From Birdo, the 1988 Nintendo character described in the manual as a boy who "thinks he is a girl", to Robert Yang's recent Radiator trilogy, which includes an autoerotic game about pleasuring a gay car, there's a surprisingly rich history of queer content in gaming. However, these instances are rarely portrayed as part of broader LGBTQ culture. Berlin's Schwules Museum has opened a new exhibition called Rainbow Arcade, that does just this. The show leads visitors around a rainbow, each colour a different section, covering the last 33 years of queer content in games through fan art, memorabilia and video interviews with designers – as well as playable titles such as Caper in the Castro, one of the first explicitly queer games. In this 1989 game, based around the famously queer San Franciscan thoroughfare, players take on the role of lesbian detective Tracker McDyke to solve the disappearance of her friend and drag queen Tessy LaFemme.

Violence is everywhere in video games, but sex is still strangely taboo. On the off chance that sexual content is featured in a game, it tends to be weird, completely isolated from the rest of the gameplay and devoid of intimacy. But who says sex in games can't also be richly rewarding and even educational? For Robert Yang, indie developer and educator at the New York University Game Center, sex in video games can be a good thing. Yang's games have gone viral for their sophisticated, but lighthearted, approach to what happens between consenting adults.