Hello, guys!

Last Friday, I was researching a little bit more about Itch.io and its algorithms, and I've discovered the amazing work made by Minoh Workshop. 

As you may notice in my studio profile, I'm a drag queen from Brazil. However, many may not know that I've been doing a master's degree trying to understand how game platforms can be a 'technologic of gender' - a theoric concept from Teresa de Lauretis, a feminist who understands gender as a representation and an auto-representation resulted by social technologies (1987).

Me speaking at SBGames 2019, the biggest research game event in Latin America.

Anyway, I'll not focus on the theoric aspects of my research, but I hope my six-month monitoring process of the tags LGBT, Gay, Yaoi, and Queer, as well as my game data, can help us (queer game developers) understand a little bit more about Itch.io and its algorithms. So, what I'll be discussing here is a small part of my thesis. Let's start it!

In the post "Furry and Bara Content on Itch.io: A Story of Data, Algorithms, Reports and Traffic Referrals", Minoh Workshop gives us fundamental information about how the "Gay" tag is by far the greatest source of traffic  for "gay men games". 

He is absolutely right about it (I'll write other posts presenting my data too), but a few questions have remained: why "Gay" is the best tag for gay men if gay men are part of the LGBT+ community? Shouldn't we be receiving a lot of access from the "LGBT" tag too?  Why, as Minoh says, "LGBT" is just a "good tag" and "its use is worth it, but not as productive as "Gay""?

An objective and short answer to these questions looking only at Itch.io is: the lesbian protagonism has appropriated of the "LGBT" tag. I'll not do a value judgment here, this is what I noticed during my six-month monitoring  process, so I'll show how I understood that.

How did I monitor Itch.io and the LGBT, Gay, Yaoi, and Queer Tags?

From September 2019 until February 2020, I made a monitoring process of four tags (LGBT, Gay, Yaoi, and Queer) trying to understand how players and Itch.io (a platform with capitalist interests) "establish a relationship". Based on that, I could try to understand how the notions of gender were constructed (how gay men and women were represented and iterated by the actions of the users and the platform). 

To collect my data, on the first 4 Sundays of September 2019, December 2019, and February 2020, I opened an anonymous page, I accessed the Popular Tags section, I filtered by LGBT (I did the same with the others), and I checked what were the top 10 games highlighted. I observed only the first ten games because if you are doing research from PC using a widescreen monitor, it's possible you'll only see the first results - the first two lines.

After that, I accessed every single page of these 10 games writing notes such as game name, who is the developer, how many followers it has, if it uses an external form of monetization (Patreon, Kickstarter, etc.), publication date, project status (in development, prototype, released, etc.), rating, how many votes the game received, how many comments it received, when was the time someone commented, etc.

The collection results on 120 games (maaaany of them were repeated) for the LGBT tag so I divided them into two groups: "The Visibles" and "The  Excluded Ones". "The Visibles" were composed by the games that were on top 10 for at least 4 Sundays (out of 12, this is 1/3 of my collection). "The  Excluded Ones" failed to remain more than a week.

So, check what we had on the Visible group:

*The number of followers was collected weeks ago.

As you can see, we have just one explicit gay male protagonist in this group: Tennis Ace. This could be expected, to some extent, since as you can check in "The Tennis Ace Case", the beautiful project of Basket is one of the highest rated 'gay games' on Itch.io. In Errant Kindgom, you can check in its page: "Errant Kingdom features three playable protagonists (with no fixed protagonist portrait, leaving players free to imagine their character as they see fit)", so I'm not considering it as a "gay game". 

By looking this table, we have two amazing creators: Brianna Lei and Nami on the top of "LGBT producers". Both girls are focused on girls love/yuri/lesbian relashionship. Nami, specifically, has at least 10 games on her page and she was one of the creators who had the most games presented in the analyses conducted by me on this tag.

In short, my point with this post is to show how communities and the platform algorithms can create different perceptions about the meaning of some classifications. So when a gay man or whoever wants to play a gay male game search for a gay protagonist in the "LGBT" tag, probably they will not find many games in the top 10 since girl protagonists are very recurrent in it. Because of that, people can try the "Gay" tag which clearly has been appropriated only for gay men's story (I can write a post showing this data if you want too). 

This is my answer to why the "Gay" tag has given better traffic for "gay games" when we they are part of the LGBT community too! Anyway, I still have a lot of data to analyze, I collected 480 games (including all 4 tags), so I'll be glad if you can give your opinion about it. Besides, for the gay men games, we can still use the LGBT tag as a source of traffic and as 'silent tags' too (as Mino said), but having in mind we have a symbolic dispute between a gay male and female protagonist on this tag and the girls have strong presence.

There are some historic aspects like the origin and differences between yaoi and yuri and how these Japanese genres were appropriated to the West, but I hope to write about it in another post.

That's it for now! I hope we can share more data and discuss how we can make ourselves more visible on the platform.

Victoria Invicta

References:

DE LAURETIS, Teresa. Technologies of Gender. Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction. Indiana university Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1987.