Heterosexual players care less about the optional same-sex relationships in games with romance options, but homosexual and bisexual players care a great deal about having them. However, Wiseman and Burch’s data show that the gender difference is mostly driven by the high school girls, as looking just within age groups, middle school boys cared more than middle school girls about playing as male characters. There are some interesting generational and social context issues going on here that require more in depth analysis. A nice supporting piece of data to my own research with adults is Wiseman and Burch’s finding that the vast majority of their respondents did not care about the gender of the protagonist.
They suggest that creating a large number of male protagonists is turning potential female players away; thus it is good business sense to make more female protagonists. This can be explained by the fact that they are developers who were presenting their findings at the Game Developers’ Association annual conference.
“It took them a while, but developers eventually got hip to the fact that there are women out there who want to control female characters, and now they’re getting hip to the fact that there are LGBT gamers out there who want to control LGBT characters” (Ochalla, 2009). Constructed this way, however, the argument treats gender and sexuality as mutually exclusive. One thing Wiseman, Burch and I agree on though is that if representation does not matter to a fair percentage of players, then perhaps the dominance of heterosexual, white, cisgendered men is not necessary. They suggest it is not necessary because girls play, but I suggest that even if game designers think their target market is hetero/white/cis male players, they can create more diverse games. Diversity should be more than a marketing hook to draw new audiences.