David Gaider will attend and speak at GaymerX, Sep 29 - Oct 2, Santa Clara, CA
JuliusBorisov
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https://gx4.sched.org/speaker/david_gaider.1vma7xs5
So if you can, you'll have a chance to meet and listen to David there.
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Some of those panels look quite interesting
Here's a photo:
The photo is from the interview with GaymerX founder Matt Conn (he mentions David in it).
But so far there's no transctipt available of the speech called "BioWare and Beyond: My Perspective".
“Bioware and Beyond: My Perspective” was an incredibly packed panel to hear David Gaider, former BioWare writer, speak. He spoke about his experience working on Dragon Age, Jade Empire, and Baldur’s Gate, and his shifting perspective on incorporating gay perspectives in games. David spoke about his difficulty coming out initially in the game industry, and his mental shift towards more inclusion in games after positive response. (He grew up in an era when people didn’t come out in high school and acceptance wasn’t so easily found.)
I found it interesting that public outcry about LGBT characters really started with Dragon Age 2, not with the first game. Incorporating gay and bi characters, and Krem, a trans character in Dragon Age: Inquisition, did not affect sales in any discernible way. David has since moved on to work at Beamdog, a smaller studio known mostly for its remakes of Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2. He disappointingly wasn’t able to chat about his current project, but I look forward to learning more about it nonetheless."
From Karin Week:
"Patrick Weekes, Karin Weekes, and David Gaider were all at Gaymer this year and participated in a number of panels as both speakers and moderators. I’m sure other folks have or are making detailed recaps of their talks, but I just want to say that: they’re wonderful people, they care a lot about their characters and their fans, and they value feedback and suggestions from fans on issues of inclusivity and visibility and representation.
They’re trying really, really hard. ... They literally held an open Q&A panel about how developers can be better allies and tons of people spoke pretty candidly about how they connected with the game and what aspects they felt were disappointing to them personally and politically. Almost every answer they gave in response to those types of questions went like this: “we hear you, you’re right, we’re trying harder, here’s an explanation (NOT an excuse) for why we fell sort and this is us telling you to please continue trust us because we’re taking all these things into account.”
Whether it was acknowledging fans’ frustrations with casting a ciswoman to voice Krem to how they were going to make huge efforts to include black voices as both writers and actors for canonically black characters to tackling deeper issues regarding negative and positive stereotypes with queerness and gender nonconformity. ... They straight up acknowledged that they’d seen a good deal of tumblr and twitter discourse, both the good and the bad. ..."