For Gay Gamers, A Virtual Reality Check

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," reads the caption to a famous New Yorker cartoon of two dogs sitting in front of a computer. You can be God, a man, a Martian, a woman, a wizard or a witch in online role-playing games. The story is largely being told to you, with characters already created by the programmers, and you exist in the framework of the story. "The Sims 2," which came out in 2004, is an exception to this prepackaged framework. Same-sex marriages are allowed in the game, and that's because the "general philosophy" of "The Sims" is to "prohibit as little as we have to," says Rod Humble, the game's executive producer.

This is not the era of "Space Invaders," "Frogger" and "Pong" ruling the gaming landscape with simplistic, almost abstract, nonhuman characters. The time is distant that "Pac" was a "Man" and that was that. Today is even a long way from the '80s and '90s, when characters and story lines were somewhat more specific but the state of the art was only Super Mario, ever the klutz, trying to save Princess Peach from Bowser, for example, while the curvy and alluring Lara Croft, Duchess of Saint Bridget, time and again saves the world.

In the past decade, as gaming technology has given way to more stunningly realistic games, gaming characters, too -- both in console and online games -- have become strikingly realistic. Up to a point. Bertram, a pirate in the PC game "The Temple of Elemental Evil," is the rare gay game character.

"By and large, game designers are not pushing the boundaries when it comes to gay characters or gay relationships," says Constance Steinkuehler, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison whose research focuses on online role-playing games. "They're largely not comfortable with it. Let's think of it this way: Does every girl character I play have to look like she's doing the Barbie thing? Does every guy have to look all macho?"

In contrast to the largely stereotypical depictions of male and female characters, Steinkuehler says there is a vast diversity in how people play with gender within online role-playing games. Most of her male friends play as female characters. She and her husband, Kurt, play "WoW" as a lesbian couple. ("Why do we do that?" she asks. "Why wouldn't we?") Social relationships, online and offline, will develop no matter the environment, she says.

'WoW' No More

Sara Andrews, the transsexual showgirl, grew up in foster homes in and around Cookeville, Tenn., 80 miles east of Nashville. Biologically a boy, she realized she was gay at 14, started dressing as a girl at 18, and, for years, has been living out her fantasy to be a girl in video games and comic books. She always played Storm -- the mutant goddess in "The X-Men" who controls the weather -- in the playground at school. She plays Storm in "X-Men: Age of Apocalypse" on her PlayStation 2 in the living room.

She's a fan of fantasy, but she stopped playing "WoW" a few weeks back.

"Maybe it's not a very good escape from the real world, playing a game online and dealing with a bunch of other people," says Andrews. "It's like escaping the real world and finding what you don't like about it -- the slurs, the homophobia -- in the online world."

These days, she's busy rereading "Through the Looking Glass," the follow-up to "Alice in Wonderland."