In all honesty I'm actually more-or-less indifferent to this stuff, but constantly hearing about it does start to turn me against it. I'm not saying anything about this article in particular, but in general it just feels like there's a lot of people online who are constantly whining because they want the world to change to accommodate them in one way or another. I'm sick of it.

It's nothing against any particular group of people or whatever, just to be clear. I would be just as tired of it if there were articles every day about how we "need" more bullet hell games or how movies don't have enough camels in them. If someone has niche interests, they should accept that and deal with it. I absolutely love collect-a-thons, which have been pretty rare since the N64 days. That doesn't mean that I write weekly articles about how the games industry "needs" to make more just because I want them, nor do I complain about the abundance of shooters or any other popular genre.

People should buy the games they want and avoid the ones they don't. If someone is bothered by games where you play as a three-eyed giraffe with eighty legs, then they should stop buying games with three-eyed, eighty-legged giraffe protagonists. And if they're not buying those games, then they should stop complaining because the existence or popularity of a game they don't like doesn't actually affect them in any way. And if someone is fed up with not having enough games where you can ride rocket-powered washing machines through deserts, then maybe they should learn the skills required and make Rocket Washers: Sahara.

Bioware has good storytelling, well now I've heard everything.

Just between you, me and all the rest of the forum, whoever taught you this word was punkin' you.
It's like someone calling you "rantallion" thinking it an insult.

Why you rantallion!

Oh, the krona has dropped, or what! ;-) Comes with the baggage, being a Finn, and all. But I like it, because it is word charmingly old fashioned, and a word indicative of what is equalitarian of Scandinavia.

Glad u found it, but it was nothing but bit of an amiable provo, because I am bit idealistic of Icelanders. But if you felt ever offended, then I shall gladly apologize. :-D

And let us not be distracted from the fact that you went pedantic about the OP, without bothering to say yea or nay about inclusive storytelling and characterising.

But also ever so slightly implying the OP was irrelevant in his/her post, oozing that slight negativity...

I cannot fault OP for starting the topic for irrelevance, nor harshness in style. If you actually wanted to state an actual opinion as to seeing LGTB as entitled as gamers as any of us, or maybe not - it cannot be that hard, eh?

I'm all for it, I suppose. Anything that makes the developer actually sit down and think about the story they're writing instead of going for the first automatic "Guy is out to save the princess" idea can only be a good thing.

In Alcatraz 1954, you play as a beatnik woman (ancestors of hipsters) and you get to blackmail a priest because he illegally married your two gay best friends. It's all for a good cause though, to break your black husband out of prison where he fraternizes with a transgender fellow inmate so he/she can make him a stab-proof vest out of magazines.
One of the main character Christine's best friends is a lesbian artist and the only straight friend you appear to have is your ex-boyfriend who keeps hanging around asking about going to Mexico together and with whom you can cheat on your imprisoned husband which is only fair considering the hubby is secretly cheating on you with a transgender inmate whom he entices by giving her your wedding ring.

Enough non bro-centric for you?

My bigger question to you would be - Do you play games where you cannot change the sex of the character and enjoy them?
Do you enjoy Tomb Raiders, but find Uncharted uncomfortable to play. Play Gone Home, but struggle with Myst?

I ask because although I have not played any Dragon Age games I understand that you can choose your sex. That seems to be the big deal for a lot of people. You yourself noted that you only "voluntarily" play a "male" in one game.
For me I struggle when people say that they can only play as female/queer/LGBT/black/asia/other in a game.
I try to wonder how they got into gaming and what games they can play. I also fear that these people miss out on some real gems because of these problems.

Risen 2 is a personal abomination of a game, so I am glad someone out there enjoyed it.

I have that in my collection and you really have made me want to give it a go. Just have to see how they have pulled this off, so long as you are not lying.

First people bitch that all the characters in TW3 are white(ish) and now people bitch that it doesn't has gay characters. Or does it? Oh well, who cares?

I care, I CARE.

My homophobic side needs pixels to beat up. *Grunts like a Neanderthal*

Jade Empire
Sleeping Dogs
Shadow Warrior
Saiyuki: Journey West

Haven't played Shadow Warrior, so I put down four instead. All off the top of my head, and I could come up with a ton more if not for the weirdly exclusive "not white" limitation. Like the Front Mission games. And there are open-world ones like the later Fallout games where you can make pretty much anyone of any race you want.

After a brief glance at games I've bought but haven't yet played: Tengami, Kung-Fu Strike, Mirror's Edge, Oniken. Probably a bunch of others where it's not so obvious until you actually play, and those are just games I've personally purchased. Which is a small drop in an obscenely large bucket.

It's a fluff piece? :) Nothing wrong with that, and I don't think I found anything major to actually disagree with as false or wrong... so fairly good for net "journalism", ergo for "not journalism".

0 - do I need to comment on the sensationalist title?
1 - It's not news obviously, unless you count the parenthetical about The Advocate not being accredited as press at Penny Arcade
2 - it's not investigative reporting, the opening para opens with a question and the whole article does not really answer it, unless anecdotes count as data and implications as fact
3 - it loses focus and lacks critical value, broadening from the question of games content / characters to other questions of games developers and their culture without even examining its assumptions
4 - from the middle on, the fundamental message surfacing seems to be: things are getting better folks
5 - final paragraph argues for diversity hiring as a silver bullet... but despite that implicit message being implied in the article's structure I don't think it's really just such a transparent mercenary intent?

So I think it's a fluff piece. The alternative would be a very amateurish lobbying effort for diversity hiring...

Just got into FTL, hope to enojoy it with some THC so I can TCB and fip off the PTA.

But IDK

Nobody likes a one dimensional character, especially if they were put in to meet some diversity quota. Token characters do nothing for nobody and people will resent you for having to deal with your hamfisted efforts

Give me a character who is well written and interesting. They can be black, white, gay, purple, it doen't matter as long they are well written.

Ninja Gaiden
Ninja Gaiden 2
Ninja Gaiden 3

:D

Thats a damn good example too.

I hope its Last of Us.

Or if not then I'm even more curious since Judas said it was good.

That game is overrated :P

And its gameplay is unoriginal. Metro, STALKER, and some survival horror already did what Last of Us did.

Ellie was certainly pushed as this femenist gaming icon and yet I just see her as an annoying brat and yeah I know she matures a bit in the end and thats to be expected obviously but still.

Less bro-centric or more LGBT friendly? Which is it? Surely not both at once?

I feel many good experiences are being denied to LGBT people when others automatically brand a game anti-diversity without context or reason. They often fail to make a connection between relatable or well thought out and well written experiences as opposed to just making it an LGBT-positivity contest or mandatory quota obedience test. This kind of logic is absurd in that a badly written LGBT character in a bad game mechanics and narrative wise can be considered LGBT friendly while a positive experience no matter what caliber will be rejected because of the logic that LGBT people can understand only LGBT people in media.
People are following this dogma that focusing on one particular set of traits such as sexual orientation or skin color make good characters or make characters that are more welcoming. This also assumes people not being able to play as a certain type of character in a story regardless of context is still bad. People making such arguments seldom realize they may be asking the artists to alter the original work itself. They also never open their mind to the possibility that the current way people are represented are good AND the very thought that an LGBT friendly experience may come from a game without a playable LGBT lead character.
I also see a fixation on particular characteristics and insistence without proof that the inclusion of these characteristics into a playable character will be somehow a magic formula for bringing in more people. This I believe to be false considering no characteristics of humans are so different enough that the exclusion or inclusion of those will ever add anything to the inclusiveness. Most commonly this is gender. To people who think so, I cite the following examples :

1.Alien movie franchise: it has a female lead character but it is a cult classic most people enjoyed because people were able to relate to the protagonist's characteristics. The emphasis being the fact that the protagonist could've very easily been someone with the personality characteristics Ada Wong or Jill from the RE movies, hence still be of the same gender but wouldn't have created the same emotion as the original character.
2.Tomb Raider 2013-despite the only playable character being female of unknown sexual orientation and no sexual content to exercise the player's own, the game was enjoyed by people of all genders.
3.Candy Crush- fucking retarded casual bullshit that is played by mostly everyone despite gender not being in the game at all.

From such and many other examples, I have become to believe that gender in games does not matter unless the game deals with aspects that concern gender in the story. I find the delusion that having an evil LGBT character is bad to be a completely off the rails crackhead barinfart considering the fact that they do not take into consideration whether the particular characters are evil because of them being LGBT or for more common and grounded reasons and gender is just thrown in.

Also; considering gaming has a mechanical side and a narrative side with varying interplay between both from individual game to game, I find the notion of demanding something in one aspect of the narrative component, in this case, a character conforming to an idea that is held to be diverse by the people making the demands; to be utterly retarded and infantalization of the minority the game is being demanded to cater to.

My 2c even though I will probably post more.
In some games? What about TW3? It is set completely in a different universe where such people may not even exist. Why dogpile on TW3? I don't see people campaigning for more disabled people in shadow of mordor. So please respond as to what ''some games'' mean and why you think no game can have a universe without such stuff as gender or race.

Far Cry 4
You play as Ajay. He is not white and he is from Asia. Does that qualify or are you implying there needs to be certain purity of race that people need to be able to see to be fully immersed?