An MMORPG for ALL of us.

I have accomplished a lot today, including my daily aspiration, but that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about what I got in the mail today, how cute it is, and why an indie MMORPG from Kickstarter is vitally important in our current societal environment.

These adorable buttons were part of my thank you gift for backing Pumpkin Online's Kickstarter. Pumpkin Online is a Farm Sim MMORPG. It's going to be a long time before the game is available, but it will be worth the wait because Pumpkin Online is unique in a couple of important ways. To pull quotes directly from their website, this game is unique for the following reasons:

CHARACTER CREATION NOT RESTRICTED BY GENDER

We want there to be limitless character creation options. No longer will you be conformed to gender specific options, feel free to create non-binary characters and assign whatever gender you want to them. 

Marriage to NPCs or other players. 

You can form relationships and get married to NPCs. Same sex marriage is a option in the game to all NPCs depending on how you interact with them. Finally a game which acknowledges marriage equality. 

Those aren't the only things that are going to make this a unique experience, but they are the two reasons I felt strongly enough to donate to the cause. Identity Equality is important to me, whether it's with regard to gender, sexuality, or any other personal identification. There isn't a lot of space in this culture where it is ok to identify with anything but the binary genders of male and female. There isn't a lot of space in this culture, in video games or anywhere else, where same sex relationships are just part of the status quo. In this game people will be People, without boundaries, and that is hugely important to me as a consumer. I want to see more of this. I was this to BE the status quo. So, I put my money where my heart is and backed this game. It may not seem important, as a farm sim of all things, but its in the places like this that change starts, is nurtured, grows, and moves forward. If the games we play don't allow true self expression and we continue to support them, then we are supporting discrimination. We need to stop supporting discrimination and start funding projects like this; projects that get it right.

Pumpkin Online is an MMORPG for everyone, not just the cis, hetero, dominant paradigm that likes to pretend the rest of us just don't exist, and I can't wait to live in that world.