I just read this, and there are some serious factual errors in this.

First, 2000–2008 was a period of major change in the video game media, driven almost entirely by the enthusiast amateur media. While the printed media treated video games like toys and limited itself to content almost exclusively consisting of reviews, previews, and strategy guides, the online enthusiast media began talking about video game issues and content — this happened because Generation Xers who had grown up playing video games and took it for granted that they were worth writing about as a form of media, as opposed to toys, were coming into their own and writing about them.

(I know because not only was I part of it, I was one of the first out the gate — when I started my Garwulf’s Corner column on Diabloii.net in 2000 I was the only one I could find talking about video game issues, and when that run of the column finished up in 2002, I was one of many doing it.)

Second, “for a little while there, only the voices of straight white men were acknowledged as the main creative say, and women’s inclusion in the medium was only conditioned on the notion that their breasts be universally sculpted to the male gaze’s uttermost desire” is completely wrong. One of the key and public players in the world of computer games as they developed in the 1980s was Roberta Williams (one of the co-founders of Sierra On-Line), who created and designed King’s Quest, which in turn revolutionized the adventure game genre. She was not the only one — Lori Ann Cole was a co-designer of the Quest for Glory series, Joyce Weisbecker was designing commercial video games for the RCA Studio II in the mid-1970s, Dona Bailey was co-creator of Centipede in 1981, and those are just a few. Women have been part of the video game industry since it took off in the 1970s (and a more comprehensive, but far from complete, list can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_in_the_video_game_industry).

Alternate sexualities have also been represented for decades. Jessica Mulligan worked on some of the earliest MMORPGs (Islands of Kesmai, etc.) in the 1980s, and she is openly transgender. LGBTQ content has been appearing in video games since the 1980s (for more details, see https://lgbtqgamearchive.com/games/games-by-decade/). And, there may be no way of knowing how many game developers prior to around 1995 were of alternate sexualities due to the stigma attached to coming out at that time.

And, non-“white” game developers have also been part of the industry for a very long time. The most famous example is probably John Romero, co-creator of Doom, who is Native American. And that’s not counting the entire Japanese video game industry, which dominated consoles and arcades for decades.

There is absolutely a historical gender imbalance, and even a “boys club” mentality (Jessica Mulligan documented this in her column Biting the Hand, where developers at GDC in the 1980s and 1990s would visit strip clubs after hours). But to say that only “straight white men” where the acknowledged creative voices in the industry at any time is not only untrue, it borders on (if not crosses the line into) erasure of women and minorities in the video game industry. Women, LGBTQ, and non-“white” game developers have been in the video game industry since it became a viable business model in the 1970s. They have ALWAYS been there.