As I plunge headfirst into the rushing waters of the c-game meta community, I’ve grabbed almost every site and blog I could think of and made an effort to watch, read, and sometimes comment. Yesterday, I left two comments on the That Video Game Blog: one on how exclusive like a new Final Fantasy game is what’s propelling the Nintendo’s DS ahead of the Sony PSP and another in praise of an increase in girl gamers in the last year.

Strangely enough, my comments never made it through moderation. I checked through the (tiny) backlogs of comments to see if what they did allow. Here’s the *first* response to information on L4D2: ‘Cow goes moo.’ Here’s a comment posted to the Final Fantasy announcement: ‘say what?’

Huh, I can see how my post might not meet the quality standards they have on TVGB.

I assume my not making it through moderation has something to do with my handle. BioWare and Blizzard have both previously decided that gay and lesbian are equivalent to the word shit, so expecting a small, independent blog to realize not allowing someone to comment because their handle has the word ‘lesbian’ is kinda homophobic may be a bit optimistic of me. It’s possible that the word ‘stripper’ is what they don’t allow… but that’s discrimination of a different sort.

People rarely treat the word stripper the way they do doctor or lawyer. It’s a dirty word because it’s about women who voluntarily sexualize themselves. Notice there’s no such problem with words like stud or gigolo.

The strange thing is that I didn’t expect this. I tend to move in very open-minded circles both in the real world and online and the majority of people I interact with don’t have issues with words like lesbian or stripper. Moreover, they play PnP RPGs, so they get the joke in ‘Lesbian Stripper Ninja.’

I'm going to try a few more comments. It's possible they just decided I was a trouble maker; if I continue to attempt to contribute, they might decide I'm doing so in good faith.