Rockwood posted the survey online and got responses from almost 10,000 people. Two-thirds of the respondents -- gay, straight and bisexual gamers -- said they felt the gaming community was either somewhat hostile or very hostile toward gay people. Eighty-eight percent of respondents said that during online game-play chat, other players had used the phrase, "That's so gay." Eighty-three percent had experienced other players using "gay" or "queer" in a derogatory fashion, and 52 percent felt that the depiction of homosexual characters in games was stereotypical.
It was this kind of hostility that in January 2006 led Sara Andrews to create an LGBT-friendly guild within "World of Warcraft." She wanted a space where people, queer or not, could play without having to contend with insults like "fag" being tossed around by other players.
But a moderator at Blizzard Entertainment, "WoW's" manufacturer, gave Andrews a warning, saying the guild violated the company's harassment policy by mentioning sexual orientation.
Andrews fought back, gaining media attention and prompting others to write letters in support of the guild. Blizzard quickly issued Andrews an apology and said it would review its harassment policy. The new policy bans only language that refers to any aspect of sexual orientation "insultingly." Representatives for Blizzard didn't respond to a request for comment on the issue.
Game players often improvise their own weddings in games that have no official "marriage" commands embedded in the game, and some of those unions, of course, have been same-sex. The first known game to deal with the issue of same-sex marriage head on, and officially allow it, was "Fallout 2," a role-playing game set in a post-apocalyptic America that was released in 1998. Timothy Cain, then a designer and producer with Interplay, the maker of the game, says the idea to allow players the option of a same-sex marriage was his.
"A big part of the 'Fallout' series was that we wanted it to be as open-ended as possible," Cain says. "We had no way of knowing whether you were going to be a man or a woman, so we decided to write all the different dialogue combinations."
Asked whether he was concerned that the core audience for role-playing games would be turned off by the possibility of a same-sex marriage within "Fallout 2," Cain was dismissive.
"I've always kind of said I made the games for myself and didn't think too much of the audience," Cain said, "but even though the primary demographic is males, it's also young males, and I would like to think this isn't an issue for males in their 20s anymore."
Cain says the same-sex marriage in "Fallout 2" didn't even receive much attention, and he's not surprised by that -- he thinks the option of a same-sex marriage is a natural thing in a role-playing game. He draws a distinction between role-playing games, which he thinks should be as open-ended as possible, and an adventure game, in which a character's actions are more carefully proscribed.
"To me, it's not surprising that a role-playing game would do this," he says. "A role-playing game, you invent your character at the beginning, so you should get to determine what they do, and if we're going to put any romantic element in, we should cover all the bases."
That's what Cain did when he moved to the now-defunct Troika Games, which he co-founded. He tells Salon that all three of the games Troika produced had some element of a same-sex relationship in them. Most notable was "The Temple of Elemental Evil," an adaptation of a 1980s "Dungeons & Dragons" game, which allowed players to marry a gay pirate named Bertram if they chose. That option did attract some attention, which Cain says he was surprised by, given that "Fallout 2" had already had the option. He adds that Wizards of the Coast, which owns the rights to "Dungeons & Dragons," had asked him to remove the option for same-sex marriage from the game, as they did other elements -- such as a brothel and alcohol -- that might keep the game from getting a T (Teen) rating.
"I told [Wizards of the Coast] I'd remove [the same-sex marriage] if they gave me something in writing explaining their reasons for removing it," Cain says. "That one seemed so ambiguous as to why they wanted it removed, so I asked for clarification in writing." After that, Cain says, Wizards of the Coast dropped their request that the same-sex marriage be removed.
However, despite its predecessors, and perhaps because of its wider reach, the game often credited with breaking down the barriers to same-sex relationships in gaming, is "The Sims." Originally released by Electronic Arts in 2000, the game allowed players to manage, with few restrictions, the day-to-day activities of one or more virtual characters. Included in that was the option for relationships, including same-sex relationships. "The Sims" became the best-selling PC game of all time, a feat widely attributed to its attraction for women, a largely underserved segment of the market that has exploded since "The Sims" debuted. Up to 60 percent of "Sims" players are female.
When "The Sims 2" came out in 2004, it allowed characters to marry and again did not discriminate between heterosexual and homosexual marriage.
"Players should be able to do whatever they want within their own game, and it's not our business to stop them," Rod Humble, head of the Sims Studio, says, explaining Electronic Arts' decision. "If you have two regular plastic dolls, you wouldn't expect someone to come along and tell you what positions you could and couldn't put them in. That's generally our philosophy."
"Fable," released in 2004 by Lionhead Studios, also incorporates same-sex marriage. The designers never intended to create this feature, according to a 2006 interview in Gamasutra.
"It was not so much a question of overt inclusion as a reluctance to remove something that occurred naturally in the course of creating our villagers' artificial intelligence," Dene Carter, "Fable's: creative director, told Gamasutra at the time. "Our villagers each had a simple concept of 'attraction to the hero.' We'd have had to write extra code to remove that in the case of same-sex interactions. This seemed like a ridiculous waste of time."
"Second Life," the popular user-run virtual world, also allows gay marriage. Joyce Bettencourt, known in "Second Life" as Rhiannon Chatnoir, owns a cathedral within the game and performs marriage ceremonies there for all kinds of couples.
Bettencourt says there isn't as much stigma online as in the real world. She met a lesbian couple within the game and found out months later that one of them was a man. "People can pick what they want to be, or even if they want to be human," Bettencourt says.
Next page: "Dwarves don't intermarry with hobbits; that door is shut"
