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Leo Johnson: The Arkh Project
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Written by Leo Johnson, The Eagle Editor
Before I get into the point of this article, I’d like to make a disclaimer that I am not really a video game person. Sure, I own The Path, an obscure indie game, and I once spent almost twelve hours straight playing KOTOR – and now I’m undermining myself – but I don’t spend a lot of time playing them normally, and I’m not the one writing the video game articles for this paper.
A common complaint among people like me who play video games is that GLBT (that’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) characters are rarely represented in games. A common complaint among people like a lot of you who play video games is that almost all video game characters are white.
The solution to this – make more video games featuring minorities – has been constantly decried by video game companies that claim that video games like that “wouldn’t sell.” The question comes to mind is, how do they know this if they’ve never tried to sell them? However, at this point I don’t think the most perfect argument in the world would convince them to start including queers, people of color, and queer people of color in their games.
The solution? Go somewhere else for your gaming needs. And that’s what I want to talk about.
There’s a video game that will fulfill these needs. It’s a linear story full action roleplaying game, to use their own description. The main character is African American and genderqueer (someone who doesn’t identify as male or female.) All of the relationships are interracial – and not just white person-with-token-person-of-color, but blacks and East Asians, for instance. There are two white people in the whole game.
Two, and I am rejoicing despite my own race because I think we’ve all had enough of whitewashed, straight, cissexual (this one means identifying as a gender that matches your body – look up gender identities if you’re curious) characters. I think that not just those of us who are people of color – though all of you are definitely important and I can’t claim to understand what you go through – but who see people of color, talk to people of color, deal with people in our lives, should welcome this game and hope for the start of a trend.
The thing is, not everyone thinks that way. The developers are getting hassled by white supremacists who object to the idea of a game that doesn’t focus on them, despite the hundreds of thousands of games that already do. Fundraising is being done, but it’s not being done enough, because it will lost about a hundred thousand dollars to develop a mass market quality game, and they are not a big business.
They’re a bunch of people who love video games – just like you – who want change – just like a lot of you. So I invite you to show your support by donating – just ten dollars will both help, and get you a poster of one of the game’s characters to boot – and by commenting, drawing fanart (art drawn of other people’s characters), telling your friends, posting about it on your facebook, and whatever else you want to do that might help.
Here are two links, to the project’s fundraising page and the project’s tumblr:
http://thearkhproject.tumblr.com/
http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Arkh-Project
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June 10th, 2012 at 11:02 am
If people complain about gays not being in video games, why don’t people just get up off their behind and make one that involves a gay.
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