In its first report on the state of LGBTQ inclusion in video games, US advocacy organisation Glaad (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) has said that games are yet to catch up with TV and film when it comes to queer representation. The study of US-based players found that 17% of gamers identify as LGBTQ a significant increase on the 10% reported in a 2020 Nielsen Games study, and 10% more than the proportion of the US general population thought to be LGBT . By contrast, only 2% of games feature an openly LGBTQ character. That compares with 28% of films released in 2022, and 11% of primetime TV characters in 2022 and 2023, per other Glaad reports. In partnership with Nielsen, Glaad surveyed 1,452 gamers in the US, from within and outside the LGBTQ community.

There aren't enough games with queer characters and themes -- and GLAAD, the world's largest LGBTQ media advocacy group, has the statistics to prove it. GLAAD's first annual report on the video game industry found that nearly 20 percent of all players in the United States identify as LGBTQ, yet just 2 percent of games contain characters and storylines relevant to this community. The report highlights three critical truths: Representation matters a lot to LGBTQ players, the remaining gaming audience largely welcomes these themes, and new generations of gamers are only becoming more open to queer content. GLAAD has the numbers, so let's take a deeper look alongside a few bits of gaming news from the past week: Xbox is preparing to address a bunch of rumors on Thursday about the company's plans to bring its exclusive games to PlayStation, Switch and other platforms. The rumors have centered on major releases like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Starfield, but according to The Verge's Tom Warren, the first titles scheduled to make the leap are Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment.

At Microsoft's X019 event in London on Thursday, the company revealed a range of major new titles for the Xbox and PC. But in an industry which has often struggled with representation and diversity of lead characters, one announcement stood out. The latest narrative adventure game from the acclaimed French studio Dontnod will have a transgender man as its lead character – a first for a major game release. Named Tell Me Why, and launching in spring 2020, the game follows identical twins Alyson and Tyler Ronan, who grew up in a small community in Alaska and are reunited after a key event drove them apart 10 years ago. Through the game, the player has to understand what drove the characters from each other, investigating their shared memories while exploring the town and talking to local inhabitants.

Tinder is giving users more tools to express their sexuality. The dating app announced on Tuesday that users can now select up to three terms that they most identify with from a list of nine options. Tinder is giving users more tools to express their sexuality. Users can choose from nine orientations, including straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, demisexual, pansexual, queer and questioning. From there, they can decide whether they want that information to show up on their public-facing profile.

In May 2017, the LGBT organization GLAAD posted a video on YouTube of actress Debra Messing receiving an award. In Messing's acceptance speech, she praised many Americans for supporting one another and reminisced about the show she starred in, NBC's CMCSA, 0.36% "Will and Grace," and its influence on telling the stories of members of the gay community. She also called on members of the Trump administration to "do right" by the LGBT community, by removing Steve Bannon (who has since left) from his post as President Donald Trump's chief strategist. She did not specify what her criticism of Bannon was. She also said in her speech that Ivanka Trump should work for "women's issues."

The person who uploads a particular video to, say, YouTube doesn't even need much of a following in order for the video to garner enough attention to be shared over and over and attract people to leave so many comments (both negative and positive) that one person cannot simply sift through them fast enough. Last May, this happened to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, also known as GLAAD. The organization posted a video of actress Debra Messing accepting GLAAD's Excellence in Media Award for her work in helping push an agenda for equality in the film and television industry. In her speech, Messing pushed for the Trump administration to "do right" by the LGBTQ community by removing certain staff members and focusing on laws that reflect equality. After posting the video on its YouTube channel, GLAAD received an outpouring of comments from people who had something negative to say about Messing and her speech.

Since the popular dating app Tinder launched in 2012, new users have been given two options to describe themselves when they sign up: male or female. But that seemingly simple question presented a conundrum for people like Liz Busillo, a graphic designer in Philadelphia who identifies as agender--meaning Busillo identifies as neither a man, nor a woman. "I figured, I present in a way that's very feminine, so I'll just put down female and clarify in my profile," says Busillo, who uses the singular pronoun they. What ensued was a slew of negative interactions, mostly with straight men, including aggression, harassment, and someone reporting their profile for being "fake." Many other transgender and gender non-conforming Tinder users have reported similar experiences on a platform where gender was presumed to be as straightforward as swiping left or right.

On Thursday at the Recode Code Conference in Los Angeles, Tinder CEO Sean Rad announced that the dating app has plans to make its services more inclusive to transgender and gender nonconforming communities. Tinder -- which has been accused of having a transphobia problem -- will be "working with leading LGBTQ experts and organizations, including GLAAD, to help them address these needs and continue revolutionizing the ways by which ALL people, across the globe, connect," according to a statement from Tinder's PR team. One challenge we face at Tinder is making sure our tens of millions of users around the world have the same user experience. No matter who you are, no matter what you're looking for, you should get quality matches through the Tinder experience. There's an important transgender (and gender nonconforming) community on Tinder who haven't had that experience... yet.