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Bringing Diversity to the Digital Realm
Finding LGBT representation in video games was once thought a bigger fantasy than the playable quests of our favorite pixilated heroes. Thankfully, games such as Mass Effect 3, Fable III, and Dragon Age II have broken new gaming ground by including same-sex romance options for players. And now Studio Fawn, a small Los Angeles company developing its first game, is working to level up diversity in video games by including a prominent transgender character in Bloom: Memories.
Bloom: Memories is the brainchild of trans artist and game developer Dani Landers, one of the four creative minds who make up Studio Fawn. The game is based on an unreleased graphic novel created by Landers and is a beautiful artistic take on the action-adventure/role-playing game genre that carries players through an epic journey following the theme of the “purest love” — that between a mother and her child. Among the many striking characters introduced to players in the world of Bloom is Ilana, the first representation of a trans person in the popular RPG genre.
“The idea for Bloom actually started shortly before I began transitioning,” says Landers. “As my life was changing and I was dealing with transition, I guess I naturally started to express those experiences through the character and game designs of Bloom. Since I was transitioning, Ilana was one of the first characters and stories I had created in the Bloom world.”
While the character grew partly from Landers’s desire to express herself creatively, Ilana’s inclusion in Bloom became a personal mission for the game designer when she took a wider look at the landscape of video games and their lack of LGBT diversity. “When I found out that trans women have never really existed in a mainstream game outside of a casual footnote, I realized Ilana's story was more important than I had thought,” Landers says. “She went from being just a cool character I could relate to, to a character that needed her story to be told.”
http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/2013/12/04/trans-game-designer-bringing-diversity-digital-realm
Another barrier being broken.
