Flight Rising is a web-based pet game, similar to Neopets, originally funded by a kickstarter, and released in June 2013 by Stormlight Workshop upon reaching their donation goals. It is about raising, breeding, and dressing up dragons with thousands of players playing at almost any given moment. It has games, trading and auctioning, forums, among many other mechanics to reach these goals of customizing and breeding. I have been playing this game for about a couple of weeks now, and I quite enjoy it because of the high amounts of customization it allows for. It lets me relive the web games I used to play growing up and I enjoy the games mechanics – I find it super interesting for a game to have forums still built into it and it’s incredibly cool that this game still so heavily relies on social interactions such as trading and auctions.
While this game is very entertaining to me, through further digging I found multiple instances of the game’s administration
using their position to be transphobic or racist with little repercussions –
instances where trans and BIPOC players are banned for “misconduct”, even when these players have not interacted on forums before or have had little interaction with other players. The game has many canonically queer and BIPOC characters, however criticisms of this diversity say it feels more like “corporate queer profiteering” – making queer characters as a means to capitalize off of them rather than to show genuine diversity in their game. The game takes a lot of influence in character lore from mythology and cultural histories, which allows for players to review what they’ve released and to critique what was done. Through looking through these forum threads, developers take criticisms from players in the threads, especially from people of the community they’re taking influence from, and adjust the work that was being done to listen to accurately and sensitively create lore for the dragons and their world.
These claims have almost all had a response from the game and its developers. Complaints regarding an ablest and transphobic programmer, Thrage, arose in 2014. He was removed from the production team in 2017, after making more comments besides trans women and disabled players. His account can still be viewed, but it is blank and cannot be interacted with. In response to a member of administration making a post about “all lives matter” in response to the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, the site came out with a public announcement denouncing what he said, removing him as administrator, and turned their
7th year anniversary into less of a celebration of the game’s longevity and more into awareness on anti black racism, providing the players with resources on places to donate and to educate others on racism.
This game relies on social interactions, thus leading to a lot of sociocultural influences in the game. Critiques and general comments made in suggestion forums influence the future development of the game. These comments allow for people to give critique on the accessibility or inaccessibility of the game, and to raise concerns about any of the game’s lore or certain biases that the developers may unconsciously or consciously have. This creates a space where feedback is responded to and acted upon instead of ignored or hidden. However, developers and admin are historically seemingly given more leeway, as seen with the site’s response to controversy around different developers. While the critiques of the game don’t inherently affect every player’s gameplay, certain players are unfairly targeted for termination under “misconduct”. This can lead to players in marginalized communities feeling uneasy that they could randomly lose access to the game due to hateful biases.
Other aspects of the game include customization – through account customization and character customization. Account customizations include badges for your account – badges that show off different aspects of your identity and different interests, allowing for diversity to be represented in not only the characters through their design / lore, but also through customization of how you present yourself in the game. This can aid in creating a sense of community among marginalized communities, especially when these communities struggle with representation overall, and when these communities have been targeted by developers of the game before. “Customization” also refers to the social influence that players have on the game’s development. Players can directly give feedback to developers and the updates being released, which influences the lore of the game as well as the games literal mechanics, getting feedback on the accessibility of the game itself.
Based upon this, I would recommend this game, but not without going in blind – I’d recommend players who are interested in this game to do some background research in the history of the game’s development. Some people are comfortable with the idea that a lot of people who helped found the game had ideologies aligning with white supremacy, however those who may be affected by the biases that come from that are usually not. While these biases and influences are not obvious and may not noticeably affect gameplay to some, as Flight Rising has denounced certain hateful acts made by their developers / administrators and has created canonically diverse characters, they are still a part of the game’s history.
