Discussing Queer Representation at PAX Aus 2017

I tried. I talked about the panels on Queerly Represent Me's diversity wrap-up and in an article for Hyper Online. But I wrote these as a researcher, and as a journalist. Don't get me wrong—these roles are an important part of who I am and what I do—but they are still me-as-a-professional, not me-as-a-person.

Sometimes it's easy to forget that the reason I do so much work in queer representation and supporting queer folks in games is because I am queer. In 2015, I was just starting to learn about queerness and games, and the spaces where they intersect. I was attending panels as somebody who was interested in a topic, not as somebody working in the field. I was doing some work as a freelance journalist, and was on a couple of panels about other topics, but I wasn't working in queer game studies yet. I hadn't founded Queerly Represent Me, I hadn't attended GX Australia, I didn't personally know many of the people who frequently sit on the panels at PAX, and I was completely unaware that I would be organising the queerness in games panel in 2016 at the same event. And, I guess, because I was yet to have this knowledge, I didn't quite know what was wrong in 2015; I just knew that I walked out of a theatre feeling worse than I did when I walked in.

Still, I managed to articulate quite a few issues at the time. There was the major gripe—that there was simply too much trying to be covered in too short a time—and this is a lesson I took on board for my own panels in future. But there was more to it as well. It was the assumption that everybody in the room already knew about the characters or games being discussed, it was the empty claims about how queerness is 'generally' represented without examples or evidence, and it was the misinformed or under-researched statements made about various characters and games.

At the end of the blog post that I wrote two years ago, I included a call-to-action, and it still speaks to me. I said:

'...we need to talk about more examples of existing representation, we need to talk about what good representation looks like and scaffold this for game developers, we need to ensure we are giving the topic of queer representation the time it deserves to be explored in a deep and meaningful way, and we need to remember not to let our hope for the future erase the ongoing issues and challenges of representation that are being faced by the queer community right now.'

And I agree. This is what I was saying two years ago—as an audience member and lover of games, and before I was a diversity researcher and advocate—and it's essentially what I continued to say in my recent article on Hyper Online. It's how I felt in 2015, and it's how I felt after PAX in 2017. Why, after two years, does it feel like we aren't making progress?

Now, I'm more than just an audience member. Instead of just articulating my feelings based on instinct, I have research that can back up my frustrations, and sources to combat misinformed statements.

But I also have a professional persona to uphold, and something to lose. Complaining on the internet has ramifications, because even though I am writing on my own website, my name is not separate from the publications I work for or the initiatives I run.

So rather than having a whinge at specific people or panels, I'm going to simply give this advice:

Make your panels more specific. This benefits the audience because they know exactly what they are coming to hear about, and it benefits the overall conversation because it means we don't continue to focus on the same points every year without moving forwards. It also benefits you because it means you know exactly what will be covered. You can focus your research on a particular area, rather than trying to be across everything. You can make sure that what you do talk about is correct.

If you don't know the answer to something that's brought up during a panel, don't make a definitive statement as if you do. Sometimes it's easy to just nod or agree when somebody else on your panel—or an audience member—makes an assumption, but rather than going with the flow or trying to look knowledgable, try to be honest. Know that the audience at your panel is there, listening to you, hoping to learn something, so if you make statements that are contradictory or entirely false, they might leave thinking that what you said is fact. That is a lot of responsibility; do the necessary work before you speak to ensure you live up to it.

And if you aren't willing to do that research? Then you should not be speaking in front of hundreds of people at PAX.

We have had these same conversations year after year. Sure, maybe some people still don't know that Birdo from the Mario franchise is implied to be a trans character, for example—but Super Mario Bros. 2 came out in 1988 and, honestly, there are more interesting and relevant topics of conversation to cover.

So, going forward, let's think about action. Let's stop recounting, retracing our steps, and being vaguely optimistic, and instead let's focus on outlining the clear steps people can take. Let's make it transparent: what are developers doing well, what are they doing poorly, and what should they continue to do moving forward. And, for a convention like PAX that has an audience of consumers rather than developers, let's also focus on what players can do. Don't just make your audience feel like they are leaving informed; make them feeling like they are empowered, and have an action plan.

Let's stop just talking about diversity. Let's change the world.

2017/11/07