• The game literally wouldn’t exist anymore without the player base and strong community bringing it back from the brink of death. 
  
• And the entire development team and company is under threat from losing their BIGGEST moneymaker if they do anything in bad faith regarding the player base – and will go under. This is why the new CEO (Jon Bellamy) is directing the company to branch out in other directions and create other types of games using the RuneScape IP—the shareholders don’t want to be beholden to the playerbase of OldSchool Runescape (this is my theory).

The classic protest protocol is to throw down cannons in Falador Square. It’s a riot symbol mostly BUT there are guards who wander around Falador Square and as many people kept actively feeding cannonballs and firing, it was an ACAB statement as well. We got a lot of bigots banned for hate speech, but their voices were tiny and pathetic compared to our cacophony. Runescape subreddits are full of posts dunking on the CEO right now.

(SapphicRowan provided screenshots of these in-game protests.)

In one of them, flowers swarm the whole ground: That’s actually because someone was growing them in swastika patterns but an impromptu anti-flower countermeasure coalition was spontaneously formed to flood the whole area with a field of flower seeds, erasing the hate symbols almost as soon as they appeared.

Franny: Based on what I’ve read, the mods and other staff are kind of in resistance with the players against the CEO and Jagex, too. 

Rowan: From what I have put together from various sources, the Mods hosted – on their own time – the Pride March stream and giveaway. This is where the mods lead us in a march around part of the world. The video of the stream wasn’t up on the YouTube channel for rewatch for the first day or so afterwards but they did put it up on the official YouTube channel, possibly after complaints.

That’s where I first heard about this, directly from the Play and Jagex moderators at the in-game Pride march. We’re very lucky that a pretty big queer content creator (RenderScape) was covering this and spreading the word. 

The Pride Event is an in-game temporary quest with a short storyline and NPCs and some pride gear as a reward. They’ve been well-done and very sweet and have referenced historical queer icons. […]

To be clear, one of the oldest defining traditions of RuneScape is for Mods to create & host fun little events for the players on holidays—Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Game Anniversary, and most recently Pride—to show their appreciation for us and celebrate with us.

Franny: There seems to be a larger and longer-historied queer community in RuneScape, especially Old School RuneScape than I had any idea about. What can you tell me about that, and your place in it? 

Rowan: I made the clan with my best friend in OSRS—Local Honey—almost 4 years ago now.

Back then, I didn’t know any other queer people in OSRS. I met Local Honey as one of the only queers biting back in a very homophobic and transphobic minigame chat that we happened to find ourselves together in, on a dedicated mass-player world for that minigame. We decided to hop to another world and have our own game just to ourselves so we could chat without a flood of grossness.

It was an extremely cozy and bonding experience as the minigame, called Wintertodt, is about fighting off a giant freezing ice tornado entity by helping Pyromancers keep magical fires alight. We spent a long time there and became best friends, eventually seeking to gather together what friends we had made and try to make a safe queer space for people to hang out and game with each other, away from the places which inevitably turn toxic due to the mass of players. Turn off Pub Chat, tune into Clan Chat.

RuneScape was a safe haven in our childhoods from real life bullies and insults, and the Gender-changing Makeover Mage Pete/Peta has been in the game since its ancient history, helping to guide players on a test journey in a virtual world with a different gender presentation then they’re used to, if they so wish. Always reversible, always re-reversible.

Here’s the totally-not-queer Barber, from whom I got my first haircut which was allowed to be long – because it was just in a game. (Riot ongoing in background—Yes, the famous riot spot in Falador Square is directly across from a queer barber—I’m sure he very much supports it, as well as the people removing Nazi symbols from the front of his shop).

Franny: Despite the fact that Jagex and RuneScape seem to have always been inclusive and later explicitly supportive of its queer community, why do you think they’re backing away from it now, even when members of their own team disagrees with the idea?

Rowan: It’s very simple—CEO Jon Bellamy is a spineless coward who has caved in to his fears of what pathetic bigots on the internet might say, instead of embracing the community who dearly cares about the game he is in charge of guiding.

Back in 2017, Jagex had a notable bout with the anti-queer gamer crowd when they introduced a quest called Gilbert’s Colours, which involved finding the six strands of a rainbow and returning them to an NPC who would then give the player a rainbow scarf. It became a sort of manufactured controversy, wherein this single rainbow scarf was deemed too political, irrelevant, and inappropriate for a kid’s game by a portion of the player base. It sparked an unbelievable backlash of in-game riots where many of the participants weren’t even active players, but rather people who had hopped on from outside bigoted groups, and a disturbing amount of death threats and harassment directed at Mod Wolf, who created the event. RuneScape no further Pride events until 2022 because of it, but even the mod’s creator went on to say his only regret was “caving into pressure, fear and hate”—the same fear and hate that Jagex is now using as a reason to scale back Pride events nearly a decade later. A few years of resumed (and well-received) Pride events now facing an interruption out of fear of more manufactured controversy, would empower the same people who were sending death threats to RuneScape mods the first time, and it sends a completely backhanded message to the community Jagex is, in the same breath, promising to support.    

The main thing that strikes me as odd about this whole thing: why has Bellamy—speaking on behalf of Jagex—made an explicit statement about this fear of backlash, the perception of queer content as controversial, when they have an established routine of these events. RuneScape isn’t alone, either. Many other games and studios have consistently shown up for their queer players without crumbling under retaliation. Games like Warframe, Destiny 2, and Baldur’s Gate 3 have done just that and continue to do it. Studios like Bioware and companies like Wizards of the Coast continue to do it. RuneScape would be fine, especially continuing as they have been. 

To get some more perspective on this, I spoke with RenderScape, a player and RuneScape content creator in the UK. 

Franny: How would you describe the queer RuneScape community and your place within it?

RenderScape: So, I can only talk for Old School as that’s what I’m part of, but I’d say OSRS’s queer community is the game’s most dedicated, yet under-served section of the whole game. LGBTQ players routinely complete some insanely impressive in-game feats, and yet never receive the recognition that would be given to cishet players achieving the same thing. Queer players just do not pull the same numbers on social media that cishet ones do, I think as a combination of people ignoring them and the queer folk themselves trying not to draw too much attention to themselves to avoid too much hate.

OSRS‘s biggest content creators are also almost all straight guys with dubious at best track records on allyship. Bigotry is allowed to run rampant in their fan bases because they either don’t care or don’t want to risk losing the money from the viewership. Some are also clearly just bigoted themselves but Jagex refuses to ever address it, and even awarded one of the most notorious creators a “golden gnome” which is an award for making content that Jagex gives out once a year.

This is all to say that the LGBTQ community of OSRS has not been well served by Jagex, and the pro-Pride push we’re seeing now has been fuelled by years of frustration on their part for the way they are treated by large parts of the player base and the company itself.

As for my place, I should state that I’m a cishet guy myself, just so I don’t mislead anyone. I became known as “OSRS’s Biggest Virtue Signaller” by the right-leaning players on Twitter when I started calling out the horrendous way they talk to LGBTQ players, and I ended up adopting that title ironically as a way to stick it to them. Since then, allyship has become a big part of what I create and talk about. I built a substantial LGBTQ following because, in their own words, I was one of the only OSRS creators who was a safe space for them, since almost none of the large ones had any interest in ever taking a stand for them. 

This video showcases some of the stuff I’ve made in support of my queer friends. And they always loved to see it because it made them feel seen. And so, I’ve become something of a symbol for the “woke” side of OSRS, which is a good or bad thing depending on who you ask. 

Franny: Can you speak to some of the in-game feats you mentioned earlier? Just to get an idea of what that looks like to someone not familiar with RuneScape.

RenderScape: Of course! So, by in-game feats, I’m talking about achievements and accomplishments in game. OSRS is defined by extremely long grinds and our LGBTQ players are some of the most dedicated players around. One notable one is my friend Witch Aileen, who is the rank 13th Hardcore Ironman in the game, which is very impressive as this means she has both never died in-game and also never traded with any other player. This stuff is a big deal to RuneScape players, I promise!

Franny: In your words, what kicked off the protests in OSRS and what’s been the general vibe around them?

RenderScape: The spark that ignited them was definitely this Reddit post talking about the Pink News article. Once that hit the front page of r/2007scape, people started assembling in-game to make a fuss. The vibe is very pro-pride, pro-LGBTQ, and very anti-Mod North. 

Counter-protesters do show up but they’re small in number and very quickly drowned out by the majority. Everyone is wearing colourful outfits, trying to spread the message, but also have a bit of fun with and make friends. It’s been an amazing opportunity for the often fragmented LGBTQ groups to find each other and start connecting.

Franny: Why do you think the CEO made this decision, despite Jagex already having gone through something similar in 2017, especially with this response backlash from the community and the RuneScape team?

RenderScape: If I may be blunt, the reason Jagex canned Pride is because North (or the shareholders he represents) already wanted to get rid of it. Pride has never caused players to quit and hurt their finances, and anti-Pride sentiment has been on the decline since 2022. The 2024 event had such little hate thrown at it that it barely registered. We know they didn’t scrap Pride to save development time because it was mostly already done and the devs offered to work for free to finish it on their own time, and yet were still denied the right to do it. I feel they are scrapping it now because the way the world is going right now, with us slipping backwards on a lot of progressive issues, they feel they can get away with it like many other companies are also doing by rolling back DEI and removing rainbows. 

Simply put, Jon Bellamy is either a bigot himself, or cares so little about queer folk that he refused to push back on whoever told him to do this. There is no logical or business explanation for the removal of Pride. It’s incredibly popular with OSRS players. 

The community has also really come together to try and make something positive about this, a Discord group got set up earlier [last] week for LGBTQ RuneScape players and has hit over 300 members already, which is pretty substantial by our usual standards.

Franny: In that Q&A, Bellamy spoke about how he knows OSRS is a safe space for queer players and wants to support that community, or the staff, in other ways, though of course it’s only been a few days or so, the results remain to be seen.

RenderScape: I feel he’ll say whatever he thinks will keep him out of trouble, while continuing to do whatever he wants. He can’t make any claim for keeping staff safe when we have players harassing jmods and getting them attacked by [infamous Twitter trolls] and doing absolutely nothing to stop it. He can’t claim to be protecting players when the removal of Pride has emboldened the worst side of the player base to start slinging f-slurs again.

Franny: Obviously there’s a desire for it, even just judging by the attention around your post in the subreddit, and between now and 2022 Jagex already withstood any backlash that was to be had. By making a public statement about rolling the events back, he’s just ripping open an old wound. And well, I’d also love to know about the inter-community responses! Like I said, I’ve been speaking with a friend who’s telling me about the protests, but I see you’re also working to promote queer artists, and have the community-organized Pride events taken on a new tone? 

RenderScape: You’ve put that perfectly, it really is like an old wound! And yes, the tone has certainly changed. When I first started planning the event, it was going to be this small gathering to have a bit of Pride fun. We suspected we weren’t getting a Pride event but didn’t know the full story, so it was fairly chill. But when the news article came out, it really exploded the enthusiasm players had for a big Pride gathering. Ironically, the cancellation could lead to the OSRS community having an even bigger Pride event than ever before! It became very apparent from my perspective that the queer community both needed and wanted more, so I started expanding the event plans into a much bigger deal than the initial small gathering. 

Franny: I feel like these online spaces are so parallel to real life, resistance matters here too. Like, it’s really not just about RuneScape, it’s important to resist bigotry everywhere we can, physical or not. 

RenderScape: My thoughts exactly! Exposure to people different from ourselves builds tolerance, and that counts whether it’s in the real world or the virtual one. These days a lot of us are spending more time in the latter than the former anyway.

At the conclusion of our chat, RenderScape connected me with some other members of the community. As someone who’s—again—unfamiliar with RuneScape, I wanted to gather more voices about the relationship between RuneScape and its queer players, and how this decision has affected them, so I asked for some statements.

Eme/Devotedpupa: Well I’ve been playing since 2006 and honestly I can say that this news [was] a bit soul crushing. Runescape was my first MMO and the unexpected joy I felt when first changing my gender with the Makeover Mage all those years ago remains a formative memory as a young NB person from Mexico. Even more recently, the Pride events felt… different from pandering from other games. Not only the rewards (I wear my NB flower crown for 90% of my gametime while skilling), the actual events feel genuine like no other thing like in the gaming space. The last couple Pride events have [dealt] with the history of our community and the struggles of trans folks in such a heartfelt way, I was honestly amazed. there’s a saying that you don’t quit Runescape, you just take breaks. Well, those definitely [played] a role in me coming back to OSRS. They didn’t feel like corporate rainbow Doritos®, they felt like some of the mods CARED. Mod North really did something unnecessary and heinous removing the events.

Sweater Paws: As of writing this, Runescape’s queer community is on Day 6 of rioting. We’ve been met with death threats and harassment, along with a slew of other nonsensical arguments, such as :keeping politics out of the game”. The main flaw in this argument is that the removal of the event itself is inherently political.

First and foremost, the cancellation of the event is a result of Mod North caving to pressures from one specific side of the political spectrum, at the detriment of the other. That is choosing a side, no matter how it is phrased.

From another angle, the ability to call oneself apolitical is a privilege. It is claiming that you are above issues, since they do not affect you. Your rights are not actively threatened, so you may fail to see, or willfully ignore, why this is such a big deal. They fail to see how deeply ingrained politics are in every aspect of our lives. Everything touched by a government entity is a matter of politics.

When my rights are threatened on a nearly global scale, having a game like Runescape, of which I’ve been a player for nearly two decades, suddenly flip their script and decide that my existence is ‘too controversial’, is akin to being told that I am no longer welcome somewhere because of my identity. Whether they like it or not, whether that is the intent or not, that is the message that is getting out there. That me, and my queer friends, are too dangerous to be celebrated.

In the end, what is left of this so-called safe space they claim to “protect”?

Newt: I’ve been playing for the better part of 15 years. The cancelling of Pride just makes me really sad, it was always fun and you could tell there was some real passion behind the events from some of the developers.

The worst part of this is that bigots are often emboldened by backing down more than even direct support; so North coming in and unilaterally canceling any official support of Pride is just telling the bigots that Jagex listens to their hate, even ignoring their own players to do so.

Ellie: I’m part of the LGBTQIA+ community and also play OSRS at a high level.

Jagex removing the pride event when it was already made in light of the current “world events” is so against what the community is and how the Jagex mods have poured their hearts into the game. The implications are that it communicates that LGBTQIA+ people aren’t welcome in the space that we exist in online and even moreso irl. Queer people are some of the most inclusive and loving people and to hear that mainstream don’t want us to exist is heartbreaking.

I feel like we have been loud enough at this point and to not get any word from the CEO is deafening. He has ruined all good will and burned any trust he had coming in.

OSRS is not just a game or space. It’s a community where we all go to hangout and feel a sense of progression and accomplishment. The world doesn’t give that in the slightest currently.

Astra Vampyre: I’ve been playing the game for about 5 years now, and as a trans woman, I always look forward to the Pride events. While the events themselves are typically short miniquests and may not seem terribly significant at face value, seeing myself and others like me represented is incredibly important. I think that the inclusion of such events have helped LGBTQ players feel more at home and welcomed in the community, and helps to remind us that we are accepted and that we are not alone. This has been very impactful for me, as there have been times in my life where I felt very isolated and like I had to hide who I was.

I think that the CEO’s decision to remove this event is incredibly cowardly, and is ultimately giving into a hateful (and unfortunately very vocal) minority of the playerbase. The large majority of players I have talked to are either in favor of these events, or indifferent to them. The events themselves require very little development time, and the team at Jagex has even offered to work on the events on their own time. I see no reason why these events should be discontinued, and it is incredibly saddening and disappointing to see the CEO give in to such hate.

I have cancelled my subscription, and I encourage others to do the same until this decision is reverted.

Sophie: I’ve been playing Runescape for over 20 years now, and it has meant a lot to me during various times in my life where I faced different struggles. One of these struggles was with my gender and sexuality, which I resolved by transitioning! Even back way before this would happen, I always remember playing as a female character in Runescape because it just felt nicer to me. With the launch of OSRS in 2013, I would eventually start playing again in 2017 or so, and really struggled to resonate with the community for a long while. The protests and backlash to the original Pride event back then still resonate in my mind and while I can take comfort knowing that many of the protestors were in fact not regular players of the game (as one of the former head moderators has stated), future events were canned. Nearly 10 years later, that pain is still fresh with this year’s cancellation. All around us, those of us especially in the US and UK, there’s been a massive and well-funded hate campaign directed towards trans people, and though I may not need the escapism as much as I needed to growing up, it still meant a lot to me to have Pride events in Runescape. I’m surrounded by so many other trans and queer friends that play the game now, and we have a lot of communities for each other, yet I still struggle to recommend friends to play Runescape because bigotry is still yet very common in the community, especially in high level PVM and skilling clans. The cancellation of Pride events enables the loud bigoted minority to feel validated in their hatred and makes Runescape even harder to recommend and is a financial loss for Jagex – I’ve seen several friends opt to quit already. Those who were against Pride events in the first place would never cancel when they did happen, but that non-action does not go both ways.

Morfred: I’ve played OSRS on-and-off ever since I was a kid, and I’ve had the fortune to witness the OSRS Pride events through two lenses: First, when I returned to OSRS around COVID, I had known I was Bi for a while, and felt pretty safe in my day-to-day life when it came to that. Second, the 2024 Pride, which had a very large impact on me, and resulted in me realising I was non-binary\I’ll mostly focus on the second point of view, and how it leads into the lack of a Pride event in 2025.

When OSRS Pride 2024 came around, the main character of the story – Kit Breaker – is heavily implied to be Trans, to the point that I’d not even really call it an implication. I didn’t realise it immediately, but seeing a character visibly working through gender-related issues made me realise things about myself. Pride needs to continue in any game that it would suit, so that people can interact with identities they may not see day-to-day.

However, we know that OSRS has cancelled Pride this year. Of course this sucks: it’s cut content. But what impacts me the most is the rise in hateful activities in the community. Reports of players using seeds to plant flowers in the shape of swastikas, slurs, and relating both sexuality and gender identity to pedophilia and harm to children – the latter of which I’ve been subject to at the Falador protests, as I’ve been wearing the non-binary colours. Gender identities seem to get the worst of it (not that anyone comes out on top, really), with lesser slights being messages of ‘Two Genders’, or LGB-minus-T speaking points like ‘Is this gay pride, or gender shit?’.

Jagex is a British company, and in the UK we have a struggling Trans community, which make up 0.5% of the population, but are twice as likely to be victims of crime than cis people (according to the home office figures), with an increase in hate crimes, especially since the recent UK ruling regarding Trans rights in women’s spaces, which has ended up with Trans folks being advised to just… avoid gendered public bathrooms altogether. With all this going on in the background, Jagex should be supporting those that are struggling to stay safe themselves, not just ignore them. Instead the CEO demands the removal of a complete/nearly complete Pride from the game for being ‘controversial’, whilst still selling Pride merch. It clearly indicates that we’re only good for them so long as we give them cash, and that stings when the creators that actually want to support us but can’t.

The CEO’s choices have shattered any goodwill I had with Jagex.

When my country is turning back the progression of social changes, the last thing I want is senseless bigotry being thrown both at queer players and queer jmods, emboldened by the choices of a CEO.

Birdhome: The stance Jagex and CEO Mod North has taken on this issue is plainly wrong. Withdrawing support for Pride within the company hurts the community. Old School RuneScape has always been a game made by the players and for the players. We (the players) want Pride in our game. The removal of Pride effectively communicates that Jagex does not want us in their game. I can’t help but worry that the events we are witnessing signify a greater culture shift within the company leading towards a future where the voice of the player base no longer matters. We, as a community, simply cannot stand for this. It is in the best interest of our games long term health to continue to provide a safe and welcoming environment for marginalized players. The leadership team at Jagex should be ashamed of themselves for abandoning the players and developers who work so hard to make this game as incredible as it is. I implore them rise to the occasion while there is still time for them to right this wrong.

Oog: I’m the administrator of a Discord Server called Rainbow Road, which is a space for LGBTQIA+ RuneScape (both Old School and RuneScape 3) players to gather and hang out, plan events, and find clans or other communities of like-minded people. Render and I have been friends for a while and managed to independently decide to put together some kind of community-run event since Jagex was holding out on us. The day after I opened up the Discord server, the Pink News article dropped and between Render and I, we managed to grab a pretty significant chunk of the LGBTQIA+ RS community on social media into one space where, so far, it has worked extremely well even though a significant portion of the community has history with each other. We’ve managed to come together and put aside whatever beef for at least a while and focus on the one thing we all have in common. Even bridging a gap between OSRS and RS3 is more difficult than you might think, but we’re doing that too. We’re planning to continue running pride events all year and trying to make enough noise that Jagex’s CEO cannot ignore us.

I’m a cis pansexual man and I have been a RuneScape player for almost as long as the game has existed. My original account was registered sometime in January or February of 2001, when the game was about a month old. I was a young teenager at the time and RuneScape was the first game I had ever really been social in. I grew up in a very rural area in Appalachia and my exposure to anyone that wasn’t white, cis, and hetero was pretty limited. My parents were bigots in every facet of the word, but my dad especially hated queer people. He told me as a young kid that if I turned out to be gay that he’d consider it a failure and kill himself. I was raised to believe that gayness was a sin of the highest order. When I was in my tween years and starting to get the feelings tweens do, I noticed that I didn’t only get those feelings for girls but I was always too afraid to ever admit anything like that. I hated myself. I was terrified of what would happen to me for being that way.

It wasn’t until I started chatting with some people on RuneScape that I started to really understand what I was feeling and feel less like it was a problem. A group of friends I had met while playing one day invited me to their IRC channel and I hung out with them and chatted. We were all around the same age and it turns out that the whole group was LGBT+. I never told them about my feelings or anything, I was just the “straight friend” in the group but seeing them be unapologetically queer was eye opening for me and started me down a path that eventually (almost 2 decades later) led to me accepting myself as pansexual. Pride was not a thing in games back then and especially not in RuneScape, but when we finally got a Pride Event, I thought back to those friends and how, despite their temporary presence in my life, their influence on me remains eternal. Pride isn’t just about the cute cosmetic items we get in-game, it’s about being accepted for who we are and sharing ourselves with people who’ve felt our struggle. It’s about knowing that, while the real world wishes we’d disappear, the virtual world we also inhabit doesn’t want us to be invisible and instead gives us ways to express our true selves through the little pixels on the screen. It allows us to see another avatar in-game and even if you never speak to each other, you know you two are at least a little connected.

RuneScape is slow and deliberate in many ways and [at] other times hectic and chaotic. The narratives are whimsical and goofy but also sometimes a little heartbreaking or terrifying. The world in the game was shaped by religious ideologies and political aspirations. All of these things mirror our world and make it feel alive, and somehow in the middle of it all there is this mage that you can talk to that can change your character between body types. The mage constantly flips back and forth too. The Makeover Mage has been there for decades and has always given players the opportunity to express their character in a different way if they choose. It was never controversial, and the game even required male characters to change to female for a quest at one point. Prior to the Pride event’s introduction, this was the smallest glimmer of queerness we had in the game. An NPC whose creation was mostly one of function, but whose significance to a number of queer people could not be overstated. Pride made us feel like we belonged just as much in Gielinor as a Pride event makes us feel welcome in real life.

Jon Bellamy’s unilateral decision to cancel a finished event is a direct attack on us and is not taken lightly. We’ve been actively protesting in-game for 6 days at the time I write this, and soon will have achieved the longest in-game riot in the history of the game. The kind of people that are happy about Bellamy’s decision are the people in-game creating swastikas out of flowers or fires, and attempting to trade us a chair and a rope, their not-so-clever way of telling us to kill ourselves. They’re the people that show up and spam slurs, or have names with slurs, or names that reference Hitler. These are the people Bellamy sided with over the ones who’ve passionately enjoyed RuneScape for two decades. […]

It might sound a little silly for us to be so invested in a medieval point-and-click MMO game, but it’s our silly medieval point-and-click MMO game and it’s been our congregating space for 20+ years. Bigots can’t have it. We’re not allowing it.

Sage: I’m transfemme, and RS was one of the earliest hints at my gender identity for me nearly 20 years ago. (Thanks, Makeover Mage!)

Pride events made us visible, they gave us time to celebrate each other and form communities together. Removing the pride event was such an abrupt slap in the face-  Calling our identity ‘too political’ is gut wrenching. It has done nothing but embolden the people who spew hatred and slurs at us. And those same people see Jagex as endorsing their behavior, telling us directly that “Jagex sided with them” and not us. 

Jagex sided with hate, plain and simple, with this decision.

Brew Sipper: Runescape to me has always been a way for me to escape the world around me and immerse into a fantasy, where I am creating my adventure with millions of others. Over the two decades I have been a player of this game, I have made so many friendships, created so many memories, and accomplished goals I am genuinely proud of myself for achieving.

To say Runescape is a big part of my life is a wild understatement. I even have a tattoo of a blue partyhat on my arm! (IYKYK)

I am also a part of the LGBTQIA+ community. I am proudly demisexual, pansexual, and non-binary. I have felt that I was different my whole life, but it wasn’t until coming into community with other queer people that I learned about the feelings I had. Through the struggle of realizing my self-identity, I found comfort, peace, and pride in myself that I had never felt as a straight man. Pride to me is about honoring the people that came before me in the struggle, the friends that have stuck by me through everything, and myself for having the courage to say my differences are valid and do not disqualify me from a happy and fulfilling life

So when I heard the news that Mod North the CEO of Jagex (the company that owns Runescape), had canceled this year’s in-game Pride event, I was beyond heart broken. I looked forward to this event every year since it returned in 2022. See, I say returned because the first Pride event in Runescape happened in June of 2017, after a gay developer in Jagex created the event, celebrating the LGBTQIA+ community in Runescape. The event received incredibly visceral and violent backlash from a very loud minority of players, including homophobic and transphobic flooding in the comments sections where the event was posted, in-game protests where people spammed slurs of all types and wished violence on the queer community, and even death threats against the developer of the event, to the point that the developer left Jagex and cut ties all together with the community. When Pride returned in 2022, I saw it as the company having the backbone to stand up for the large LGBTQIA+ community that has always, and will always be, a part of the Runescape community.

But the new CEO of Jagex, Jon Bellamy, or Mod North, shut down this year’s pride event over fears of “backlash”. After an earlier article was posted about the event being canceled, a Jagex Moderator posted on Bluesky, saying not only was the article true, but the situation was so much worse than we thought. Internally, developers had volunteered their time to create the event, working for free and after hours, and had nearly finished the event. When they presented it to the Bellamy, he shut the project down, and over a meeting told everyone that there would be no official pride event in OSRS this year. Those same developers decided to host a parade in-game for Pride on their own, using their personal laptops and streaming the event from home, but they were not able to deliver to the community the event they had worked so hard on.

In my opinion, Jon Bellamy should be ashamed. What his actions have shown to bigots and trolls is that with enough pressure, they can get their way. He has said without saying that hate can be weaponized against marginalized groups in his games. His failure to demonstrate even a base level of respect for such a large portion of his game’s communities is very telling of not only his feelings towards queer people, but the climate he is creating within the company for queer employees of Jagex. His messaging is loud and clear, and we hear him all [too] well.

Kama: As a trans woman with a lot of queer friends of all flavors it was obviously upsetting not only seeing the lack of representation for most of my close OSRS friends, but that it happened only because the hate of the few was loud enough to do so.

But even with that, the fact that it sparked so many people to get together and make their own community pride with blackjack and hookers in response that it’s kinda hard not to feel hopeful that things’ll be alright in the world.

RuneScape is slow and deliberate in many ways and [at] other times hectic and chaotic. The narratives are whimsical and goofy but also sometimes a little heartbreaking or terrifying. The world in the game was shaped by religious ideologies and political aspirations. All of these things mirror our world and make it feel alive, and somehow in the middle of it all there is this mage that you can talk to that can change your character between body types.

I’m sure you heard that a few years ago (2017?) the original Pride event was met with right wing riots including people dressing up in desert robes and hoods to paint themselves as klansmen, and jagex (rightly) stamped on that shit, and many jmods (notably mod ash) have previously firmly responded to bigotry on social media by politely telling them to leave, more or less.

Of course, this decision by the CEO is cowardly and seems to go against what much of the jmods who actually engage with the community want, and is shown to be extra hypocritical since the CEO also claims to stand with the queer community, just… further away then before for “reasons”.

Previous pride events have been neat additions to the game though, like all events, they’re at most vaguely canon. there was one a few years ago that involved in-game representations of a few major queer figures irl like Marsha P. Johnson and Oscar Wilde among others.

And as someone who’s been involved in online communities for a very long time, and involved in moderation/leadership, a critical part of maintaining a healthy community is kicking bigots to the curb immediately and loudly when necessary. there’s the old “Nazi bar” thing everyone says, and it makes the overall vibes absolutely rancid. these guys say they don’t want politics in their video games, and respond by furiously putting their politics in the video game.

Anonymous: Honestly I’m heartbroken especially after the quality of events the last couple of years. Last year specifically I actually cried, it being a story of making someone truly believe in themselves and raising them up.

To cut this year’s content especially after having large portions of it already done is heart breaking. 

The riots have filled me with so much hope and good feelings, seeing so many people be supportive and loving and standing up against what feels like tyranny almost.

OSRS Pride Zine Organizers: Our response to the news that the OSRS Pride seasonal event had been cancelled by upper management was to start organising a digital fanzine of creative fanworks and commentary. Our project goals are to:

1. Showcase fanwork creators from the OSRS LGBTQIA+ community
   
2. Express support for LGBTQIA+ OSRS players and Jagex staff members
   
3. And create a record of thoughts, feelings and actions on the topic of LGBTQIA+ representation and inclusion in the game

We’re aiming to release the zine at the end of August. We hope, of course, that by the time of release Jagex has already issued a statement through official channels and reinstated this year’s Pride event. In the event that they have not, we intend to make the zine’s release a focus for further protest action. For example, hand-delivering a printed copy to Mod North at Jagex’s office.

Our website with the full zine info is here if you would like to learn more. And we are on social media including Bluesky.

UnionizeNow: Many people have asked why we care about an in-game Pride event in a medieval clicking simulator. My answer is this: There are no battles against fascism too small to be worth fighting. The removal of pride is a victory for a wave of violence and hatred sweeping over the whole world. A wave which is going to drown more than just us if it continues. Allowing it any victory, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, without a fight, is a mistake. It won’t stop until it IS stopped, by people, working together against the dark.

I’ll close on a short poem by A.R. Moxon which sums up my thoughts on the issue.

Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.
I take one step forward. He takes one back.
"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man

As of publishing, that aforementioned community Pride event organized and hosted by RenderScape has come and gone, a successful gathering of some of Old School RuneScape’s queer and allied players. Admittedly, I was hoping to publish this sooner, but life always finds a way to disrupt. So, I asked him one more time for a little reflection on the event and some final thoughts. 

RenderScape: I would say that the event was a massive success! At peak we had somewhere around 300 players in attendance during the main event, with so many players in one spot that the game couldn’t even show them all at once! The vibe was incredibly positive, so many people just hanging out, making friends and realising that they aren’t alone in this game has been incredibly heart-warming. I’ve received no end of messages from players who attended expressing their gratitude for the event, it’s very humbling to be part of something so big!

And, despite the event being advertised far and wide, including on the hateful platform that is twitter, there were almost no haters turning up to the event! I think I had to mute only about 5 people from stream chat and 3 in game all day, so the “backlash” to Pride is clearly not a big factor!

I think one of the most notable moments for me was when the former jmod, previously known as Mod Wolf, who made the original OSRS Pride event back in 2017, popped in to the stream chat to talk with us for a bit. He was delighted to see the little event he had put together all those years ago still inspiring people to celebrate Pride in game to this day. I was incredibly grateful for his efforts!

I spent a long time denying indelible truths about myself, having to rely on environments that didn’t really allow me to explore who I might have wanted to be. Those little windows into other experiences, seeing queer people, relationships, and narratives in video games, books, movies, whatever, were all steps toward examining the bigger picture of myself until I discovered my own ineffable qualities. There’s no reason for these qualities to be deemed controversial unless you look toward a future where they don’t exist at all. If it wasn’t for things like video games and pro wrestling, where queer narratives are abundant and beautiful, who knows how much longer it would have taken a younger and closeted me to fully understand myself and live in a way that actually made me feel aligned with my own heart in spaces where I belonged.

The protests within RuneScape went on for over a week, players gathering every day to support themselves and each other, buffeted by all kinds of hateful spectacles. These are the kind of stakes involved – it’s never just about RuneScape, or any other space where inclusivity is being sheared away, it’s about challenging these notions of intolerance regardless of where it pops up.

The post We Gay We Pay – The Player Side of Protests for RuneScape Pride appeared first on Gamesline.

While all of npckc’s games appear to be cute, compact titles that give players a space to find comfort, others brush upon and explore heavier topics, such as what remains to be troubling issues that continue to negatively impact the LGBTQ+ community in Japan.

On top of having developed a larger following through the positive response towards a game like one night, hot springs, npckc continues to make games whenever they can. They discuss what drove them to work on their first project and the real-life issues that needed to be portrayed. Working around and inspired by their own limitations in game making, npckc also encourages prospective developers to take a chance to finally make something whenever they are inspired.

How and why did you start to make games? What are your sources of inspiration? You have a very cute artstyle and aesthetic: Was that influenced by anything?

I think I just wanted to make something fun and interactable at first. I remember seeing the game engine bitsy and thinking, Wow! I bet I could make something with this—and that’s how I made the first game I ever released on itch.io, a short bitsy game called you have to go to work.

Usually when I release short games on itch.io, I’m doing it for game jams, so the themes for the jams are my sources of inspiration. I like to browse the jams page on itch.io to see what jams there are and if there are any interesting ones, I try to think of a short idea I can make and join the jam.

For my art, it’s just the kind of art I am personally capable of making. I don’t really think of myself as an artist, but I can handle simple drawings and it gets things done.

What are some of your approaches when it comes to making a new game from start to finish? How do you come up with new ideas and how do you settle on what type of game it should be?

Since my games are generally on the short end, I don’t actually do much planning outside of having a general idea of what I want to make and then scoping it down into something I am capable of making on my own. I usually like to start with character sketches first if the game has characters in it, and then I decide on the art direction from there.

What led to the creation of one night, hot springs and later A YEAR OF SPRINGS? Was it drawn from any personal experiences? As one of your most known games, have your thoughts on the series changed since?

one night, hot springs was made because I saw an article in the news about somebody having the police called on them because somebody else thought they were in the wrong gendered bath at a bathhouse. It wasn’t so much the article itself but the reaction online to the article was really awful, so I wanted to make something that went against that.

The compiled trilogy A YEAR OF SPRINGS is the continuation of that story, though I didn’t originally plan on making any sequels. The second game in the trilogy is similarly based on a real-life event, starting off with the decision by the Japanese Supreme Court to uphold the requirement for sterilization and surgery before trans people in Japan can change their legal gender.

When I talk about A YEAR OF SPRINGS, I try to make sure to mention that this is the situation in the current day. Right now, as of May 2022, Japanese trans people still cannot change their gender without being sterilized and having surgery. Bathhouses and other gender-divided spaces usually do not have any guidelines on where trans and nonbinary people “fit” in these places. Gay marriage is still illegal on a national level in Japan.

I hope that in the future I’ll be able to say that A YEAR OF SPRINGS as a series is no longer a “factual” [depiction] because the statements I mention above are no longer true.

A lot of your games explore themes around relationships, identity, and learning to develop self-confidence. What do you hope to be the main takeaway for players of your games?

I hope that whoever plays any of my games feels better after playing it than they did before. I never want somebody to come out of my game feeling beaten down or defeated. While I do discuss heavy topics at times, I don’t ever want that to be the sole focus of any game.

I also hope that my games might encourage other people to make their own games and tell their own stories. All of my games are very personal to me because they’re about things that I personally care about, and I think the world would be better with more people sharing incredibly individual stories through their creations.

What advice can you give to people who are interested in making games and telling stories without a professional background? What can they do to start?

Just do it! You can say, “I want to make games” forever, but it won’t mean anything until you actually put that to action. I don’t have a professional background at all (I’m just somebody making games out of my kitchen) and my first game on itch.io is a tiny little thing you can play in your browser, but without taking that first step, I would never have made any of the games I’ve made after that.

Start with something small so you can get into the habit of releasing stuff into the world for other people to see, and don’t stress about getting it perfect. Join a game jam and make a tiny game in a couple of days. Just tell the stories you want to tell!

one night, hot springs is available on both PC and Android mobile devices. A YEAR OF SPRINGS is available across multiple consoles and on mobile devices. The rest of npckc’s continuously growing body of work can be followed on their itchio, and on their main website.

The post Springs and Short Games: An Interview with npckc appeared first on Gamesline.

When it comes to talking about Fire Emblem, the support system is inevitably what comes to the forefront of the discussion. Originally designed as a hidden mechanic to merely buff adjacent characters for story purposes, the conceit gradually evolved more and more with games like Genealogy of a Holy War adding a child-rearing system, and Binding Blade adding customized cutscenes for any given pair of characters. In most recent games, the system has become polished and simple: you put two characters next to each other in battle and over the course of your war campaign they’ll go from begrudging strangers with differences to the best of friends (or maybe more). While not everyone has been a fan of the more Otome style of gameplay this has encouraged, with a focus more on making two characters kiss and joke around instead of the horrors of war, it’s undeniable that the implementation and evolution of Supports have brought Fire Emblem to the acclaim it holds today.

While the series first took a foray into “proper” canonized gay supports with Fire Emblem: Fates, you can go back as early as 2003’s Blazing Blade to see implied same-sex relationships through the characters of Lyn and Florina, as well as Lucius and Raven. Both of these characters have paired endings, where the characters promise to “spend forever together”, or joke about how they’re already an old married couple. These supports, while not mechanically represented the same way heterosexual relationships are, still showcase and promote a healthy homosexual romance. Sacred Stones even goes a bit more blatant, with the characters of Gerik and Joshua having their own paired ending where Joshua basically challenges Gerik to a duel with the goal of convincing him to settle down with him.

With the series’ first 3D releases, Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, subtext became even harder to ignore with the main character Ike becoming involved in not one, but two different romantic supports with other men. The primary and most represented in fan content is the bond between Ike and Soren, which was basically made canon through anniversary books released over the last few years. In Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn Memorial Book Tellius Recollection: The Second Volume, Ike and Soren are continuously referred to as having “feelings of love” for one another, and even goes so far as to refer to a support interaction where Ike and Soren embrace as “the moment where their two hearts became one” which is like, wow.

The other romance for Ike takes shape in Ranulf, a catboy who has an “extreme fondness” for Ike. Just as with Soren, Ranulf has an ending that changes depending on whether or not he got an A-rank support with Ike. If he does so, he leaves his home after the war to travel the world with Ike. If Ranulf dies at any point during the game, regardless of context, his last thoughts will be of Ike. 

Though neither of these relationships are as vocal as the vast amount of heterosexual options presented throughout both games, I argue that they do not need to be loud to be valid. While there is absolutely an importance in cementing representation of homosexuality on the same playing field as heterosexuality, that doesn’t discount the feelings that these pairings helped create in the people who played these games. Fans made art, music, fiction, and more all about the implications that these relationships tried to get through, and that makes them important in the history of gay content in gaming. 

When 2013’s Fire Emblem: Awakening implemented the old child system of Genealogy of a Holy War alongside a new “S-Rank” system, which let characters get married, it, unfortunately, led to a lot more heteronormativity than the series had started to move away from. Fans, however, were not wont to leave well enough alone and ended up creating a comprehensive fan-hack, which allowed same-sex marriage, while keeping the children. The ROM-hack featured custom written S-Rank dialogue as well, so it was not as if you were simply changing some pronouns in a confession speech. While it’s possible that a hack like this could’ve been created even without the history of homosexuality in Fire Emblem, fans were inspired to and looking for content like this because of what had come before. 

Fire Emblem: Fates had a same-sex hack of its own, but it also had the first “legitimate” gay options for supports. While the unit’s homosexuality (or I guess bisexuality?) was limited to relationships with the player character, women had the choice of marrying Rhajat, while men could romance Niles. For some reason, however, these characters were made version-exclusive like a rare Pokémon, and you could only find Niles in Conquest, and Rhajat in Birthright. On top of this bizarre wrinkle, both characters were represented as twisted murderers and criminals, which, while obviously redeemed over the course of the game, didn’t exactly leave the best impression onto what Intelligent Systems’ impressions of gay people were. 

Outside of the romance options, there were also multiple LGBT-coded characters scattered throughout the teen characters you recruit during the second half of the game. Forrest, the Nohrian Prince Leo’s child, is assigned male at birth but dresses up in frilly dresses and outfits that they sew themselves. While Leo struggles with this at first, he ultimately comes to terms with and respects his child’s choices, even going on to get more involved with them upon realizing that he’s been foisting his own expectations and beliefs upon them. Obviously, this can be interpreted as a trans-narrative, although there is no blatant explanation of such.

The knight Laslow’s daughter Soleil’s entire character revolves around her being unable to stop herself from flirting with every girl she sees. While this is a common trope in a lot of Japanese media, Soleil’s interactions with characters like Ophelia play just like any normal romantic interaction, even ending with the two going out on a date. The most damning (and unfortunate) evidence for Soleil’s homosexuality comes from her supports with the player character. 

In the original Japanese script, Soleil is made to go through “training” to make her stop disliking men and going crazy for women, where she wears a blindfold and is convinced that whoever she’s interacting with is the opposite gender than she would assume. Obviously, this entire scenario ends up seeming a lot like gay conversion therapy, which is not exactly the best thing in the world to randomly feature in any game, let alone when played off as a joke in 2016! While Nintendo changed the events of the support conversations for the English release, they merely changed it to a magical potion instead of a blindfold, which is honestly? Maybe worse! Though even with this egregious stain on her character, she’s become one of the most popular characters in the Fire Emblem fandom, specifically because her homosexuality is so undeniable and endearing.

There are plenty of other characters I haven’t even mentioned too, like the loud and proud Heather from Radiant Dawn, or the later legitimized Leon from Shadows of Valentia. While Fire Emblem has only recently waded into the territory of blatant and mechanically labeled homosexuality, that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t had any characters with gay narratives. Outright and heavily supported representation will always be an incredibly important thing to strive for and implement in any form of media, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore or dismiss the legitimacy of the more subtle stories along the way.

The post Fire Emblem: Path of Gaydiance appeared first on Gamesline.

The Missing isn’t a game I would’ve expected from the notorious game director SWERY. Responsible for quirky and eccentric games like D4 and Deadly Premonition, the Osaka based developer has never exactly made his reputation on serious topics and ideas. It’s not that The Missing isn’t like those other games- it has surrealism in spades- and it’s not because of any other reasons I could have ever guessed. The Missing is surprising, because it’s a game about me.

On the surface THE MISSING: J.J. Macfield and The Island of Memories seems like a simple puzzle platformer. Similarly to games like Limbo or Inside, the player moves left to right in a continuous stream of environments and situations with little to no interruption. The Missing, however, has the player solving puzzles not just through basic environmental interaction, but through various forms of bodily harm. With the ability to constantly regenerate yourself with the press of a button, the game presents you with dozens of complex puzzles, where the solutions can be anything from dismemberment to self-immolation.

From the outset I was incredibly into the concept of a game about solving puzzles via loss of limbs and other torturous concepts. When I first heard about the game NeverDead back in 2012, I couldn’t get it out of my head how novel of an idea it was (though its implementation left a lot to be desired). Seeing a game actually manage to pull these concepts off inventively and entertainingly is incredibly satisfying, and all the different ways that The Missing is able to create interesting scenarios out of grisly situations in its short playthrough time (about 6 hours) gives it plenty of points for creativity.

Though it seems at first that the game is purely based on the novelty of this core gameplay conceit, The Missing is primarily a story driven game. In the shoes of J.J. Macfield, you’re stuck stranded on an island off the coast of Maine (the titular Island of Memories). Though you came there with your Close Friend™ Emily, you quickly get seperated, and have to navigate through the very lonely and very dangerous island to try and find her.

Most of the story of the game is told through text messages, mostly inspired by the sticker messaging app LINE, where you get to see past conversations between J.J., her mother, Emily, and various other friends. Through these conversations the game gradually shows the sort of life and relationships that J.J. typically has, and you’re able to gradually learn more and more about her. There’s also short sequences with more surrealist tones involving conversations with J.J.’s stuffed animal F.K., and a mysterious deer headed doctor that often appears in pseudo-Lynchian fashion.

Throughout most of the game it seemed to me like The Missing would just be another one of those lesbian subtext games; the type of story where I end up wishing the characters were gay and smooching by the end of it, though the subject matter would never say. I never had expected that the game would slowly show to me the types of situations that I’ve had to experience throughout my life, and in so many of my relationships. I really didn’t think The Missing would transform from a simple eccentric puzzle game, into a metaphorical narrative about what it means to struggle and live as a transgender woman.

As it’s slowly revealed through in-game conversations, J.J. is trans, and closeted at that. As the game continues to explore this, the conversations that you’ve been reading through, and the game as a whole, suddenly take on incredibly different meanings. From the distant way J.J. talks with her friends, to the reluctance in her relationship with Emily, everything suddenly made a lot more sense, in a completely new way.

The game’s conceit of self-harm puzzle solving becomes less of a gimmick and more of a metaphor through this lens. The Missing has J.J. go through extreme physical pain in order to solve every problem she runs into. Though the game displays this through what seems like extreme sacrifices, they can be representative of the small ways that transgender people have to hurt themselves everyday just to get by. Whether it’s dealing with things like being misgendered, having to operate under a dead name, or even just the anxieties of what other people might think, being transgender often involves suffering, and too often it can make us feel like we’re the ones doing it to ourselves.

J.J., however, always bounces back and recovers to keep moving forward, just like anyone has to. Everytime she hurts herself, every time she’s hurt by the world around her, she forces herself to pull everything back together, to get up and continue going on. She does this not just for herself, but because she wants to find Emily, she wants to find the person she cares about the most in this world, even if she can’t parse all of the feelings she has for her. She fights through and past her depressions, she overcomes all the obstacles even if it hurts because it’s for the one person in the world who accepted her as she was.

When I was first coming to terms with being transgender, I went through a lot of the exact same feelings that I saw portrayed in the game. Every action felt like suffering, the people around me quickly abandoned me, rumours were whispered about me, and I felt myself collapse more and more into myself. Throughout that though, I was able to confide in and find respite in my girlfriend, and I kept pushing through day to day because I loved her. I knew that persevering meant that I would get to spend another day loving her, and feeling her warmth made all the conflicted parts of me feel at ease.

Though media has come a long way in the last decade in terms of representation, there have been so few stories about transgender characters, let alone ones done right, that I had never really let myself have high hopes for one. There was a feeling that was incredibly difficult to parse as I played through the game, that I gradually realized is probably natural for so many people, that I really felt wholly for the first time as I played. The Missing is an uplifting game about people like me, it’s a game that operates by all accounts under the same rules and ideas that so many other games have, but this time it’s about an element of my life I never really explore because no media ever really considers it valuable outside of a shock or jeer.

While I would normally feel some trepidation at the way the game almost treats J.J.’s identity as a twist, I think that it’s done in such a respectful and affecting manner that I can hardly take umbrage with it. Throughout The Missing, I cried multiple times as I reflected on the experiences in my own life, and how they were actually being talked about for what felt like the first time ever. To some it might just be another video game with compelling reveals, but to me, The Missing is about me, and that’s not something I could’ve truly said about a game before.

The post THE MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (Switch) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

In the post, which can be found here, KLab states that they want to create a quality translation for the games they work on, but says that “a good translation is more of an art than a science” and that a translation can’t be too literal. They also say that they have reviewed the English version of the game and that they believe their version “effectively conveyed both the content and tone of the original”.

The final paragraph in particular specifically addresses the removal of gay subtext from the game:

“We would also like to address one specific concern raised by some gamers, namely that we were engaging in self-censorship by removing or softening some playful same-sex banter from the English version. This absolutely was not our intention. We localized the game based on our interpretation of the original anime contents, but at the same time, we also respect our gamers’ interpretations as well. We take to heart the comments from some of our gamers who felt we were dismissing them in some way by some of our translations. We truly regret any hard feelings that we may have caused. We love our games and our gamers and don’t want any of them to change!”

So at the end of the day, while they don’t want fans to be mad at them for these changes, they don’t have any plans to release an update fixing the issues in question. This in turn has led to even more negative feedback from fans in the comments section of the post.

It’s easy to see why fans are outraged in the comments section of this post. These sorts of localization issues are far too reminiscent of the days when Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune were “cousins” in the 90s. Taking an all-girl school setting and changing lines to make the player character seem male is ridiculous no matter how you “interpret” the game’s content. Replacing lines references to liking “cute girls” with liking “cute things” or “I don’t mind at all even if we’re both girls” with “I don’t think it’s scandalous for a boy and girl to hang out” makes it very clear that the content and tone of the original is being radically changed.

Fans of ANY game expect the same content here that the original Japanese players got when they spend money the game. To heavily alter the content and intent of a game’s dialogue is disrespectful to both fans and the creators of the original version. It’s especially disrespectful to LGBT fans of the game, going out of it’s way to exclude them completely. It would definitely make me stop financially support a game or company, and this seems to be the case for many Love Live! fans as well.

KLab’s website be found here.

The post KLab America Issues “Apology” Erasing Gay Content from Love Live appeared first on Gamesline.

“For any events we do, we always want to make sure we are able to have an inclusive environment where no one feels left out, and of course for everybody to enjoy.  On this angle, we believed that allowing more to be eligible to join is obviously the answer and as many of our female teams have expressed — Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered Women members are their friends too.  On the other hand, for any competitions, we seriously look at ensuring there’s a fair level playing field for all participants.  And there are arguments and concerns from other participants who disputes that Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered Women members may probably have some unfair advantage.”

While arguments to exclude transgender women from women’s only events are unfortunately quite common, it is baffling that Garena plans to limit lesbian access to the tournament as well. This, combined with their statement above, suggests that Garena is attempting to be apolitical and take a ‘compromise’ position that they hope will satisfy both sides, without actually seriously examining either side’s arguments. It is hard to think of a legitimate reason for banning transgender and lesbian women from a video game tournament other than just discrimination, but there is also notable that no limits on bisexual women are present, suggesting that Garena didn’t think through this ruling particularly much. 

The penalty for violating the ruling (whether knowingly or not) would be a 1-year ban from all Garena-run events even if the discovery of the violation takes place after the event, so if you’re gay or trans you’d better hope that none of your teammates are in the closet, because when they come out you could be earning yourself a neat little ban.

Riot games has stated on their twitter that “LGBT players are welcome at official LoL tourneys. We’re working with partners to ensure consistency with our values across all regions.”, and while Riot doesn’t have the best track record with LGBT issues they do tend to be quick to respond when the credibility of their tournaments are in question. Garena’s ruling isn’t likely to last long.

The post Filipino E-Sports League Limits LGBT players in LoL Tournament appeared first on Gamesline.