Deep storylines and gay characters in games

I’ve been thinking about the lack of gay characters in video games and how utterly annoying it is that developers don’t try and make their games a more immersive experience by adding characters of depth that in some manner represent the color of society.

It seems that gay characters in video games generally get a bad rap. Developers have to woo ratings boards by tweaking the wording regarding characters, edits are made and now and again we do see a gay games characters. Whether coincidence or not it seems that games that can cope with the ‘horror’ of having a gay character included will generally feature a deep story and character depth.

One game that springs to mind as having little to no drama surrounding the gay character within was Fahrenheit (released 2005 on Xbox, PS2 & PC). Quantic Dreams had one of the main characters in Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy) have a gay neighbor and friend. This addition took a back seat to the controversy surrounding the sex scene between the straight couple within the games story.

Mass Effect, KOTOR and Jade Empire too all – could – feature homosexuality and again all these titles feature deep, rich storylines.

Does a deep story and character depth leave the door open for the addition of gay characters more easily, or is it coincidence in these particular instances that this is the case? BioShock featured a rich story and no out gay characters, as do quite a few other titles.

When will we start seeing story driven titles that feature the diversity we’d like to see, without the shockwave of outrage flowing alongside?