Gaming Communities

For this assignment, we are looking into the world of gaming using discussion boards from different gaming sites where the gamers self-identify as a culture or subculture.

The first site that I visited was www.gaymer.org. This site is specifically geared towards gay gamers. On this site I found two discussion boards dealing with homosexuality and gaming. The first forum was "Which is more difficult?, Coming out as gay or as a gamer." The topic as can be guessed from the title discussed if people thought that it is harder to come out as being gay or as being a gamer. According to the discussion, there are a lot of stereotypes with being a gamer including, all gamers are virgins, anti-social, and/or socially awkward which makes people keep it a secret that they are gamers. Reading some of the post, it seems that the group is divided between those that think that there is no such thing as "coming out" as a gamer and that it doesn't compare to coming out about being gay, and those who do believe that it is the same situation, when it coming out to friends. I think that those that didn't think it was the same, never really answered the question, they just gave reasons for why it wasn't the same but not if it was more difficult to come out about being gay or a gamer. Those that said it was stated how they were accepted by parents and friends for being gay, but had lost numerous friends and significant others because they were gamers. I thought that overall this was a very interesting topic and something to think about when considering something that you are passionate about and how it may affect how those you care about treat you.

The next forum also from gaymer.com is "Xbox against the gays". This discussion tackled the issue of how Microsoft disallowed a man to use the screen name "theGAYERgamer" on Xbox Live because it was an offensive user name. According to Xbox Live Service, it wasn't allowed because of its sexual nature. The groups main issue was that they wanted to know if The division among this group, was very slim. Most people did believe that the name should have been allowed because it expressed who the man is. They also thought that it was most likely that if it said "theSTRAIGHTgamer" it would not have been a problem. Others did however, saw where Microsoft was coming from and understood why they disallowed the name, because of the growing issue of the word being used as a negative term. A Xbox Live team member said that he didn't know how they would explain to a young child's mother why they saw a gamertag that contain content of sexual nature. Personally in my opinion, I believe that if you are going to enable your child to be exposed to violent, explicit video games in the first place, there is no place for a parent to talk about what gamertag their child sees. There were no points really to be made that had not been touched on in this forum.

The final site that I visited was www.gamespot.com, which is mainly for women gamers. The discussion board that I chose for this site was "Women's Portrayal in Video Games". The creator of this forum wanted to know what people thought about a recent article she had down on women's clothing in video games. The main point that came about in this discussion was how company's geared their games towards boys, teenagers to be exact, so they feel a need to have the women characters with big breast and provocative clothing. One person did switch the topic around and talk about how female gamers don't like how the character Ivy looks, but they don't mind how Aries looks in Final Fantasy. The final point brought about was why does it really matter how the character is dressed, and whether it would make the game anymore enjoyable. The group was pretty divide across the board in this forum, but did answer the question of how they felt about the way women are portrayed in video games. Overall, I don't think that it should matter what the characters are wearing, male or female, because someone is always going to not like the way the character is dress, how they act, or what they say. The game isn't about what they are wearing but how they perform in the game.