No homosexuals in Star Wars ? BioWare,‘gamer’ identity,and the politics of privilege in a convergence culture

Abstract

Fan studies scholar Henry Jenkins lays out a blueprint for participatory culture that highlights its potential for more democratic, more inclusive mediascapes, asserting that corporate media producers have an economic incentive to listen to the suggestions and demands made by its fans. This article questions who is able to lay claim to titles like ‘fan’ or ‘gamer’, how those titles are being contested along gendered, racialized, sexualized, and classed lines, what happens when new groups lay claim to those titles, and how some fans are reacting to the loss of their privileged relationships with content producers. I look at fan responses to North American game developer BioWare’s decision to diversify games like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Dragon Age II by adding the option to play as a gay male character. I discovered that what was often framed by fans as a desire to prevent politics from leaking into gaming and ruining its unique attractions manifested as the maintenance of a heterocentric construction of the gamer identity.

Keywords

BioWare convergence culture embodiment fan studies feminist video game studies gamer culture GLBTQ privilege queer theory

In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, new media and fan studies scholar Henry Jenkins lays out a blueprint for participatory culture in which ‘rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules’ (2006: 3). Jenkins is often read as an optimistic idealist who praises ‘the promise of this new media environment’ to ‘raise expectations of a freer flow of ideas and content’ (2006: 18). According to Jenkins, convergence culture contains the potential for more democratic, more inclusive, mediascapes because corporate media producers will have an economic incentive to listen to the suggestions, requests, and demands made by its audience (and even to encourage acts of production or on the part of users). Therefore, that audience accrues a kind of power to shape and contribute to media production that it has never before wielded so explicitly (2006: 62–63).

However, Jenkins is not naive. He points out that ‘not all participants’ in a convergence culture ‘are created equal.… Corporations – and even individuals within corporate media – still exert greater power than any individual consumer or even the aggregate of consumers’ (2006: 3). He even briefly acknowledges the problem of what he calls the ‘participation gap’, the strong likelihood that ‘early adopters’ and ‘elite consumers’ (who are ‘disproportionately white, male, middle class, and college educated’) will ‘exert a disproportionate influence on media culture in part because advertisers and media producers are so eager to attract and hold their attention’, as they are seen as the primary consumers of new media technologies and are therefore thought of as the target demographic for those marketers to court (2006: 23). The perception (or presumption) that new media users are mostly white, male, middle class, college educated, and (although Jenkins does not mention this category) straight leads to a kind of feedback loop in which a media environment is created that discourages the participation of users who identify with other groups, both because they are not marketed to as potential new media users and because they risk being labeled as inauthentic participants by their fellow users. Despite this caveat, however, the majority of Jenkins’s book paints media consumers as a relatively unified group standing collectively alongside, negotiating with, and occasionally entering into conflict with its rival stake holders in convergence culture: corporations. He often lumps himself, the reader, and the fans he writes about under the pronoun ‘we’, thereby crafting the image of a collective interest group, and he does not spend much time exploring differences among users.

This article explores the contours of the participation gap more fully and questions who is able to lay claim to titles like ‘fan’ or ‘gamer’, how those titles are being contested along gendered, racialized, sexualized, and classed lines, what happens when new users lay claim to those titles, and how some fans are reacting to the loss of their privileged relationships with content producers. I will examine what happens when the channels of communication opened via convergence culture are used to lobby both for and against the inclusion of other users, how the power to influence media production that Jenkins identifies is being unevenly dispersed and even contested within fandom. Of course, producers watch these interfandom disputes closely, so they can determine who to side with to maximize profits. Thus, the outcomes of these squabbles over who and what fans or gamers really are indirectly affect all media consumers in the form of mass-produced corporate responses to what exactly it is producers believe their fans want (dictated by who it is they are convinced their ‘true’ fans are).

Take, for example, fan responses to BioWare, a North American video game developer, as it attempted to manage discussions of sexuality on their gaming forums. Fan responses first exploded in 2009 with a forum thread about the censorship of terms like ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ on the message boards for the massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), Star Wars: The Old Republic (abbreviated by gamers as SW:TOR or just TOR). TOR fans argued over whether an online game is an appropriate venue to discuss the sexual politics and the problem of heteronormativity in virtual worlds. What was often framed by the participants as a benevolent desire to prevent political and ideological conflict from leaking into gaming and ruining its unique attractions manifested as the maintenance of a heterocentric power structure. True gamers and fans are assumed to be straight (or, if they are queer, it is assumed that they will remain in the closet while participating in the gaming forum), and out queer gamers and their allies are flagged as disruptive and harmful interlopers. This stance implies that BioWare would be doing its real fans (the ones they rely on to sustain their profit margins) a disservice were it to cater to the desires of queer players by making the forum community queer friendly. A similar debate arose 2 years later when BioWare made the decision to include gay male romance options in their popular single player role-playing game franchise, Dragon Age.

Ultimately, for both games, BioWare ended up deciding that the business they could gain from explicitly reaching out to and including game elements requested by queer players and their allies would outweigh the business they stood to lose from straight male fans who were upset at losing their privileged status as the sole demographic game developers tried to please. This scenario complicates the usual positions of corporations and users in accounts of convergence cultures, where users are assumed to be a homogenous group pushing for more inclusive, more democratic, more open media environments and corporations are assumed to be reluctantly capitulating to the virtuous demands of the enlightened masses.

Sport, games, and the construction of hegemonic masculinity

There is a substantial body of literature around questions of privilege, identity, and othering in play, beginning with studies of homophobia and sexism in the world of sports (Anderson, 2002; Bryson, 1994; Clarke, 1998; Heckma, 1998; Messner, 1992, 2002; Pascoe, 2007; Pronger, 1990), where ‘hegemonic masculinity is reproduced and defined’ (Anderson, 2002: 860) through displays of physical prowess, and continuing with investigations into why video game culture has been skewed for so long toward a straight white male demographic to the exclusion of other potential markets (Bertozzi, 2008; Burrill, 2008; Cassell and Jenkins, 2000; Christensen, 2006; Ray, 2003; Shaw, 2009; Taylor, 2003). Some of the earliest works in this genre like the edited collection from Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (2000) and Sheri Graner Ray’s Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market (2003) tried to explain why certain demographic groups like women and girls haven’t, until very recently, played electronic video games in the same numbers as boys (although current numbers from the Entertainment Software Association (2013) show that almost half of all players of digital games today are women) by looking at game content. They concluded that the rules of most video games require players to carry out ‘masculine’ actions of aggression (Cassell and Jenkins, 2000: 8–9; Ray, 2003: 37–50) when, they claimed, most female players would prefer games build around ‘relating and cooperating with others’ (Subrahmanyam and Greenfield, 1998: 55) and focusing on ‘social relations’ (Cassel and Jenkins, 2000: 289–290; Ray, 2003: 51–65). Many of these early studies also argue that games (and their attending marketing materials) are ‘without positive representations of women’ (Cassell and Jenkins, 2000: 10; see also Miller and Summers, 2007; Ray, 2003; Sherman, 1997) or the GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and queer) community (Schröder, 2008), and that programmers need to create more a more diverse stable of characters if they hope to attract these underrepresented groups to gaming.

However, my work takes a somewhat different approach. Although these projects were invaluable for establishing a starting point for feminist and queer critiques of video game culture, they do have a tendency to rely on essentialist assumptions about gender and sexuality. For example, they assume that feminine and masculine approaches to play are distinct and are easily mapped onto female and male bodies. Likewise, they assume that players with female bodies require video games that feature female avatars crafted in a particular style (i.e. not sexualized for the male gaze) to fully identify with their virtual doppelganger. In this work, the content of the game is assumed to be dictating to the player what gender and sexuality mean in the context of the game world. The player is constructed as a passive media consumer, and their ability to interpret or shape the cultural narratives being produced by the game is downplayed or ignored.

This study follows a different approach to feminist and queer video game studies: One that takes a more complex, more player-centered look at how gender and sexuality are constructed in games. This approach is often used by scholars interested in MMORPGs, where players create their own avatars and act out their own narratives in a persistent game world (Eklund, 2011; Taylor, 2003). It uses an ethnographic methodology to explain how gamers, particularly those that are considered ‘an anomaly’ (Taylor, 2003: 22) by game makers such as women and queer gamers, actually use the tools afforded to them by games to derive pleasure from them rather than assuming that the games will dictate their experience to them. This approach allows for an acknowledgment of the power of players to use content to craft their own interpretations of gender and sexuality within the game world (Eklund, 2011).

And yet, this article differs from those described above in that it does not focus on the relationship between the player and the avatar or the content of the game at all. Such an approach risks implicitly recreating the narrative of the simplistic, adversarial relationship between corporations and media producers (who offer a limited number of tools for character creation and are therefore blameworthy for failing to cultivate women as a potential gaming demographic), and users (who are pluckily finding ways to create enjoyable media experiences with those limited tools) (Schott and Horrel, 2000). Rather than rehashing this oft-told story about convergence culture, this work focuses on how players are working both together and against one another to determine who can lay claim to the title of gamer, while media producers sit back and watch, gathering data and trying to figure out which faction of the community to get behind to maximize profits. To study this phenomenon, it was necessary to trace the types of rhetorical appeals made by gamers when they argue for the inclusion or exclusion of certain groups. I discovered that the discourses most often cited by those who oppose expanding gamer-dom are, ironically, rooted in the techno-utopian rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s. This rhetoric suggested that the Internet was an ideal venue to solve problems like discrimination on the basis of race and gender, because it would allow users to forgo embodied social interactions, to leave their bodies behind and present themselves to others only on the basis of their personalities. According to the utopians, the Internet would enable us to evolve beyond the petty concerns of heterosexism and homophobia because it had already evolved beyond the body and to bring those concerns back into a virtual community would be to import unwelcome, unnecessary problems from the physical realm.

However, as numerous cultural critics across multiple contexts (Bordo, 1995; Dyer, 1997; Warner, 1993) including the study of new media (Nakamura, 2002, 2007, 2009; Sundén, 2003) have argued, a self-representation that is not specifically identified in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and ability is often assumed to be a member of the dominant class: a white straight able-bodied male. Thus, attempts by gamers to shut down and dismiss discussions of gender and sexuality using the techno-utopian rhetoric of disembodiment have the actual effect of reinforcing the privileged status of straightness and maleness, not of enabling users of all descriptions to live and let live online as they see fit.

A short history of censorship and queerness in the online gaming community

BioWare’s gay-mer troubles first began in April 2009, when news of a new thread on the message boards for SW:TOR spread like wildfire through the blogosphere. These message boards give fans a place to gather and discuss press releases, form cooperative gaming groups called guilds, and offer suggestions to developers about the direction the game might take. They are regulated by moderators to ensure that discussions remain civil and family friendly. To this end, the moderators on the SW:TOR forum developed and announced an automatic filter that looked for certain words deemed inappropriate. This verboten language included the words gay and lesbian (Sliwinski, 2009).

It is true that the word gay is notoriously used throughout the gaming world (Cole, 2009) ‘to describe anything unmasculine, non-normative, or uncool’ (Thurlow, 2001: 26), and the reasoning behind BioWare’s ban on these words may have been aimed at curtailing derogatory uses of the term. Other gaming entities like Blizzard Entertainment and Microsoft have instituted similar policies around such words in the past, even going so far as to ban players who were up-front about their sexual orientations and telling them that it was for their own protection (Gilbert, 2009; Ward, 2006). Shortly after BioWare’s ban was put in place, a poster nicknamed Elikal (2009) started one of many threads on the message board asking the developer to reconsider the censoring of these terms. Among the several concerns raised by Elikal’s thread (which was the longest lasting and most popular of the threads on this topic by far) was the notion that such ‘solutions’ only help to further marginalize the gay and lesbian community, making it difficult for gay and lesbian players to find each other online if they so desire by marking the labels they have chosen to describe themselves as ‘taboo’ and ‘dirty’ (Fdzzaigl, 2009). For example, a poster named Kevar (2009, n.p.) argued, ‘a minority requesting that they be represented in a game that is entirely about developing the identity of your character requires loudness. If they don't make their voices heard, BioWare doesn't see the demand, and it doesn't go in the game’. Sherle_Illios (2009, n.p.) took a similar tack, writing, ‘One cannot open up a world for players to play/live/communicate/tell their stories in and expect these [words such as “gay” and “lesbian”] to not exist in it’. These gamers argue that it is the forcible closeting of queer players, not the visibility of queer users, that politicizes the game space. However, many other posters jumped in and defended BioWare’s decision, arguing that discussions of gay and lesbian issues are irrelevant to the stated purpose of the forums, which is to discuss the forthcoming game, because they are inherently political in nature. Ultimately, BioWare decided to reinstate the ability of posters to use these words in the wake of the attention the controversy garnered in the gaming press.

This incident is an ideal case study of the political and social dynamics in a convergence culture because the thread in question was widely viewed both within the SW:TOR forum and beyond in the larger gaming community. It even got some attention from outside gaming culture when Tony Perkins’s conservative group Focus on the Family covered the ‘biggest threat to the empire’ posed by ‘homosexual activists’ (apparently Perkins did not realize that, in the Star Wars universe, the empire is evil) (Good, 2012). Despite its location in an out of the way, unpopular corner of the forums (the unexciting and utilitarian Website Feedback and Support board on the General Discussion forum), this thread accumulated over 1200 posts and tens of thousands of views, exposure comparable to that of ‘sticky’ threads (threads with important information that are always located at the top of the forum and are never bumped down off of the front page by new threads) or the extremely popular official threads offering previews of upcoming in-game content. This fact attests to the importance accorded to this debate by community members, regardless of which side they found themselves on.

Furthermore, work on this particular site is especially useful to gaming scholars in that it serves as a historical document of a corner of Internet culture that is no longer accessible. On 10 December 2011, BioWare deleted all archived threads from the SW:TOR forums to prepare for the game’s release (Ashral, 2011). This means the threads containing the dialogue this article grapples with have largely been lost (although news sites with accounts summarizing parts of the thread remain). As such, this article serves as a valuable record of what actual gamers thought media producers should (or shouldn’t) do to cultivate diversity in gaming culture.

Will the ‘real’ gamers please stand up? Straight privilege and convergence culture

The faction of gamers I focus on in this study defended BioWare’s decision to censor the terms gay and lesbian by arguing that there should be a stark divide between the game space and the outside world and that such terms undermine that division. In a recent article in Game Studies, Lehdonvirta (2010, n.p.) critiques this position, which was also once popular among academics writing about virtual worlds. Lehdonvirta argues that this position mistakenly imagines virtual worlds as ‘located outside “the real world,” in many ways mirroring it like a synthetic double, but carrying on independently of it like a distant planet’. To Lehdonvirta, the real and the virtual are inseparable, as gamers cannot help but to bring their real-world selves into the game and vice versa. However, the gamers described here are dedicated to the idea of a virtual world as a space apart, a ‘magic circle’ much like the one described by Huizinga (1955) that is set aside for experiences of play free from real-world consequences. In fact, they see attempts to pierce the barrier between the game world and the real world as a threat to their play. According to their view, the introduction of real-world political concerns into the digital world disrupts the barrier that they’ve tried to erect between their time in SW:TOR and the rest of their day-to-day existence. They used the thread to make the argument that BioWare should help them maintain that barrier, insisting that there is no place for progressive political activism, or, indeed, any overtly political speech in a space that has been set aside for play.

These gamers learned to view virtual worlds (and, by extension, the Internet as a whole) in this way by absorbing the many narratives perpetuated by early proponents of the new media, including both visionary science fiction writers and hopeful academics who saw the opening of the virtual frontier as a chance for humanity to build more equitable societies where power would be shared and oppression would disappear (Turner, 2008). According to these narratives, a new utopia could be reached online, but only because the virtual worlds were sealed away from the always-already corrupted physical world.

This utopian image imprinted on in the imaginations of many gamers, creating what Pierre Bourdieu calls a ‘habitus’ or a set of ‘deeply internalized master dispositions that generate action’ (Swartz, 1997: 101). A habitus comes

from early socialization experiences in which external structures are internalized.… As a result, internalized dispositions of broad parameters and boundaries of what is possible or unlikely for a particular group … develop through socialization.… What agents judge as ‘reasonable’ or ‘unreasonable’ for people of their station in the social world stems from habitus. (Swartz, 1997: 103)

Typically, habitus is conceived of as an embodied practice, one that manifests in everything from posture to body language and gestures (Swartz, 1997: 107). However, because the gamers studied here are interacting online using only the medium of text, we can think about their habitus as being a practice of presentation of information about the body; the kinds of information are revealed and concealed by users who have been ‘properly’ socialized according to the norms of gamer culture. The habitus instilled through the rhetoric of techno-utopianism normalizes and labels as ‘reasonable’ the negation of the physical body.

Gamers have been taught to desire (and to expect) a bodiless, apolitical experience within virtual worlds. In fact, many see that experience as the purpose for the existence of virtual worlds in the first place, the source of their entertainment value and of their potential as a refuge from the real world. As such, they discipline themselves and their fellow gamers through the creation of social norms built around this utopian ideology. They do not simply abstain from mixing the real with the virtual. They also scold others for doing so out in the open, turning such world mixing into a social faux pas, an indicator that one is not truly a citizen of utopian Internet space. In the case of SW:TOR, that scolding was reserved for those who protested against BioWare’s decision to ban the words gay and lesbian on their forums. The implication is that the forum members who raised such concerns must not be real game fans (in that their primary loyalties must not lie with the preservation of the gaming community but rather with some other, unrelated group: in this case, the GLBTQ community) and so their concerns can and should be ignored by game producers like BioWare when they craft rules for the forum.

Often this implication takes the form of an accusation of ‘hijacking’, the posting of something that is off-topic. This was so despite the fact that the subject under consideration in the thread was, in fact, the rules governing the forum and not some broader political subject matter and the fact that the thread was correctly housed in the web site Feedback and Support board and not on one of the boards about gameplay topics. And yet, according to BioWare’s Rules of Conduct (2011, n.p.), ‘discussions of political, sexual, or religious topics are prohibited on the forums’ and ‘posts deemed to be inappropriate to a particular forum will be moved to a more appropriate forum or removed completely’ (n.p.). In other words, these arguments carry the threat of moderator intervention or even banning with them. They suggest an alignment of purpose between BioWare and the accuser who poses as someone merely attempting to helpfully (re)enforce the forum’s code of conduct. This attempt to draft the authorities that run the forum into seeing things their way (or to stand in for them) creates a social environment in which queer identified users and their allies are interpellated as ‘guilty’ subjects. After all, if the rules against queer discourse were made permanent, they would function like Althusser’s (1972) famous policeman by defining and labeling any who stray away from topics that are approved of as appropriately apolitical as rule breakers, disloyal gamers, and disruptive community members. Moreover, their arguments that gaming while (out and) queer is harmful to the community represent an attempt to recruit queer gamers into seeing themselves as guilty so that they will self-censor. The ultimate aim is to divest gamers who insist on bringing queerness into the game world of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984) by questioning their gamer bona fides, thereby ensuring that queer issues receive little attention from game producers and tastemakers and the status quo of gamer culture is maintained.

For example, many gamers took a similar position to the one espoused by punkniner (2009a, n.p.) who wrote, ‘This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I have ever seen argued about on a video gaming forum. Congratulations. If you want to protest, go to your town hall. The simple fact is, this is a forum about a video game, and there is no purpose whatsoever to bring up this kind of nonsense’.¹ In a later post, he or she takes this point even further and declares that all political discussions are out of place on the SW:TOR forums:

This is a forum about a Star Wars video game. Will we now be arguing and complaining over abortion rights, or even the presidential election? I'm sure we can somehow tie those into a star wars theme somewhere (Palpatine was elected by a majority vote just like Bush!), and they are just as pointless and off base from the subject matter as the argument set forth in this thread. (punkniner, 2009b, n.p.)

To gamers like punkniner, any attempt to lobby for a more inclusive stance toward queerness is understood to be an attempt to rudely divert discussion away from the game itself and toward what is perceived as a personal, political agenda: Something a real gamer would never do.

Leaving the body behind: Identity politics and techno-utopian theory

Importantly, the political discussion in question is not centered on just any controversial issue but rather is focused on issues of embodiment, identity, and privilege. I believe that this thread about the potential suppression of queerness in SW:TOR drew a great deal of attention from players because, in addition to evoking the need in some gamers to defend what they see as the bright line that divides the virtual from the real, it also taps into how elite participants in convergence culture view their relationship to media producers: They assume that this influence is a finite resource, and they dislike the idea that their influence over gaming culture could be diluted as gaming expands in popularity.

Participants in the thread sought to protect what they saw as their own privileged position by tapping into another prominent thread of techno-utopian thinking: That, on the Internet, the bodies and identities that we were born with are irrelevant (Stone, 1991: 113). In fact, their belief that the virtual world is a world freed from the constraints of the physical body is, in no small part, the way in which technophiles provide evidence for their claim that the virtual and the real are (or can be) separated in the first place. This claim is usually couched in hopeful terms, evoked to explain how the new social order created online will be free of the scourges of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism.

In the mid- to late 1990s, techno-utopian rhetoric sang the praises of the disembodied Web. For example, the ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ contains a passage outlining the positive political consequences that are assumed to follow from the creation of a society without bodies:

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.…

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. (Barlow, 1996, n.p.)

Techno-utopian theorist and academic Howard Rheingold also praised the Web as a level playing field, writing that, on the Internet, ‘race, gender, age, national origin, and physical appearance are not apparent unless a person wants to make such characteristics public’ (Rheingold, 1993: 26). Discrimination, Rheingold asserts, will be impossible when users are unable to see the actual bodies of those with whom they are interacting.

This, essentially, is the claim being made by many gamers on the SW:TOR thread: That BioWare was simply protecting the sanctity of the disembodied and anonymous virtual culture when they set up rules that would eliminate references to queer sexualities. For example, I would argue that this claim is threaded through the argument of a poster named LordByrondathird (2009):

now i don't mean this to be offensive, and i see your point. it's totally legit. but like one person already said, this is about star wars, and its fans. Its not about who's what orientation, or religion, or race or gender. if so, you might be hearing a lot more pro islam, or pro christian, or pro life, or pro feminism and so on. again, i see your point, but this is about star wars. Im sure there's a lot of people like you on here, just like there's plenty of religious people, or femenists, but we're all here because of our love of star wars and The Old Republic. (n.p.)

At the core of LordByrondathird’s post is the idea that discussions of politics and sexuality are unwelcome in the discourse space that he or she believes is reserved for ‘our love of Star Wars’ in that they corrupt the purity of a space he or she believes should exist separately from such issues.² Furthermore, according to LordByrondathird, one of the primary ways in which unsavory politics are introduced into the game world is when one is able to identify ‘who’s what orientation … or race or gender’ (n.p.). When physical embodiment returns, this argument goes, it brings politics with it.

Indeed, the idea that any discussion related to embodied sexuality (straight or queer) is unwelcome on the forums and in the game comes up numerous times in the thread. For example, a comment from indelible (2009), quoted here at length, complains that ‘personal’ and divisive issues like sexuality cause unnecessary divisions within the Star Wars fan community. He or she then accuses those who would bring sexual politics into the game space of the virtual equivalent of disturbing the peace

I'm inclined to say that – on an online gaming forum – your sexuality is of no concern to anyone else. I'm not going to ask you and frankly, I really couldn't care less. I'm here for the game. I'm not here to have people tell me whether they are lesbian, gay or straight or to start any debates about equality.…

You have brought that conflict and imposed it on a group of people who – for all intents and purposes – transcended the whole issue in the first place.… There is no war on these forums that you haven't brought on yourself with this thread. If people start attacking gays and lesbians, it is simply because you have drawn attention to the issue which – in all reality – didn't need attention drawn to it within this community.…

I'm sorry – I understand you struggle for equality and empathy in the real world, where that sort of issue is important – but here, on a gaming forum. it just isn't the right time or place for a political debate and it certainly isn't the place to encourage some kind of social change, mainly because many of us could give a flying hoot who or what you sleep with. (n.p.)

Of particular interest is indelible’s claim that sexuality has been ‘transcended’ in the bodiless virtual world, as it seems that this enlightened state is actually quite precarious if it can only be sustained when gamers employ a don’t ask, don’t tell policy regarding their sexual orientations. Indelible is claiming that gamers who reintroduce the body into virtual spaces by making their sexuality visible are to blame for any abuse that they receive, as that abuse would never have happened if the wider community was allowed to remain blissfully unaware of the presence of queers in their midst.

Furthermore, requests like those made by indelible to censor any references to sexual orientation (including heterosexual orientations) would not actually open up space for users to be quietly queer online. Rather, as theorists of the body like Bordo have pointed out, the disappearance of queerness would simply reinforce the assumption of universal straightness among gamers and forum dwellers. Bordo describes the way in which a splitting off of the mind from the body such as the one that techno-utopians assume takes place when we go online has historically been used as a philosophical rationalization for the maintenance of a hierarchical social organization that privileges white straight able-bodied males (1995: 2–5). According to this logic, the body itself comes to be seen as a site that is feminized, racialized, sexualized, and/or disabled (1995: 9), while the ‘“generic” core’ of identity that is supposed to pass as genderless, raceless, sexless, and bodiless (the soul, the mind, and the human essence), comes to be read as ‘white or male … passing as the norm for all’ (1995: 34). Or, to put it another way, women, queers, racial minorities, and disabled persons have bodies that call attention to themselves through their marked differentness from the supposedly ‘normal’ bodies of straight white able-bodied males. Meanwhile, citizens with ‘generic’, bodies, white, straight able-bodied males, whose place at the top of the social hierarchy means that their bodies are the bodies to which all others are compared and judged to be deficient (or at the very least noteworthy), are thought to come as close as possibly to the ideal of disembodiedness (Dyer, 1997: 1–2).

Michael Warner describes the inscription of this process with regard to sexuality as heteronormativity: The assumption that straightness is universal and all encompassing and that queerness is an aberration or an outlying position created by privileging straightness (1993: xxi). According to this (often invisible) cultural framework, straight culture is seen as ‘normal’, natural, or nonideological while queer culture is seen as aberrant, artificial, and hyper-politicized. In the virtual world, heteronormativity takes the form of what Sundén calls ‘heterotextuality’, the assumption that all users are straight in the absence of any overt mention of sexual preference (2003: 130–131). This assumption is only discarded when a user directly outs themselves as queer, a practice which, as noted above, allows the body to return and thereby may draw the ire of techno-utopian users looking to escape bodies and their politics. In other words, heterotextuality is one example of the many ways that users discipline identity formation in online spaces to secure the fantasy of a virtual realm free from difference and therefore free from political conflict. Queerness is erased in favor of a universal silent sameness (which is ultimately read as the default: straightness), and users who insist on reintroducing the existence of queerness into the game space are derided as agitators, bringing unnecessary turmoil into what was (for users who conform to the norm) a pleasantly placid environment. The dislocation felt by queer users in the face of great pressures to remain closeted online are not taken into consideration. Instead, queer users are asked to put off ‘their’ concerns for the sake of the comfort of larger group. Their insistence that their communities be accepting of queer sexualities in practice, not merely tolerated so long as they are kept safely out of sight, is perceived as a kind of buzz kill, a disruption of the benevolent fantasy that the denizens of online communities have transcended bodily matters.

Thus, it becomes apparent that the rallying cry of ‘no politics in gaming’ actually has huge political consequences within the gamer community. As Althusser (1972) points out, ‘ideology’ or ‘politics’ is always the label given to what someone else cares about. People think of their own concerns as rational and logical and assume that it is only others who are motivated by politics or tricked by ideology. This is what makes ideology so durable: It is difficult to see when it is operating on you. In the case of this debate in the gaming community, heteronormative ideology disguises itself as the rational default position of loyal gamers while those who lobby for the inclusion of queerness are rhetorically labeled as ideologically driven political operatives. This labeling functions to disguise the heterosexist ideological constraints that portray straightness as the normal, natural, default human state in the first place.

BioWare strikes back: Corporate responses encouraging diversity in the name of profit

These same discourses arose again in BioWare’s online forums in the years that followed and in the wake of the implementation of gay relationships for male player characters in the Dragon Age (Kuchera, 2011) franchise. This time, some gamers were explicit and direct about expressing their ire with BioWare for being willing to, as they saw it, dilute the influence of their ‘core demographic’ (Bastal, 2011) of straight male gamers by producing more inclusive games. In March 2011, a poster named Bastal responded to the developer’s choice to include these queer narratives on the ‘Official Campaign Quests and Story’ board of the BioWare Social Network forums by creating multiple threads with slight variations on the name: ‘BioWare Neglected Their Main Demographic: The Straight Male Gamer’. Bastal chided the Dragon Age II developers for including queer content in the game using many of the same arguments based in techno-utopianism and antiembodiement discussed above.

For example, Bastal begins his³ argument with the assumption that straightness and maleness is universal and normal (or to put it another way, that the default identity of a gamer is a straight male) when he opens his post by writing, ‘I don't think many would argue with the fact that the overwhelming majority of RPG gamers are indeed straight and male’ (n.p.), and he continues, ‘its ridiculous that I even have to use a term like Straight Male Gamer, when in the past I would only have to say fans’ (n.p.). In fact, he soon reveals that he does not merely feel as though the desires of his particular demographic of the straight male gamer have been neglected. Rather, he argues that the mere inclusion of the option to partake in queer content is an affront to him as a straight male gamer. To this end, he calls for a ‘“No Homosexuality” option’ to be implemented in the game so that he can be certain that his personal version of the fantasy setting of Thedas is free from the incursion of queerness.

This time, BioWare's response to a controversy brewing on their forums was swift and decisive. Dragon Age II senior writer Gaider (2011) wrote a lengthy post in response to Bastal, rejecting the argument that he should have the option to eradicate gays and lesbians from his personal copy of the game world. First, Gaider rejects the assumption that all or even most gamers are straight.

The romances in the game are not for ‘the straight male gamer’. They're for everyone. We have a lot of fans, many of whom are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention. We have good numbers, after all, on the number of people who actually used similar sorts of content … and thus don't need to resort to anecdotal evidence to support our idea that their numbers are not insignificant. (n.p.)

Even more to the point, Gaider notes that, rather than eliminating political concerns by erasing queerness, such requests actually inject a politics of privilege and hierarchy into the game.

And if there is any doubt why such an opinion might be met with hostility, it has to do with privilege. You can write it off as ‘political correctness’ if you wish, but the truth is that privilege always lies with the majority. They're so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. They don't see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what's everyone's fuss all about? That's the way it should be, any everyone else should be used to not getting what they want. (n.p.)

This thread demonstrates movement on the issue of inclusion in the gaming community, in part fueled by the feedback BioWare received from queer gamers and their allies during the debate over SW:TOR. Furthermore, Gaider’s post suggests a responsiveness to user input that is an important feature of convergence culture. However, it is important to note that this responsiveness is directed toward the desires of one group of users and against the desires of another. This complication runs counter to typical accounts of convergence culture in which fandom is portrayed as a single united entity working with (or against) media corporations to further their own interests as consumers. In this case, inclusive, democratic outcomes to the question of whether or not to implement queer content were made possible because BioWare’s profit motive coincided with the expressed desires of some users, though the company risked the ire of other users when they made their decision. This outcome was not some foregone conclusion that was predetermined by the technological affordances of new media and convergence culture. Rather, it came about as the result of a calculation made on the part of the developer. BioWare believed that inclusiveness was a money-making proposition. And indeed, they ultimately made the same calculation about TOR when they made the decision in 2013 to include same-gender romances in their virtual Star Wars universe…but only if players paid an additional $20 to access the additional content.

As these events demonstrate, convergence culture enables for far more complex relationships between users and producers than was previously thought. Various factions of elite users who recognize and seize the power to talk back to media corporations through the channels opened up by convergence culture are not only lobbying to see their own interests reflected in the media they consume, thereby creating a more democratic and inclusive media environment. Some are also using those same channels to try and protect what they see as their privileged position within the convergence culture, to the extent that they fear that the efforts of media producers to broaden their fan base will dilute their power. And if we fail to include schisms like these in our account of how convergence culture is developing, then that account will be woefully inadequate to accurately model power sharing in the world of new media.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr. Lisa Nakamura and Dr. Stephanie Foote for their guidance as this essay was being shaped for publication. She is also grateful for the support and help received from her fan studies reading group, including Stephanie Brown, Ezra Claverie, Alicia Kozma, Jungmin Kwon, Aimee Rickman, Andrea Ruehlicke, Brittany Smith, and Mel Stanfill.

Notes

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