“The explosive growth of online gaming communities in recent years has created amazing opportunities to go head-to-head against all kinds of players from around the world. But the vast freedom and flexibility of online play on consoles and PC has also given rise to something more insidious – a new place for bigotry and homophobia to manifest and thrive.”

UPDATED: Here’s the link for the article on IGN. Note the 1,000+ comments. Holy crap.

I’ve been wanting to write this feature on homophobia and harassment in the online gaming world for quite some time. After a lot of work, I’m very pleased that the finished piece is running on two prominent high-traffic sites to help get this discussion out there. I’d like to thank Flynn at GayGamer and Angela at LesbianGamers who took the time to share their thoughts and feelings on this important subject. You can check out the article here at MSN’s Game On at this very moment, and it will also be running on IGN.com soon. Please feel free to spread the link around, post about it on your blogs, fire off a tweet about it, and get people talking. Thanks.