Reading 12

 So I have completed my last round of reading tasks.

I thought it was interesting writing a chapter, but it didn't come without its challenges.

First I thought about writing a chapter about why people play games, but I couldn't get stuck into it. So I decided to switch my chapter to be about how representation is changing in video games, a topic I'm much more interested in.

Having more representation in video games is important to me as I'm not the 'typical' cisgender American, straight white male gamer. I am cisgender and I am a white male, but I'm not American and I identify as asexual.

It is important to me that more characters of different nationalities get represented, and it's not something people commonly talk about. The fact that in almost every piece of media, books, video games, movies, or TV shows, the most popular ones ALWAYS have a majority cast of American characters, whether they are fully American or partly American. As someone who is not American, it makes me feel insecure about my own nationality, debating where to hide it or not. I do hope my section on American characters in my chapter will make some people think about it.

The other thing that is important to me is representation of different sexualities, there are other chapters in the book that discuss this topic and it's one I briefed on in my chapter. Too many games don't have characters who are written to be not straight from the start. As someone who identifies as asexual, a phase I kind of made up is 'I'm so sick of straights, I want something new'. I do hope more games feature hard written non-straight characters rather than having it up to the player if a character is straight or not.

Gender is another topic I touched on. I talked about how women are portrayed. Since a lot of video games portray women to appease a straight male audience, as someone who is not that, I find myself getting irritated at seeing women sexualised. Of course there is a notion people follow called 'sex sells' but if that's the only thing being promoted in a game, that's just sad, and don't do it to just the women, do it to the men too, so it isn't so much of an issue. Also I wonder how transgender people would feel about having gender options as 'male' female' trans male' and 'trans female', would they like it. I am not trans myself, so I can say.

Race was another topic I touched on. It actually shocked me that race isn't as represented in video games than I thought. I talked about how most non white people are exaggerated stereotypes. A huge problem source of this type of representation comes from the Grand Theft Auto. I hate the Grand Theft Auto series as it is, so this is just another reason to hate it, all African Americans in the series are criminals. This can make white players believe that all African Americans are criminals, which creates a whole other problem. On the flip side, younger African Americans might believe that a criminal life is all their future will be.

Overall I did enjoy writing and researching for my chapter. It made me think and look at things I never noticed before. I do believe that the gaming industry has come a long way in representation of minorities, but it still has a long way to do. I will see you next time

Bye