Electronic Arts is one of the world’s biggest video-game companies, and they’ve recently come under fire from Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council for including gay characters and plotlines in Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect 3.
Activist group AllOut.org decided to thank EA for “fighting the dark side” with a petition that has garnered 60,000 signatures.
Andre Banks, executive director for AllOut.org said, “Electronic Arts customers are speaking out loud and clear: Being for equality is good for business. Groups like the Family Research Council are truly on the ‘dark side’—they put pressure on companies like EA to block fair, balanced portrayals of gay characters in gaming and other media. You don’t have to be a gamer to understand that it makes a real difference for Electronic Arts to present positive portrayals of gays and lesbians to its community of 100 million players.”
The force is strong with EA and AllOut. With any luck and more support from these groups, positive plotlines for LGBT characters will become completely unobjectionable before 3069.
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Elias
The petition was a fake: http://i.imgur.com/4FDjQ.jpg
Polyboy
http://www.allout.org/theforce
The petition is legit and they’re looking into issues with irregularities.
And bluntly, given the despicable trolling of the Family Research Council and other religious groups, it would not be a surprise if they orchestrated the bot strike. It
would not be the first time their ilk pretended to be gay or invaded gay space.
Red S.
The fact is, EA have come under a lot of fire recently and the homophobic hate groups are only a small part of that. They were voted Worst Company of the year largely by disgruntled customers upset over a variety of issues from the ending of Mass Effect 3 to the way they’ve been managing downloadable content. A lot of this criticism seems incredibly petty to me, but there you go.
Whether or not EA were behind the use of bots in the petition, it’s clear they’re trying to deflect criticism of the company as a whole by painting it all as coming from homophobic sources. Frankly, it’s exploitative.
Martin
STOP CRITISIZING THE PRODUCER OF MY FAVOURITE COMP GAMES!! DAMMIT!!!
A Chick That Plays Video Games
I wouldn’t thank EA first, I would thank Bioware. They’re the ones who came up with the idea and made the game, EA just owns them and distributes for them. But then again, I wouldn’t thank them, because the ending was so bad. So I guess I’d thank them for doing their part to promote social justice and then spit on them for being bad plot writers. But you get the drift.
El Derpus
EA Botted their own petition.
Triple S
@Martin: haha, I know! Mass Effect 3 was great! What the fuck are these people talking about; “I didn’t like the ending!” Well sorry, precious! Not every story has a happy ending!
But I’ll never forget one of Jack’s first words in ME2; “Shit, you sound like a pussy.”
Best damn line ever in a video game. 🙂
A Chick That Plays Video Games
@Triple S: I didn’t want a happy ending. I wanted one that wasn’t a cop-out, “precious.”
Triple S
@A Chick That Plays Video Games: What was the cop out? It seemed OK to me. Please don’t call me precious. I didn’t call you that. It was a rhetorical complaint to how people can’t settle for what they’re given.
wingfield
People didn’t complain for nothing. Bioware weeks before release promised there wouldn’t be an open ended finale and that players would get closure. But it doesn’t really matter because they are going back and adding more cutscenes and possibly gameplay to elaborate on the ending and provide closure.
I hope that petition is real. I played a gay Shepard and enjoyed the naturalness of it. Wish they had kept the gay option in the first one!
A Chick That Plays Video Games
@Triple S: Sorry, I assumed that because I was technically under the category of people who didn’t like the ending, the logic followed that I would be one of the ones being referred to as “precious.”
*SPOILERS* Personally, I believe it was a cop out because all of the player’s investment in the series up to that point was thrown out of the window by Bioware. No matter what complex series of choices you had made in the series before, no matter what planets you had saved or destroyed through your choices, no matter what relationships you had or did not have, you were given a generic ending out of a choice of three with no personal differentiation from player to player, no matter how different those players may have played the game before. It literally condensed the hours of decision-making and time spent becoming personally invested in the Mass Effect universe and lore into three, color-coded outcomes, and no matter what, left you with the same ultimate result, that the universe full of diverse characters which you had come to so dearly love was destroyed, and you were left practically empty-handed after three games of playtime.
Allen D.
Duplicate comments?! “Cut and paste” is a bitch.
Polyboy
That ending was bullshit, flying in the face of the entire series. It was probably written by marketing and tacked on given the absolute lack of actual game-play involved.
Jaesun
@Triple S:
Other than what A Chick That Plays Video Games said above, the ending wasn’t the only blunder of ME3. Granted it did have some nice story arcs (Garrus, Mordin, and Legion, to name a few), most of the game (not including the ending) was riddled with plot holes. ME2’s story was goofy enough (in a good campy way), but Bioware had to cater a “wider audience” and decided to go full retardo with ME3’s direction (note the absence of Drew Karpyshyn, lead writer of the first two games). Bioware is supposed to be a master of video game storytelling, and yet the game seems to have been written by preschoolers. Also note the illusion of choice the entire series offers, even though “choices and consequences” was/is one of Bioware’s main selling points for the ME series. They could have attempted to make choices and consequences evident in their final installment, but riding their brand name to the bank was much more important. If you have the time, visit their shitstorm of a forum and prepare yourself to be entertained.
Oh, and to address the article, no one should be falling for any of EA’s publicity stunts. Both this and the whole Jennifer Hepler debacle were only used to create fake controvesy in an attempt to draw attention to Mass Effect 3. A video game corporation with horrible consumer relations is not an ally, especially since any support they show would disappear once the controversy dried up/no longer profitable.
@wingfeld
Don’t expect any extra gameplay to “fix” the ending. Bioware has made it clear that they will only elaborate on how it ended, with extra cut-scenes. Which is a shame, since no amount of elaboration can fix the premise which will (now) always be fucked beyond repair. Oh well, back to more important things…
Drew
So then is Queerty ignoring the fact that EA is a company so terrible that it sent itself automated comments praising itself in the hope that people would ignore its recently acquired “Worst Company in America” title?
13Zeroither
As a bi, Peruvian/Irish, male gamer I am happy & glad that they are more lgbt positive changes in videogames today. btw are there a couple/few/alot/many lgbt people who like /love videogames?