When I was growing up, I always just played whatever games that my sister played. I was never concerned that most of the protagonists were male and therefore not a representation of myself. The thought of a certain group being left out in games wasn’t something I really thought about until recently because I was raised in a straight, white, cisgender, and very religious background; I wasn’t really aware of any LGBTQ+ discrimination in society, let alone video games, as a kid simply because they were never really discussed around me. Representation of these various groups of people in video games is very important because the inclusion can help various players immerse themselves into the game when they see characters that represent who they are. However, the importance of representation lessens when such representation is simply incorrect or even harmful. Adrienne Shaw gives us a prime example of this poor representation in her chapter on the Leisure Suit Larry series in How to Play Video Games by Matthew Thomas Payne and Nina B. Huntemann. Shaw describes how the game series makes fun of the LGBTQ+ community and is riddled with jokes that are varying degrees of homophobia and transphobia, explaining that “the core message that male homosexuality is undesirable, female homosexuality is only important to the extent that it is titillating to men, gender nonconformity is a mark of deviance, and transgender people are a joke are consistent” (115). These negative depictions of LGBTQ+ people through LSL’s various characters can be very off-putting to some players, especially those from that community. Personally, as someone with a handful of friends in that community, I wouldn’t feel comfortable playing a game that stereotypes and makes fun of them.

Gender is something that is also discriminated against in video games with many games portraying men to be dominant and powerful when compared to lesser female characters. In another chapter of How to Play Video Games, Soraya Murray writes about how many video games have a hyper-masculine hero as the protagonist with great mastery of skills and weapons, as well as his surroundings, that he uses to protect a side female character that is much weaker. Murray cites The Last of Us as breaking that norm in a way because the protagonist, Joel, is shown to not always have the right answer or the necessary tools needed to do something; Joel has to scrounge around for food and makeshift tools while learning to survive. He still plays the part of the protector when it comes to Ellie, the girl he is tasked with smuggling to another surviving zone, but the two often work together or rely on each other when completing certain tasks (103-106). Joel’s character and his relationship with Ellie go against, in a way, that hyper-masculine protagonist trope in video games because while Joel is still protecting Ellie, she helps him out on multiple occasions, meaning that Ellie is not completely helpless like other female characters in other games. Ellie’s character can also be seen as a positive representation of girls in video games because while she is not a playable character and rarely engages in combat, there are a few times where she briefly fights alongside Joel, which shows that girls are also capable of defending themselves.

All in all, representation is a seemingly integral part of video games that makes them much more enjoyable to the player when they are included.