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Back then and to this day, gender politics have heavily influenced play, with rigid expectations. A boy couldn’t play with a Barbie; a girl couldn’t play with toy soldiers. That was the norm growing up, dictated by the social expectations of adults and parents. When someone would stray away from this norm, they were often either corrected by a parent or ostracised by other children for being different. However, in the world of video games, this was beginning to change, but with a significant catch.

With the advancements in gaming, we began to see more so-called ‘grounded characters’ and more female-driven stories, allowing players to step outside of traditional gendered norms. Franchises such as Tomb Raider and Resident Evil gave players the opportunity to experience stories and worlds as female characters. These games exposed an imbalance in play, and once that imbalance was exposed, there was no going back.

Although a boy couldn’t play with a doll, he could play as Lara Croft as she shoots down enemies. But why? He was inhabiting a female character; shouldn’t that have been treated in the same way as playing with a ‘traditional’ girls’ toy? It wasn’t necessarily seen that way. Instead he was seen as a boy controlling a character and trying to complete a game.

Yet, despite the socially acceptable rationale, he was spending hours navigating the world of the game as a woman.

Now consider the inverse: girls could play as soldiers, but only if they looked like Lara Croft or Jill Valentine while doing so. These characters were not the pinnacle of female representation in gaming. Like other female characters of that time, their construction was heavily influenced by the male gaze. That doesn’t mean playing as them was meaningless; it wasn’t, and it still offered a sense of liberation to many players. Here lies the catch: the representation was there, but it wasn’t necessarily positive. The positive outcome was the ability to play as someone different from who you were, or who you believed yourself to be.

This was an early stage of exploring questions of sexuality and gender that players might not yet have had the language to articulate. Character choice was not a new concept; early arcade games such as Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat offered a choice of male and female characters. They did not necessarily provide the same immersive connection to a character as the later home consoles did, nor the level of privacy in which to explore that connection. When you are alone with a character, living through them, you can become connected to them for that period of time. This is where the questioning can begin.

Choosing a character to play as is one thing, but creating a character from scratch is where gender and identity can come into play in a different way. As character creation became a big part of gaming, as seen in titles like The Sims and WWE SmackDown! Vs Raw, players were not only given the power to choose but also the power to create. You could choose your character’s gender, appearance and, to some extent, how they acted. Although these options were somewhat crude compared with later advancements, they provided an extremely informative outlet for many. We were not just choosing an identity; we were building one.

From this creation, an interesting question arises: what are we building this character for? Secretly, or maybe subconsciously, what underlying desires are at play? Are we creating a character we wish we could be, or perhaps even a character we wish we could be with? These are feelings the privacy of video games gives and has allowed us to explore. Nobody necessarily knows why we chose to make our characters look the way we did. Was it aspiration, a gender presentation, attraction or simply an idealised version of ourselves? The important part is that experimentation was present and available.

The world of video games has offered a loophole in the expectations of gender and sexual orientation for young people, which can be both enriching and confusing. Gaming created a private setting in which we could ask and explore questions and explore identity before we even fully understood what those questions were or whether we were ready to ask them.

This ability to question is particularly significant within the queer community. As games become more advanced and gradually more progressive, the hope is that they will continue to offer these opportunities for exploration with increasingly positive outcomes.