is soooo 2011).
• Then there's Condom Corps, which allows you to stare at men's crotches to fit them with the right size condom.

We've covered most of these, but not all, and I will look into making sure we have explications/reviews for the ones not already mentioned on the site. Meanwhile, enjoy!