As someone who frequently partakes in the playing of games (you might call me a gamer), my distaste for “the player character” is long-standing and well-documented. From Fire Emblem to Baldur’s Gate 3, the idea of playing as a blank slate simply isn’t appealing to me, because that’s not how I want to experience a story. From a storytelling and game design perspective, it enriches the experience to have a protagonist who can become whatever the player wants them to be, but it also necessarily flattens the rest of the game, because it means that the player character’s personality cannot meaningfully influence major story beats. I like when a story is grounded in a certain perspective because it allows you to perceive and move through the world as someone other than yourself. And if that character’s choices and motivations grate against your own, so much the better. I enjoy when the character I’m controlling is doing something I know is a bad idea, and I’m powerless to stop them, like a train that’s run off the tracks.

But I accept that I won’t always get what I want, because the truth of the matter is that people like using video games to play as an avatar of themselves, and I can’t say that’s a bad thing. In fact, I would wager that most people like to play games as a character who is either a stand-in for themselves or an original character of their own invention. I totally see the appeal in it, too; why wouldn’t you want to see yourself as a cool elven ranger, or a farmer in an idyllic town? And, in that case, why wouldn’t you want your in-game avatar to be as close to your real self as possible? 

The build-a-protagonist approach is a popular one when it comes to RPGs — but it also has some negative side effects, especially when it comes to romance and queer identity. (Yes, this article is actually about more than just me kvetching.) Sexuality in video games is something that has evolved a great deal over the past two decades or so. There was a time, not so long ago, where gay romances generally weren’t even a consideration for game developers. There are several reasons for this, including societal stigmas around queerness, but from my perspective, it’s a combination of gamers seeking a power fantasy, and the fact that “gamers” were mostly equated to “straight, cisgender men.”

When I played BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy for the first time a few years ago, I felt that it wasn’t really made for me. I very quickly got the sense that the female characters were all designed to be dating sim prospects for men, while the male characters were just characters. This meant that the women tended to feel flatter and more archetypal, whereas the men felt more realized and were granted more interiority. (Ironically, this makes the men much more appealing to romance.)

Back then, there was a decent amount of freedom in shaping your character and their story, but those freedoms were still operating within certain limitations. Video games are informed by the time in which they were created, the perspectives of the developers, and the desires of the players. Back when the first Mass Effect game was being developed in the mid-2000s, the voices calling for queer romances likely weren’t as loud as they would be now. According to a study conducted by the International Game Developers Association in 2004, men made up 92.9% of the 994 respondents. It’s safe to say that the majority of the men developing Mass Effect were cis and heterosexual, too, so they were creating games from a somewhat limited perspective. To their partial credit, the first game had a female companion who was romanceable by both the male and female protagonist — but it took until the third game (released in 2012) for the Mass Effect writers to realize that gay men were playing their game, too.

“With the original Mass Effect, that’s where the gears started turning for me,” said Kenneth Shepard, a staff writer at Kotaku who also hosts Normandy FM, a video game podcast. “As a 15-year-old gay kid, you kind of see the lack of equitable romance options — that game had three romance options, and none of them were for gay men — and you start to realize that certain types of people are not prioritized. Once that became clear to me, it just started to be something that I noticed in pretty much any game that had romance in it.”

Things have changed a lot since then. Nowadays, queer romances are a given in many RPGs — because they’ve moved to a model where you can romance NPCs regardless of your gender. Baldur’s Gate 3 made headlines for the fact that you can have an, uh, intimate moment with a bear (not that kind — I mean a literal bear), but its characters all being romanceable by anyone, was just business as usual. People have long since stopped being surprised by games allowing queer romances, since developers realized that it’s both more inclusive and more efficient to make all romances available regardless of gender.

In some key ways, the new trend is a win for queer gamers. But as we move towards a world where all romance options are available to all player characters, I find myself inevitably having the same grievances that I’ve always had with a game built around a blank slate protagonist. Just as I don’t find it fulfilling to play as a character without a defined perspective, so too do I find it reductive for romance options’ sexualities and preferences to be simplified to “whatever the player wants.” 

A popular term for this phenomenon is “playersexual.” For me, the term encapsulates what is wrong with this new phenomenon — namely, that romance options may have open sexualities, but none of those sexualities have intentionality. Baldur's Gate 3 does a much better job of fleshing out its characters' pasts than most, but even it falls short when it comes to defining identities. It would be another matter if the entire cast of Baldur's Gate 3 just happened to be bisexual, and that was established as something that informed their interactions with you, each other, and the world, but instead it comes off as them just being open to you in particular, whoever that is. You could argue that in a fantasy world, maybe the concept of gender preferences just doesn’t exist, but that’s just not true to the way people are and feels a bit like a copout. Plus, if you happen to want your character to be gay, a lesbian, or straight, what does that then mean for you?

One notable example of romanceable characters having defined sexualities comes from BioWare’s Dragon Age: Inquisition, a game where the cast of companions included Sera, a lesbian, and Dorian, a gay man. Naturally, Sera was only romanceable by female avatars, and Dorian was only romanceable by male avatars. This greatly enriched both characters and allowed them to feel much more well-rounded, particularly in the case of Dorian, whose entire story is based on his sexuality causing conflict between him and his family.

“We didn’t like how [playersexual] made the characters feel like they existed in service of the player; like they were there in the game to be a toy,” Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider said in an interview with Kotaku. “We felt like that wasn’t why those characters existed. That wasn’t the kind of game we were making. These characters were characters first, and they had their own stories, and the player could interact with them, but it wasn’t always about the player.”

Dorian was unique as a gay male romance option because gay men are often the least-served players when it comes to romance. Female romance options have generally been more available to female player characters, although exclusively lesbian characters are also comparatively rare. As someone who always plays as a female Qunari in Dragon Age: Inquisition, I enjoyed Dorian’s arc more because of its specificity, and not being able to romance him didn’t diminish that. But a number of players did take umbrage with the fact that these two characters weren’t available to them, which is something that game designers consider when sketching out romance options. Is it worth removing the specificity and richness that comes from writing a character with a defined sexuality — one that excludes half the player base — just so it doesn’t feel like anyone is missing out?

As I’ve probably made clear through the course of this article, my answer to that question would be “no.” I don’t believe that deeper character writing should come at the cost of anything, including player satisfaction. But there are definitely drawbacks to that approach. For one thing, it makes things harder for developers, who then have to include more options to make sure that everyone has something. For another, there’s no guarantee that all demographics will be served equally. They certainly haven’t been in the past.

“A lot of people jump on choice-driven games for presenting the illusion of choice, or choice not really mattering at the end,” said Black Tabby Games cofounder Tony Howard-Arias in an interview with Kotaku. “The fact of the matter is every time that you make a major decision in the narrative, you are doubling your work from there on out if you are going to respect that decision.”

“The unfortunate thing about it is that I ultimately do prefer Dragon Age: Inquisition’s approach of giving characters a large spectrum of identities,” Kenneth said. “But when gay men are the ones always getting scrapped, I would rather get games where every character is pansexual and that is well-portrayed and thought out, than games where a broader stretch of defined sexualities means that gay men get scraps.”

There’s no single solution to the problem of “playersexuality.” And when faced with the kind of extra work that comes with creating a cast of characters who all have defined sexualities, there’s no guarantee developers won’t decide to prioritize certain audiences over others. But I think it’s possible to create a game where players both feel sufficiently served and the characters feel authentic. Kenneth noted that Baldur’s Gate 3 did a good job of this by having its characters talk about and be affected by past relationships with people who aren’t you, and are of varying genders. Mass Effect and Dragon Age also feature companions who may end up in a romance with each other if you aren’t romancing either of them, which means they don't feel like they were just standing around and waiting for you to give them a purpose (even though, yes, when you meet them, they usually are just standing around and waiting for you to give them a purpose).

The key is intentionality. Sure, all the romanceable characters in a game can be bisexual — that’s totally fine, and pretty true to real life (you can’t imagine how many bisexuals I know). What matters is that their sexualities are defined in some way and expressed as one of the core parts of their identities, one that informs the way they engage with the world. That’s how it works for us, as real people. And if we want our video game romances to be fulfilling and not just empowering, they need to feel rooted in truth.