LGBT representation in the game industry

Gaming is art. Even though titles such as GTA and CoD not really holding any big ideas, there are so many games which truly invokes emotion that other forms of art cannot since, within gaming, you ARE the person - not looking at them. To name a few, That Dragon Cancer, Beyond Two Souls and Detroit Become Human. These all hold a huge amount of symbolic value which I think is extremely important. But when there are games such as RapeLay, a game on raping women, or just regular games with a huge amount of tokenism or other things really makes you forget that games are art. In this post, I'll explain the most recent.

Overwatch

Overwatch has been acclaimed for being progressive. And honestly, they are. Lots of ethnic minorities, sexual orientations, strong women and more are present. But my main problem is with sexual orientation. When the game was extremely popular, one of the popular characters called Tracer, who's even shown on the front cover on the game, was announced to have a girlfriend. It wasn't announced - announced, it was smoothly done with hints and an effective Show not Tell scheme where it was just a photo of them together. This was good, and personally I liked it so much to have a lesbian character in the game. This was good.

Flash forward to now, where the game is dead. Without any hints at all, another character called Soldier 76 was announced to be gay. To be blunt, this was a way to get the game back into the media again since it is dying and it did but for the wrong reason. There were no hints, no references, nothing. Just, again, a photo of him having a boyfriend. My main problem links into a bigger problem.

The lesbian, progressive point. The thing with lesbians is that it's more socially acceptable to have a lesbian character. The main demographic of gaming is men, and straight men do not like men kissing but women kissing. It's sexy and hot. Men kissing is usually only for comedic effect. 'tHeY'Re GaY hA!!!' Because of this, developers will always pick a lesbian character over a gay character to have a token and earn progressive points from the SJW agenda. I'm not really a someone who uses the term 'SJW agenda,' but this is really just obvious tokenism.

I wanted to spread this so people can be more aware on LGBT representation in gaming. I want people to understand the context of representation and not award games for doing this, but for making it flow in the game (a good example is the new Mortal Kombat).