It might just be my experience, but I’ve seen the cozy game genre be very lgbt friendly. Would be interesting to explore the reasons for that.
Also, of note is the way some games have been updated to be inclusive. The Sims 4 allows basically any combination of produces milk/impregantes/become pregnant/masc body type/femme body type/pronouns/voice/clothes. It also allows poly relationships and different romantic and sexual interests. The interesting thing to me is the fact that gendered language was still used in certain places for a long time after those updates. “Birthday boy/girl” was a particularly egregious one for nonbinary sims. It is interesting to see all this effort put in on one end and then when they dropped the ball elsewhere, there was no change for a long time. Is this indicative of just performative behavior or oversight? Looking into the community response etc might be interesting. It always struck me as so strange to basically have this super inclusive framework completely undermined by something that could take a jr dev less than a minute to fix.
Yea, I wonder how much actual gameplay loop affects LGBT people. I remember being able to play a game as a kid (long long ago lol) where you could romance a same sex character. It was my first intro to same sex relationships and I was baffled that there was this cute npc and my female character could tell her she’s pretty and it’d give us the option to date. Like legit blew my mind. I just kept playing it again and again until it became normal to me that I could date a same sex person. I dropped like all other games just to keep living in a world where I could date this cute girl and people would tell me how cute we were together. I wonder if cozy games give that validation and that’s more important than a gameplay loop that otherwise would be more exciting.
There seems to have been plenty of interesting points in the thread. I’m sure we’d love to read what you come up with if you feel comfortable sharing once you’re done! Good luck!