So I’ve not really talked about this aspect of myself on the site a whole lot, if at all, since Play Diaries launched back in January. But I am a queer-identifying person.

And there are a lot of queer-identifying people in the LGBTQIA community within the games industry. Representation with games, both the actual games and the people who make them, is finally starting to catch up, albeit slowly. But just in the past month alone, let alone this hellscape of a year, representation has picked up in a massive way through one of the biggest AAA releases of this year, The Last of Us: Part 2.

In October of last year, I hosted a panel about being queer in the games industry at EGX (remember when physical shows were a thing?) featuring five fellow folks in the UK games industry among various disciplines from development to comms to streaming and social media to talk of being queer and their experiences.

Them being Izzy Jagan (Junior Global PR Manager for Life is Strange, Square Enix), Hannah Flynn (Director of Communications, Failbetter Games), Charleyy Hodson (Head of Social Media, Xbox UK and Ireland and one of the on-air personalities for Xbox On),  Els White (Game Director, Spider Lilly Games) and Ed Fear (Game Director, Mediatonic).

In this episode, we discuss first coming across queer content in games (spoiler: The Sims is a popular answer), how far queer representation has come along in games, what work remains in bringing representation forward, how they can be achieved and more as we do an hour-long panel that is hopefully enlightening, entertaining and fun.