Celebrating the LGBTQ+ Community

We are celebrating Pride Month globally to emphasize the importance of community and strength in unity. Through this year’s theme, Coming Together: Strength in Community, we are creating space for powerful conversations and programming that honors our people, leaders, champions, and allies across the LGBTQ+ community.

Inside EA’s Walls 

Our people fuel our workplace culture and we prioritize building an environment where every employee is treated equally and welcomed to be their authentic selves. 

Our Pride ERG has built a strong support and advocacy network to push for change wherever it’s needed. 

Naomi Patterson, a transgender woman who sits on our Global Pride Board as Communications Lead, shared her POV on LGBTQ+ support, changes within EA, the industry, and games close to her heart.  

Naomi Patterson

As an EA employee of five years and a player of our games since adolescence, it has been a tremendous privilege to see how titles such as The Sims have impacted our player communities and myself. There is no other word I could use to describe my career at EA other than transformative. In my time here, I went from being an intern to a Machine Learning Engineer to an Assistant Producer at Maxis. Having EA support this career journey has encouraged me to look within its walls for further growth and development. It is a tremendous feeling to get to work on the games that helped form my identity, from watching them mature to becoming part of making impactful change.

EA was already taking action in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion when I joined in 2018. Our first employee resource groups were being launched at that time, and I originally joined the Pride ERG as an “ally.” This group always felt like a safe, supportive space and when I started coming out, it became a vital resource to connect me with my community. While our ERGs were huge for my experiences as an employee, it was our games that made a strong impact on me as a player.

The freedom of self-expression in The Sims helped me process my gender dysphoria. Although I was very much in the closet, I could be my queer self in-game. Living in this virtual place provided a safe space to explore my transgender reality and helped me deal with unprocessed trauma. Although I did not come out until many years later, I will always be grateful to The Sims and Maxis for letting a young trans girl explore herself.

Creating content for the next generation, to give others what was given to me, is a very strong motivator in my heart. I want everyone, particularly younger players, to have the freedom to express themselves in our games, especially when that option might not exist for them in physical spaces. I’m proud to push for more inclusion and diversity in our games. I want to see the video game industry continue to positively impact behaviors around LGBTQ+ and, especially in this moment, trans rights. Challenges towards bodily autonomy and other basic human needs significantly impact our players and employees, and that is why it’s so important we stand together.

Moving toward games that have a diverse cast is critical to make sure all players have characters they can connect to. 

This year we saw Apex Legends™ pick up an award for Outstanding Video Game at the 2023 GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) Media Awards. Apex Legends is a great example of a team with diverse backgrounds and lived experiences infusing those experiences into our characters to make a game reflective of a modern global community.

Leslie Heryford, Sr. Director, Experience Integration and Global Chair of Pride took us down memory lane, reminding us how important representation is and how LGBTQ+ support needs to be in the makeup of everything we do.

Leslie Heryford

For me, EA’s history of support and representation of the LGBTQ+ community is core to my belief in the positive impact we have on the LGBTQ+ and gaming communities. EA’s support goes back decades before the significance of inclusion and representation was an established norm. From the late 1990’s when a live demo of The Sims included a same-sex kiss, to Dragon Age’s first trans character, Krem, to the current Apex cast, EA has always been committed to diversity and compelling characters. Our games create spaces where everyone is represented and welcomed. This is part of the core of EA and carries over to our company culture.

EA believes that creativity and passion are unlocked when people can be themselves. This is not part of a corporate fad or the result of increased industry awareness, but a manifestation of EA’s commitment to its values. I am proud of the positive examples of LGBTQ+ representation we have in our games and how we strive to create authentic spaces for our community. Creating places where everyone can be seen and heard in safe spaces is core to what we do. Our values are why we do it.

We’ve only just scratched the surface of what’s possible for LGBTQ+ representation in our games. Our investments in diversity, equity, and inclusion are because we want to empower our people. By celebrating diversity and actively fostering inclusion, we will also shape the future of Electronic Arts along the way—IRL and in-game.