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Girls are "LGBT", Boys are ‘just’ "Gay" - the appropriation of the tag "LGBT" by lesbian protagonism

A topic by Male Doll created May 26, 2020 Views: 392 Replies: 2

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Hello, everyone.

Last Friday I found an amazing post published by Minoh Workshop, and since I’m doing my master degree investigating Itch.io and its algorithms, I’ve written a post trying to answer: why "Gay" is the best tag for gay men games instead of LGBT even though gay men are part of the LGBT+ community?

Me speaking at SBGames 2019, the biggest research game event in Latin America.

An objective and short answer to these questions looking only at Itch.io is: the lesbian protagonism has appropriated of the "LGBT" tag. You can check the whole post here.

I’ll be glad if you can give me feedback about it. Although it's a small part of my thesis, I made a monitoring process of 4 tags on Itch.io (LGBT, Gay, Yaoi, and Queer) from September 2019 until February 2020. I hope we can use this information to get more visibility.

I’ll share other pieces of information from my thesis as well as updating my biggest project for this year, so I’ll be happy if you all can give me feedback about them.

I wish you all amazing projects and take care of yourselves and your families during this pandemic!

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No Time To PlayModerator moved this topic to General Discussion 4 years ago

Afloof.devModerator4 years ago

This is just a guess, but could it be that the percentage of (male) gay gamers is bigger than the rest of the lgbtq+ community, thus making it more useful to have its own tag, to make it easier to find the games they are looking for?

Alternatively, maybe the percentage of developers making gay-themed games is higher than the percentage of devs making any other lgbtq+ themed game?

These are both guesses, but usually tags are made based on popularity.

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Male Doll4 years ago (3 edits)

Maybe... but in my monitoring process, I noticed there is a thematic division between the tag LGBT and the Gay one. The games with gay men as a protagonist that appear and didn't stay more than fours week in the LGBT tag are close to ‘sensitive aspects' (like you can see in the Yaoi tag). However, in the Gay tag, I found a lot of adult content and super strong characters - close to the Furry tag. So, I'm not sure about the numbers of gamers, but I think that it can be a community interest too.

Regarding the second question, you have a good point. According to IGDA (2018), the game industry is mainly composed by men but we don't have any data about what is the percentage of female producers in Itch.io especially. It's a really good theme for new research

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