THE MAIN CATALYST for my switch from playing mostly female characters to living vicariously through male characters must have been when I was accidentally forwarded a lesbian story arc in Dragon Age II. In the 2011 game, you play as Hawke—a human refugee who is soon caught up in the social, political, and magical struggles of the city where they now live. Most of the storyline is already predetermined for players, except that they can choose Hawke’s first name, gender, appearance, and class at the start, followed by any dialog options that appear throughout the game’s quests. Along the way, players meet non-playable characters who will join Hawke’s party, fight in battles, unlock unique dialog options, and weigh in on story beats. Depending on the players’ actions, Hawke’s companions will view them either favorably or not, which will impact the storyline and—as I would soon find out—open opportunities for monogamous romance.
As a young adolescent who had not yet started to question his sexuality, I was stunned by the experience of romancing my female Hawke with a female party member. The idea of gay and lesbian people existing was no surprise to me, but the fact that I had initiated a same-gender romance in a video game—despite knowing that both characters have different gender identities from my own—affected me very differently than did the passive experience of, say, witnessing a gay kiss on TV or film. My actions determined the course of this digital romance, a scenario that made me wonder whether those virtual actions had revealed an unknown, inchoate desire.
Moments like these reveal how formative video games have been to my queer identity—albeit in ways that the developers, or I, may not have intended. After this first foray, I would still need more time to discover how playing as a male character seeking proxy same-gender relationships would feel more natural than playing a female in search of a man.
Romance Options Needed in Video Games
Today, I pursue games that offer complete role-play freedom within sexually and socially diverse universes, allowing me to get lost in compelling, nonlinear storylines thanks to their strategic designs. However, even as I play titles that are lauded for their LGBT representation, I can’t help but feel dissatisfied. For a medium that can provide freedom and relief to people on the margins, most mainstream and indie games still create experiences that do not feel organically queer. I believe that video games, with their capacity for nonlinear and self-directed stories, should be the perfect vehicle for representing a community marked by subversion and liminality. This belief leads me to wonder why this inauthenticity persists, and from there, why in-game romance matters, and how video games in this genre operate.
Evidence shows that even straight-identifying players sometimes use video games as a conceptual space in which to “try on” different gender and sexual presentations, albeit for slightly different reasons. In “Gaming on Romance,” an article by social scientist Christine Tomlinson, interviews with straight men indicate that some will switch their character’s orientation or gender for the sake of more in-depth gameplay. Tomlinson suggests that because men are expected to be stoic and avoid feminine presentations, they cannot openly enjoy romantic media, leading them to use romantic storylines in video games to overcome these restrictions. I can imagine how this ability to break from heteronormative constraints could bring relief to people who are questioning their sexuality or gender identity.
In addition to defying societal norms, people may explore fictionalized romance in video games for deeply psychological reasons. One of these is the desire to initiate real-world relationships. In “What Factors Attract People to Play Romantic Video Games?” Mayu Koike et al. surveyed 281 students at a Japanese university after they watched an advertisement for romantic video games. They found that loneliness—not low self-esteem or poor life satisfaction per se—is significantly correlated with wanting to play romantic games. They also found that those who wanted to play such games hoped to develop their relationship skills. For LGBT people who are closeted or constrained by social, cultural, or political circumstances, the psychological pangs of loneliness are even stronger. Having romantic options in video games may provide these players with some emotional interaction, even if it’s with a fictional character and only for a short time.
To be fair, video games do not guarantee complete self-discovery, let alone security in coming out. But they can be a catalyst for people who have just started some form of questioning. Moreover, as these studies have shown, having multiple options for romantic role play—from several gender and sexual perspectives—may help people of all orientations to find empathy while being critical of dominant social systems.
Heteronormative Story Structures
The gaming community uses the term “playersexual” to describe characters of any gender who have no explicit sexual orientation but are nonetheless romanceable. In essence, all characters are mechanically bisexual: they become attracted to the player character, regardless of gender, as long as the player takes the right actions. Dragon Age II and BioWare’s other roleplaying series, Mass Effect, are two such examples. In these games, party members will disclose their bisexuality only if they are currently romancing a same-gender party member, and this conversation will last for only one or two dialog lines. Other mainstream titles like Skyrim, smaller titles like Divinity: Original Sin II, and indie titles like Stardew Valley all use playersexual romances.
The problem here, however, is that most of the characters in these games will not acknowledge their own bisexuality. Playersexuality allows people who want same-gender romances to have them, but people who want to keep same-gender romances out of their gameplay never have to see them. This is just one way that developers privilege a straight, male-centric style of gameplay. In “I’m a Gaymer in Search of Romantic Queer Characters,” Sam Whitaker writes about the presence of a romanceable all-female alien race in Mass Effect, along with the absence of an all-male race. He argues that this gives straight male characters—those who are assumed to resemble most of the gaming market—more options within the game than their female or gay counterparts. In fantasy and science fiction universes, there’s the potential for more expansive gameplay that allows for multiple forms of expression. Instead, video game developers show the limitations of their worldview when they adopt such brazen double standards, thereby prioritizing one form of sexual orientation or gender identity over others.
Over the years, players have challenged these playersexual mechanics, arguing that this ability to press sexuality onto in-game characters diminishes the importance of sexual orientation in all of our lives. To its credit, BioWare took these criticisms to heart when it developed Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2014, the third game in the series. According to the media watchdog GLAAD, Inquisition gave the series its first exclusively gay character, Dorian Pavus. One of the major selling points for Dorian was his back story: while he doesn’t live in an explicitly anti-gay society, Dorian is still expected to marry a woman so he can continue his family’s noble bloodline, limiting his sexual interactions with men to mere dalliances with no room for serious commitment. This narrative solidifies Dorian’s sexuality as an important part of his character, making him unique to the Dragon Age universe while representing the kinds of family struggles that many queer people experience.
In my own play-through of Dragon Age: Inquisition, I created a male character and explored Dorian as a romance option to see how deep the characterization and romantic plotline would go. Sadly, Dorian did not appear until the middle of the second act, after all the other romantic options had already been introduced and assimilated into my character’s party. When Dorian finally appeared, I viewed him as a straight person’s concept of a gay man—in a word, debonair. Sporting a quasi-pompadour haircut, a handlebar mustache, and a soul patch, he didn’t appear outwardly flamboyant but spoke with a haughty and flirtatious tone, complaining about getting his hands dirty while remarking on how much he liked viewing my male character’s backside. Moreover, his outfit—multiple rings plus a mage’s robe with a bare left shoulder, teasing the toned figure underneath—suggested to me a material and moral decadence, a social status often coded with a queer subtext.
I should note here that David Gaider, the creator and writer of Dorian, is himself a gay man. The love that Gaider put into this character really shows. Even if Dorian’s wit, irreverence, and pretentiousness often make players roll their eyes, his personality hides a bitter and compelling sensitivity under all that irresistible charm. Gaider left the company in 2016, and I have no doubt that in his seventeen-year role as lead writer for the Dragon Age series, he strove to create stories and characters that truly resonate with people of all sexual and romantic orientations. Yet even according to his own Tumblr post titled “On the Gay Thing,” he admitted that the heteronormative climate surrounding video game development and consumption made him second-guess—or even overlook—the possibility of same-sex romance. In fact, it was at the insistence of his straight colleagues that Gaider began writing these character romances.
The result is a reflection of our own society: queer people existing in a heteronormative, masculinized universe that may not always contain bigotry but nevertheless confines the universe of possible lived experiences to a traditional narrative structure. As in most games, the main storyline of Inquisition enforces this worldview through “tropes”: recognizable patterns that exist through different media iterations. In Inquisition, the one-true-hero trope places the player character at the center of the universe. The player is the undisputed Inquisitor, the one-and-only person who can save the world from the demonic horde—and everyone, including the Inquisitor, must ultimately accept this fact. A story like this fails at being aspirational, because it is unachievable for most people at the margins.
Inquisition strategically inserts romantic role play into the one-true-hero narrative, treating the romance as unofficial unless there’s some kind of sexual conquest. This leads to the damsel-in-distress trope, which privileges a heterosexual, masculine style of play and treats romance not only as a quest reward but as a promise of intimacy. Because queer people may often lack access to others of their kind, romance for us is seldom a guarantee. Yet in Inquisition, romances become available only at certain checkpoints in the main storyline. While this process gives players time to develop organic connections, it still exhibits the core concept behind the damsel-in-distress trope—romance as a reward. This reward comes down to three main cinematics: the consummation, where the screen fades to black followed by pillow-talk; the ballroom scene, which includes a brief glimpse of the couple’s dance; and the balcony scene, where the couple looks to the valley before the final battle. Outside of these cinematics, the player can choose only to share an occasional kiss with the partner, thereby limiting the romance’s importance in the overall narrative.
My point here is that heteronormative systems both within and surrounding the video game market not only cause LGBT people in the industry to self-censor their work; they limit the scope of innovation that would enable different types of play. Even if Dorian had appealed to me as a romance option and not just a character, or if there were other canonically gay (or bisexual) options besides Dorian, the structure of the game itself still regulates play to certain ideological expectations. No matter if the player decides to play as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or any other identity, they are the indisputable central protagonist of the universe at that moment in time, expected to play the hero according to the limits of that universe.
The Future of Queer Games
My brief survey of Dorian and Dragon Age illustrates how even good representations should not be consumed uncritically, and it underscores the problem that our community faces when discussing queer representation. As it stands, the mainstream market limits discourse to the mere presence of queer people in these fantasy worlds with little concern for how these worlds are born out of the real world’s dominant perceptions, beliefs, and values. And while it’s great that LGBT people are included on creative teams, we need to be aware of the ways in which their manufactured worlds may unintentionally color our own (real) worldviews.
Without envisioning alternative stories and styles of play, people will often default to either-or binaries. Ashley R. Lierman examined this conflict in her article “Queer Quest: Romancing the Code”: “I want it both ways. I want to be able to have fictional romances with computer-generated people of all kinds when I want to, but I want to have stories that are about queer people and queerness, too.” It’s a dilemma: should developers risk making a game entirely for LGBT people by creating a plot-centric queer romance, or should they relegate the romance to optional status and thereby attempt to appease everyone?
The trouble with developing games specifically for queer people is that creating any work for a specific demographic runs the risk of further alienating that demographic from the mainstream. Consider when the video game industry attempted to drive a market for female players in the 1990s. In her book Gaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw describes how this resulted in games made specifically for female audiences that centered around sexist mechanics such as cooking, cleaning, and accessorizing. Similarly, games made for queer people may be more restrictive than liberating. For instance, games that center gay or lesbian dating, pride parades, drag performances, or other queer subcultural elements are not wrong on their own, but inevitably they’re rooted in stereotypes about LGBT people, which in turn are reinforced. Therefore, we can still consider plot-centric queer narratives, but we’ll need to revisit these narratives regularly to determine if they’re truly building a better world for us.
What I’m proposing are games that lean into subversiveness to the point of being more liminal and, at times, absurdist or surreal. Consider the ways in which queer lives differ from straight or cisgender lives, and how this creates a separate set of circumstances. Even if a queer person lives in a culture that’s tolerant or accepting, they may still experience delays in coming out, transitioning, finding a partner, getting a job, and having children if they so choose. Straight and cisgender lives, on the other hand, do not require coming out or transitioning; their lives are on a fast track to fulfillment. In contrast, queer lives have no set path or destination. As Jordan Wood writes in his essay “Romancing an Empire, Becoming Isaac”: “The body that functions according to queer archival logic is, therefore, a liminal body that resists external definition by virtue of its own continual unfolding. Queerness is not a state of being but rather one of becoming.” Taken further, the placement of queer characters into traditional story structures is akin to expecting queer people to mark their lives by straight, cisgender milestones: it will lead to inauthentic and restrictive expression. Because queer lives are already liminal and subversive, this fact necessitates that our fantasy worlds should likewise stretch the limits of possibility.
Of course, video games are still a young medium, and the industry has yet to explore all of the technological possibilities for gameplay. Few games with queer representation exist, so it’s not entirely clear what a game with queer mechanics would look like. Some suggestions might be to decentralize the player character from the universe, allow romances and other relationships to impact the game world, and design quests and plots that continue in a non-chronological direction. Such mechanics would allow a game to be queer without becoming a “queer game,” playing with concepts of time, space, perception, and being.
Over the years, I’ve found myself liberated through unintentional play. However, I’ve always felt like the surrounding universes had predetermined who I’m meant to be. Possibility and liberation, after all, are both the purpose for playing games and the hallmarks of queer existence. Even if that liberation means living in fear and frustration of not knowing how one’s own story might develop, at least there’s joy in the discovery and forging of that journey. I hope to see fantasy worlds that capture these experiences and all the pain and relief that comes with them, not by simply including queer people but by framing queer life.
