Hey interested folks!
If you have any questions about the jam, or are feeling a little uncertain about it, feel free to voice that here! No such thing as a silly question, and maybe others are thinking the same. We're happy to chat!
by asking people to limit "cis monosexual" representation, you're drawing an explicit line between cis people's orientations and trans people's orientations, acting like we can find no value in each other's depictions, that we must rep identical to our own situations or it doesn't count. it feels incredibly degendering, as a transmasc person, to be told that my contribution is seen as more valuable than the contribution of a cis gay man with identical presentation and embodiment. you're basically telling a huge subset of your target audience that we're Not Queer Enough, that we're Played Out, and the fact you limit it to "cis monosexuals" doesn't make trans people feel any less alienated by this! such wording implies you don't view trans people's genders as equivalent to cis people's genders.
also like, gay men are the second-likeliest group to suffer violence and be straight-up murdered in a hate crime, after trans women. we're not half as ~privileged~ and ~well-represented~ as everyone seems to think.
Hi! Thanks for voicing your concerns with us.
We've removed some of the "limiting" language on the jam front page at the request of a dev on Twitter, so hopefully that reads a little better for you now as well. Let us know if there are other changes there that would make you feel more comfortable with the overall explanation of our focus with this jam.
Our goal here is simply to encourage some different representations. We all know that we can empathise with anyone—queer people have been empathising with hetero or cis characters in games forever—but it would be lovely for some underrepresented identities to see the spotlight. We definitely don't think gay folks are overrepresented when it comes to games in general, but they are in the existing queer games that are out there. If you're into stats, here are some. 300+ games with gay NPCs is no where near enough when it comes to all games that exist ever, but, for example, 1 intersex NPC is ridiculously low. We are just looking to boost those numbers too!
If you have any additional points you'd like to talk about, or info you'd like from us about why we're running this jam, just let us know.
>We've removed someone the limited language
Yet here I am 32 days later making the exact same complaint.
Also I'd like some real stats, not some plain numbers, because I doubt that is true, I bet most of those counted as "gay" there are just player options and lacking any crafted storytelling. Again just so quick so assume and minimalize experience outside your own. I wonder how many of those games too are written by straight people who just use the laziest of tropes for praise too, or outright use us as punching bags (See Antony Birches job of creative lead in Borderlands 2, literally every gay character in the game is tortured, experimented on and killed (lets not even go down how scarily close that is to what has been a reality for mostly gay men in the past)) or worse known homophobes just profiting off tropes of us that streamers are using to have a big laugh about (Game Grumps/Dream Daddy). Like all could be do better here, theres plenty of issues to go round.
It wouldn't have been hard to encourage all intersections to be part of it without making it sound like one is lesser and not adequate, but yet you failed even when a dev on twitter and people here have raised that concern with you.
Find it strange too how when talking about "overrepresented groups" yet mention not the highest number there, Lesbians are the highest number, thats a very strange choice, guess gay males are lower in your opinion then gay women so even lower numbers is still too much of us.....
Edit: Looked into the database...so much false information there.
Dragon Age? Player choice, not a gay protagonist, you might as well list head canons.
Devil May Cry...he's implied Bi, not gay.
GTA Series? First off..a DLC of single game (a game which had a dating website mini game by funnily enough you pick any of the gay men they aren't available). And the actual protagonist you play isn't Gay Tony, it's a complete heterosexual guy named luis. Aside from that? Oh the camp male hairdresser is really a champion for representation, and the real protagonist.
Technomancer...again headcanons do not account for true representation, though you can count Lucky, since you can't play as female so rules out "playersexuality", but he's not the protagonist.
Persona....you even state in the text it turns out he was straight all along.
And WOW...WoW? Really? The game that intermittently bans gay guilds under their "exclusionary guild" rules? That has no "protagonist" to begin with, oh a minigame where hearts appears over heads of unnamed npcs...thank you brave progressive blizzard for offering us peasants your scraps off your might straight table.
Funny how all these bars have been set low so you can justify you gatekeeping and dismissive language. I see you. Far to frequent deliberate fully of dishonest, disingenuous to be considered accidentally, even when pointed out you seem to just double down on doing it. And why is it, when someone labels themselves an intersection of two particular things, they always seem to do so to shout loudly over those othered experiences and be so hateful to a large part of that experience...its almost like clockwork at this point, see it far too often.
You've taken something I should have felt joy for, should have been for representation, for equation for intersectionality, for inclusion and made it hateful, ugly, dismissive and just all round vile.
Hi there! There are no restrictions regarding when you have to make the game. Despite the jam running for a two week period (so that most people are around and chatting at the same time), you're more than welcome to get a head start since there is no real judging / winners / etc. Just do whatever feels right for you!
I'm currently working on adding some additional moderation tools and moderators to the Queerly Represent Me discord server so we can open it up for this purpose. We've had some difficulties with... less than pleasant communities online before, so we don't want to make it accessible until we can be sure that issues will be kept to a minimum. In the meantime, feel free to use the community discussion board to your heart's content!
How does this jam look on lewd things in submissions? I'm guessing it's not prohibited, but maybe not exactly what you were hoping for. I would probably have something at least lewd-ish if I end up making something simply because I am rather sexual personally and my idea would be quite personal itself.
Also hope I'm in the right place here. A bunch of my stuff is rather recent and I'm not very confident about it.
There aren't exactly "rules" for our jam (it's all pretty relaxed). We're hoping most submissions would have been worked on at least a little during the jam period, but we'd rather more submissions than not. So, if there's some more work you can do on it during our jam window, that'd be rad; if it's done and you just want to submit it as is, that's better than not sharing it with our community at all, so sure.
Question? No
Concern? Yes
>Prove to game designers everywhere that there's more to the queer community than cis gay and lesbian characters
Like they get so well represented in games (real talk, explicit gay characters barely exist in games, its either implied or you actually just get "playersexual" as supposed "representation", it was fine for a time but now it's just complacent and used for praise in lue of actual work for representation and being a real ally, like calling some umbrella term and not an actual lived experience "representation" and "equality"), being so divisive against a large part of the community...just so much about that line is so very wrong.
Just ew. Maybe consider what you say more before you say it and tell people what to consider, when you've considered others outside yourself so very little. Just gatekeeping "queer"-representation, and our stories being told.
