Proud Everyday. That’s How We Play.
As we kick off our Pride celebrations at EA this year, we’d like to invite you to look back with us and EA Pride, our LGBTQIA+ Employee Resource Group (ERG), on where we’ve been, where we are, and what we still need to do.
Last year we launched the Positive Play Charter, which includes our pledge to specifically stand against any harassment of players on our platforms for their gender identity/expression, and sexual orientation. EA has very recently signed on to the Texas Competes Pledge, in support of transgender athletes, because we believe in creating spaces for everyone to play. Several of our games included LGBTQIA+ content, including a lesbian couple featured on The Sims™ Brand Refresh Key Art, and several characters in Apex Legends™: Bloodhound, Gibraltar, Loba, and Fuse. The Sims™ team recently announced exploration into including gender neutral pronouns in the game, a long time ask from the community, made more poignant by the creation of the game’s first canonically non-binary character, Morgyn Ember, in the Realm of Magic Game Pack in 2019. And for the 13th consecutive year, EA was named one of the Human Rights Campaign’s Best Places to Work for LGBTQIA+ Equality.
These are all great markers of the culture we’ve built, but we’re far from done building it. Even as global culture has made great strides in accepting and celebrating LGBTQIA+ lives, we see a vicious backlash to this progress in many communities. Pride is not about ignoring this harsh reality in order to celebrate, Pride is and always has been a celebration in the face of hate. We know we can do more for our LGBTQIA+ employees and players. This touches everything from recruitment, to manager training, to asset planning, and of course, our games and how we create and maintain a safe, accessible, and welcoming place to play. Ally is a verb, and we’re in this for the long haul. These are our people: our employees, our players, and the people they care about. Play is not only an escape. It’s exploration, creation, even empowerment. All of our players deserve to experience this free from barriers and harassment, to see themselves in the game, to lose themselves in the experience.
We can create that, but only if we do it together. And we are all in this together. On that note we’d like to take a moment to shout out to our colleagues in our other ERGs, in particular BEAT! (Black EA Team), who will be leading Juneteenth celebrations later this month. Stay tuned for a message from BEAT! In the coming weeks! Our missions are intertwined, and together we are more than the sum of our parts. Last year, U.S Pride Month coincided with the height of Black Lives Matter actions, sparked by the police murder of George Floyd. There was never a question of competing for attention or focus, we showed up to support each other's causes, particularly in the places where they intersect. BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) LGBTQIA+ folks, and in particular Black and Latinx Trans Women, have always been at the forefront of the struggle for LGBTQIA+ rights. Pride is a perfect time to remember this fact, and to look at what we’re doing for the most marginalized members of our communities -- particularly BIPOC and disabled LGBTQIA+ folks -- who have fought the hardest for and benefited least from the progress made over the past decades.
We strive to tell authentic and diverse stories with our games, stories players from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences can relate to. We can only truly achieve this if we create the kind of environment we want to portray, if our culture itself is diverse, and if those diverse voices are genuinely heard. Stories and culture have the power to relate and to generate empathy, in a way that cold facts can often miss.
At EA, we don’t just create our culture at work, we create it through our games. We have a responsibility to do that mindfully, and an opportunity to change it for the better. We know that the diversity in our games is not a box to check, but a reflection of life as it is. A reflection of variety, abundance, and change. Representation in media matters, and we’ve just scratched the surface of what’s possible for LGBTQIA+ representation in our games.
Are we there yet? Nope.
Are we better than we have been? Most definitely.
Should you keep calling us out when we miss? Please do.
Lastly, we’d like to take this time to reheat last year’s It Gets Better employee video. This was a project initiated and led from the ground up as an employee initiative. The message never gets old, and we hope that the stories shared in this video will resonate with the right people at the right time. Please share! And for allies, please remind the LGBTQIA+ folks in your life that the world is a much better place with them in it. After that, it’s our job to make good on that promise. Thank you, and Happy Pride!
