Are Games Getting Better At Representation?

we speak with the game makers and fan communities who are helping give a voice to LGBT+GAMES.

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“As a gay gamer, words cannot describe what it is like to be able to pick an LGBT+ character that actually reflects you,” Curtis Free, co-founder of London Gaymers, a gay gaming group, tells us. This might not seem like much if you’ve grown up seeing characters you felt you could relate to on a cultural, ethnic or gender level, but anyone who hasn’t will tell you it is such a powerful thing. What’s more, it feels as if there’s a positive expansion of experiences coming from game makers, so we wanted to explore the depth and breadth of that progress with community figures and developers on the cutting edge.

Much like in other media, portrayals of LGBT+ characters have evolved over the decades. Back in the Eighties characters like Nintendo’s Birdo, described as ‘a male that believes he is female’, were typical of the time. Queer characters were there, but only to be laughed at for being LGBT+. This continued into the Nineties with characters like Chrono Trigger’s Flea, alluded to be genderqueer, being an enemy the player is encouraged to mock rather than fear. Around the turn of the millennium we saw a shift. In Metal Gear Solid 2 a bisexual character, Vamp, exists and is accepted as such with no jokes, but nor any depth.

Free believes there are two key changes that have emerged that capture the shift that we’ve seen in LGBT+ representation in video games; first there is visibility. “In earlier games, LGBT+ characters’ sexual orientation or gender identity was always alluded to or implied, but never explicitly stated. Today we see characters like Tracer from