Given the preponderance of young straight guys in the world of videogames, it's not all that surprising that the sexuality of games tends to revolve around big-breasted women with proportions that would make Barbie's back ache with sympathy pain. Generally, gay characters are nonexistent, or existent as small, jokey asides (i.e. a quest that required dressing in drag in Final Fantasy VII) or titillating girl-on-girl action, in a game that I can't even remember at the moment because it didn't interest me for what must be fairly obvious reasons.
So I've been quasi-eagerly awaiting Enchanted Arms, a Japanese-style role-playing game with a screamingly flamboyantly gay main character, Makoto. Turns out that the game manual actually calls him a "flamboyant transvestite" because he's a woman trapped in a man's body, which indicates to me that one of the writers at developer Ubisoft is a little behind on the current language of sexual orientation.
After a few minutes of play, I can say that I've never before seen such a flamingly flaming homosexual in a videogame: "Love lunch"? Oy. I'll have to get a little further into the game to see if this is a step forward or a leap backward. What I'm most curious about, though, is how the non-gay players who still make up such a bulk of the gaming world are reacting to Makoto. I'm not sure I'm going to go close to Xbox Live with this one -- I've had enough 12-year-olds calling me a fag, thank you very much.
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