![]() ![]() It was time I’d ever played from the perspective of a teen girl, and the first time I’d ever seen the intense, funny and sometimes confusing dynamics of female best friendship given any airtime in a game.Ī young Ellie, right, with Riley in The Last of Us: Left Behind. It is a heartfelt and heartbreaking vignette of first love at the end of the world, following the girls on an irresistibly dangerous jaunt through a long-abandoned mall that, unfortunately, turns out not to be free of the infected. That changed with 2014’s The Last of Us: Left Behind, a short companion game that took players back to Ellie’s first romance with her teenage best pal Riley. In 2013’s The Last of Us, Ellie was a supporting character: the funny, sarcastic teenage foil to gruff, conflicted, beardy father figure Joel, who transported her across America on a post-apocalyptic road trip. Despite a history of gay representation that goes back decades – gay marriage was a thing in The Sims long before most real-world countries – games rarely have much to say about what it’s like to be queer in real life. Often your choice of romantic partner feels hardly more consequential than your choice of favourite weapon. Your romantic choices never affect how a character moves through the world or how others react to them. But often there isn’t much weight to this version of in-game queerness. ![]() Role-playing games have long featured romance, and some developers pride themselves on offering players unrestricted choice in BioWare’s 2011 fantasy game Dragon Age 2, characters of all genders are “player-sexual” and will happily reciprocate if you hit on them. Most often in video games, if a character is gay it’s because you chose for them to be so. ![]()
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