Share. Queerness doesn't have to be a statement. Queerness doesn't have to be a statement.

I joked about the lesbian sex scene in Mass Effect 3 to anyone who would listen at the time, whooped about it as if it was the novelty porn my flatmates and I had watched in our first shared apartment. I thought it would be a scene I cringed through, a cynical product of my calculated romance option selections set deep in the Uncanny Valley. As it began, though, it hit me that I was watching an actual lesbian sex scene in a video game, between two characters I had grown to care about over a long period, whose relationship felt important to me. It felt too big to laugh at.

That was 2012. The Mass Effect trilogy was the first experience I had with LGBTQ characters in a video game since my grandma bought me a Gameboy in 1990. Nothing has measured up to that experience for me since, and of course, nothing could. It was revelatory to me in the way late-‘90s queer films like But I’m a Cheerleader were -- my palms sweating, clutching the side of the couch and furtively glancing at the door in case my parents came in.

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It dismays me to see that six years later, queerness in a big name video game is still analysed, tweeted about, and obsessed over -- on the one hand the target of a tired insistence that inclusiveness is nothing but a ticked box or an effort on the developer’s behalf to placate liberal demands, on the other a symbol buckling under the pressure to be a bastion of LGBTQ representation.

It’s rare enough to still be perceived as a statement, in other words. Recently, the discussion exploded around the E3 demo for The Last of Us Part II, when Naughty Dog revealed Ellie’s sexuality would be further explored in the sequel. Under the microscope, most people decided that because it had been seeded in The Last of Us: Left Behind, it wasn’t ‘token.’ Though there were a few furious reactionaries who decided all women would only be allowed to exist as breeding vessels in a post-apocalyptic environment, most people decided that, from a storytelling standpoint, it was ok for Ellie to be gay.

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What is particularly alarming about this line of thought -- that an LGBTQ character must justify their sexuality, that it must be relevant to some broader theme or narrative, or seeded early so as to be believable -- is that the real world doesn’t work that way. Queer people merely exist alongside everybody else -- and not to some narrative’s end. Some come out late, some come out early, some prefer to keep their sexualities a secret their whole lives, some gain strength by shouting it from the rooftops as teenagers, some choose to mention it awkwardly before never mentioning it again, some are deeply sexual, some are asexual. There is no rulebook, it just is, and to echo this human truth in your game is good writing.

Unfortunately, it’s good writing we rarely see in the mainstream video game space. We haven’t yet gotten to the point where LGBTQ characters are integrated naturally enough so people understand their sexuality doesn’t need to be rationalized. It felt revelatory when The Last of Us Part II co-writer Halley Gross told me that “Ellie was born gay,” but it shouldn’t have been.

“This is just who she is,” Gross continued. “And to explore who she is as a teenager and as an adult, it wouldn’t be honoring her character to hide some facet of herself. We want to engage with her as a full character. She’s also a great shot, and a great fighter. But Ellie’s also nineteen. Nineteen’s a fun age.”

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Even in the increasing occurrences of LGTBQ representation in games, we have to be careful of the negative tropes that already exist in fiction. Critics have rallied against those cliches, like ‘Bury Your Gays’ (an epidemic of a theme most often seen in television where queer characters are killed off in order to provide dramatic motivation for their loved ones), the ‘Murderous Bisexual’ (self-explanatory), the ‘Gay Best Friend’ and the ‘Tragic Gay’’ (in which a character's sexuality is used to incite guilt and/or pity).

These cliches are rightly criticised for potentially harmful depictions of an underrepresented group, in part comprised of vulnerable youth. “All I see right now on social media is kids who are seeing themselves on television getting killed," GLAAD’s director of entertainment research and analysis Megan Townsend said last year at the Television Critics’ Association Press Tour of the Bury Your Gays trope. "If you live in a small town where you're already struggling to come out, or see yourself represented, that can do a lot of damage. I hope we get to the point where we have enough [gay] heroes, that we can also have amazing gay villains and amazing everything across the board.”

Studios need to be louder and braver if we want to see amazing gay villains and heroes across the board in video games. The anti-progressive sentiment that’s gripped many consumers of geek culture simply won’t last — it’ll be crushed as developers continue to tell the truths of their characters and stand by the stories they want to tell. And it’s important that they do so, as there are many who haven’t had that moment I had, suddenly overwhelmed by seeing who I was and what I desired in a medium that leans so heavily on the heterosexual status quo. These shouldn’t be seen as political; they’re not part of a shoehorned commentary on social progress or a liberal fantasy. They’re a reflection of what society really looks like. Everybody deserves to see that.

Lucy O'Brien is Games & Entertainment Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her on Twitter.