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In a way the fantasy of video games represent an ideal world – a world that teaches people to embrace difference rather than ostracize it. However, gaming culture itself can alienate its players and often lacks diversity and representation of marginalized people, in both the industry and community culture.
Gaming in Color is a Kickstarter campaign-made documentary that traces through stories with people that identify with both LGBTQI and gaming culture, since coining the inclusionary binary term ‘gaymer’. Director Philip Jones tells the stories in a dynamic way and works cleverly with the theme, carrying through video game styled graphics and music to enhance the experience.
Interviews featured gaming experts, creators, academics including Associate Professor Colleen Macklin and founder and CEO of Midboss Matt Conn, as well as players that offered their personal experiences growing up with games as an intrinsic factor in their development .
The feeling of un-belonging was effectively conveyed, with some interviewees really hitting home the common feeling among the LGBTQI community of not fitting in, even within their own community, for gaymers it is feeling ‘too gay for gamer culture but too geeky for gay culture’.
The film was made and initially released pre-Gamergate, so it can be understood that the current issues of misogyny against females or trans-females is not the focus and are just mention in passing. However, a documentary about video game culture that doesn’t mention names such as Anita Sarkeesin still feels like its lacking the necessary modern context.
While three women were featured in the documentary, the film at times seems focused on male homosexuality and often neglected to get a counter point from a female perspective.
Call of Duty was one gaming franchise that was singled out for being particularly unprogressive in its representation of people other than heterosexual men- alienating both its female and LGBTQI audience. While games such as Portal, Fable and Gone Home are celebrated for their inclusion of queer representation and themes.
Trolling cyber-world hotspots such as Reddit and 4chan were only feebly mentioned, despite the ‘gaymer’ community on Reddit having almost 40,000 subscribers. Furthermore, the overall film seemed solely focused on American LGBTQI gamers, and a more holistic view of the culture would have been more inclusive to a world-wide audience.
Never the less, Gaming in Color is an essential film to see as part of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, with the need to reject and disallow homophobia and transphobia within video games going hand in hand with the much needed cultural shift to find safer spaces for the LGBTQI community.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Gaming in Color
Director: Philip Jones
USA, 2014, 62 mins
Melbourne Queer Film Festival
19-30 March 2015
www.mqff.com.au
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