I’m a professor here in comparative media studies and I’m codirector of an organization called AnyKey which I’ll tell you a little bit about today. We launched 2016 with the help of Intel and ESL. We’re an organization dedicated to fairness, equity, and inclusivity in gaming and in particular esports.
Archive
The unrelenting pace of technologies is deeply ironic, given the original intent of them to make our lives more efficient and give us more time. But we can all attest that the actual effect of this escalation of efficiency has been to increase the pace of work and play in our worlds.
How do we make gay worlds in video games? Well, I can tell you how not to make a gay world. You should not rely on the AAA game industry to pity you and leave you some table scraps. I’m tired of being 0.1% of a world, right. Why isn’t Dragon Age 100% gay sex, right?
In the real world we can creatively represent ourselves in dynamic ways. So, we can vary our gesture, our discourse, our posture, our fashion, life stories, the way we tell our stories. And all of this is with an astounding sensitivity to social context. Computer technologies like computer games, social networking, and virtual worlds are much more primitive than what we do in the real world.
Katherine Cross at The Conference 2015
Simply put, anonymity does not cause harassment. It does play a role, but it’s much much more complicated than most people have made it out to be. The reason that this is important to understand is because it’s having a practical impact on the world right now.