Trans-Inclusive Gaming
Rachel Bryk, a transgender woman and a game developer for the Dolphin Emulator, committed suicide on Thursday, April 23rd. She was 23 years old.
Byrk started submitting code to the Dolphin Emulator, an emulator that allows Wii and GameCube games to be played on the PC, two years ago. During that time she was responsible for improvements in savestates, netplay, the user interface, configuration, and many others. She spent much of her time improving the tool assisted speedrun
Anna Anthropy is a freeware game designer of such titles as Mighty Jill Off, Redder, Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars and Dys4ia. On March 20, 2012 she published the critically acclaimed book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. The book calls on game industry to develop games outside of the current corporate model and design and show a greater diversity of the human experience.
When I posted on twitter to share my post on Rebecca Heineman on Matt Chat, I got a reply from her. After a good two minutes of fan girling over it, I read what she wrote. She let me know that Jennell Jaquays was also interviewed on Matt Chat. I have to admit that I didn’t know anything about Jennell Jaquays.
Matt Chat is a YouTube Channel with weekly discussions on video games with Dr. Matt Barton. Barton is an associate professor in English at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. Back in December of 2010 he conducted an interview with Rebecca Heineman.
Heineman is a video game programmer who is responsible for such classic titles such as The Bard’s Tale III: The Thief of Fate, Dragon Wars, Tass Times in ToneTown, Borrowed Time, Mindshadow, and The Tracer Sanction. She is also a transgender woman who started to transition in November 2003. She’s just one example of the handful of trans women who are working within the video gaming industry. Yet, in my opinion, she is one of the more mainstream names within the industry.