Gaymer

I’m a geek. I’m the first to admit it and I wear my geek badge proudly.

I would rather play Mario Bros than leave my house to find a real Italian stallion, and I make jokes you would only understand if you own a PlayStation (Solid snake lol).

Being gay and liking video games can be a hard life. Gay characters in video games are very rare — or simply characterised as androgynous and sexless.

Most, if not all, playable gay characters appear in video games where it’s up to you to choose to be gay, such as in The Sims and Fable. But while it’s great that homosexuality has been given a somewhat dim green light in these games, there is still a long way to go.

In most video games, there are only subtle hints that a character may be gay, or it may not be stated at all but they are so flamboyant in their portrayal that their not being gay is out of the question.

Tingle from the Zelda series for example was obviously the only homo in Hyrule, and then there’s the infamous on-again off-again transgendered Birdo.

GLBTI storylines are, for the most part, minimal, and the sexual themes are kept to an all-time low. Nintendo even had a policy of censoring homosexual characters back in the 1980s.

Notable exceptions of games with outwardly gay characters are Grand Theft Auto V: The Ballad of Gay Tony where the title character Tony is the owner of a gay bar, and the infamous (and somewhat controversial) alien lesbian sexual encounter from Mass Effect.

In reality, as much as I would love to see a video game where the main character is gay with a perilous adventure to save his lover from an evil tyrant, regrettably I don’t think it will happen any time soon — though it would be nice to see a Secret Agent Summer Salt, or Maxi Shield: Maximum Overdrive. Joysticks crossed!

By JESSE MATHESON