Blair Durkee interview — How to embrace your LGBTQIA+ players

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GLAAD has spent decades monitoring media for defamatory coverage of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. But now that video games have become a powerhouse medium, the nonprofit group has also begun to focus on the gaming sector.

But rather than just focus on defamatory representation, the group has also been consulting with the game industry to help with the depiction of LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual) characters in video games.

GLAAD has consulted with Capcom on the transgender fighter Poison in Street Fighter X Tekken as well as with Dontnod Entertainment in the narrative adventure game Tell Me Why. Blair Durkee, an advocate for LGBTQIA representation in gaming and associate director of gaming for GLAAD, recently spoke about the topic of how to best engage, support, and grow gaming’s LGBTQIA+ audience at the recent DICE Summit event in Las Vegas.

Durkee said that LGBTQIA+representation had come a long way in games such as Life is Strange: True Colors, Rainbow Six Siege, Tell Me Why, and Cyberpunk 2077. But from GLAAD’s perspective, she said that nobody has gotten it 100% right.

GamesBeat Summit 2022

I spoke with Durkee in an interview at DICE. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: What did you talk about?

Blair Durkee: Yeah, two sessions this morning. The topic was “Embracing Your LGBTQIA Players.” The discussion ranged very broadly. We talked about the pipeline problem of hiring diversity in the industry, all the way to the specifics on how you write an authentic LGBTQ