We kept killing you and teabagging you

I'm a white, North American, heterosexual male, and I'm sick of playing me in videogames.

Videogames occupy a strange place in terms of our media and artistic culture. On the one hand, they offer authored experiences akin to movies and books, while simultaneously forcing the player to identify with their character through interactivity. This could be a powerful experience, an experience for social change. On the other hand, videogames are products, and largely misunderstood ones at that.

Because videogames' perception is largely dictated by their need to appeal to as many people as possible, especially with rising development costs as well as to maintain the games for eventual sequels and spin-offs, marketers have seemingly dictated that every videogame be designed to appeal to, well, me, or at least people with similar backgrounds as me.

The truth is, there are a very, very select few games with strong, non hyper-sexualized female protagonists (Metroid… umm… others I'm sure…), fewer still with people of colour, and basically none with homosexual, transgendered or queer protagonists. We're supposed to accept that videogames are art, and yet we can't get anything outside of normative culture? Give me a break.

Videogames offer possibly the greatest opportunity to both empower the traditionally non-represented gamers, as well as perhaps change perceptions within domninant society. But there's a big hurdle to overcome, and that is that for the last 30 years, games have been directly marketed almost exclusively to people in the 12 – 20 age range. As a high school teacher, I have first-hand experience with videogaming teenagers, and woe be the day when anything in their lives is "gay." As videogames are a risky prospect for any development and publishing companies, anything that would limit their profitability, possibly, is verboten.

If one is to take the film industry as an example (not that that's necessarily a wise thing to do), mainstream Hollywood does mostly target the same demographic as videogames, for the most part. However, the indie sector as well as certain "prestige" studios are quite a bit more healthy than their videogame counterparts, where studios who pump out what would essentially be Hollywood blockbuster action movies are praised as providing the Best Gaming Experience Ever. Unlike the film industry, the gaming industry hasn't matured with the people who used to play the games targeted at them – they just always focus on another batch of teenagers.

Does the answer lie in endless customization, as rho from the Border House Blog posits? I'm not so sure. I think it definitely works in some games, especially RPGs. However, as far as I'm aware (having not played an RPG of this type since maybe Baldur's Gate, although having seen Mass Effect in action a little bit), changes to your character don't really have much of an effect on the story. For instance, if I wanted to play as a gay character, my gayness wouldn't really effect the story in any way – I'd just be attempting to woo a man. Also, doesn't this sort of give the impression that being gay is a choice that a player has to make? Why can't my character just be gay? This would also offer, again, a much stronger authored experience, and videogames could possibly move into the realm of seriously being considered as a major artform. While simultaneously pissing off Fox News for corrupting children! Wouldn't that be fun?

If you'd like to see the video that inspired the awful title of this article, here it is. It's NSFW and makes you feel sad about humanity. Now do you see why there's barely any gay protagonists in games?